Grocery Wholesale & Distribution
Keeping Grocery Moving:
Hours of Downtime, Cut to Minutes
E2 was brought in after a previous rocky WMS go-live and cut the downtime from hours to minutes, without replacing Infios or adding staff.
Watch the full interview with Stephen Acosta
From a Rocky Go-Live to a Trusted Partner
The mission: make sure grocery ships
For 75 years, Associated Grocers has supplied independent retailers across the South. Today that's roughly 300 community stores in five states, and the 2025 Shelby Report Wholesaler of the Year. To scale and automate, AG retired an aging legacy WMS that only one expert understood and moved to Infios (formerly Körber), heavily customized with its own developers.
A rough go-live
Infios's on-site support wrapped after a couple of weeks, and the cracks showed fast. Even printing broke: labels and tags took 10 to 15 minutes and behaved inconsistently, leaving the floor idle. The pressure got real enough that AG's CEO asked it out loud: "Do we just need to pull the plug on this thing?" The answer was no. Power through.
Finding E2
AG went looking; they couldn't be the only ones who'd struggled through a WMS launch. A pattern emerged: many of the strongest Infios/Körber developers had moved on and now supported the platform from outside, several at E2. After the first call with Erik Easton, the depth of knowledge surprised them. Nothing they brought was foreign, and the estimates E2 gave were actually met.
Printing, rewritten
E2 engineer Segun rewrote most of the printing process and made it consistent. Jobs that used to bog down for 10 to 15 minutes now print in seconds, so no one stands around waiting on labels.
The meltdown and the rebuild
About two months in, a full meltdown idled the warehouse for four to five hours with payroll still running. The cause: a counter that wasn't incrementing correctly. On a live crisis call, Segun stepped through the code, got AG back online, then re-engineered wave releasing into visible, staged steps with built-in error handling. A recovery that once took hours and a roomful of people is now a single button press. When AG threw a weekend Hail Mary, Segun even got on during his day off: "that's all we needed to know about this relationship."
Labor hooks, corrected
A separate labor-standards vendor, with its own Infios experience, couldn't get AG's labor analytics screens to display correctly. Segun stepped in and fixed them, better than the specialists, restoring the point system that drives operator bonuses on cases loaded.
From Crisis Calls to a Button Press
The fixes compounded into uptime. A failed wave once meant hours of troubleshooting with a roomful of people on the call, payroll running the whole time. Now recovery is a matter of minutes, and crashes are far rarer to begin with.
"Something that would take hours to correct, with multiple people on the call. Now it's literally a button press. It's light-years ahead of where it was."
— Stephen Acosta, VP of Information Services, Associated GrocersWhere Associated Grocers Stands Now
"Once we contact E2 and they reply, I know the issue is going to get solved. It has been a genuine partnership, and when it's time for our Infios upgrade, we don't want anyone else." — Stephen Acosta, VP of Information Services, Associated Grocers
E2's engineers built and supported Infios/Körber from the inside. "The depth of knowledge outside the Infios team was amazing to us."
Hard timeframes were quoted and met: rare predictability in software, and exactly what AG needed mid-crisis.
Segun got on a crisis call on his day off and stayed until AG was back online. The fixes live in AG's codebase, and the team learns from every one.
When Grocery Has to Ship, Downtime Isn't an Option
If your Infios/Körber WMS is bogging down (print jobs stalling, waves crashing, screens not behaving), you don't have to live with it or rip it out. We've helped wholesalers like Associated Grocers turn crisis calls into a button press, with engineers who know the platform inside out.
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