Since 1961, Wilson Warehouse has been a cornerstone of third-party logistics services across Louisiana and East Texas. When they opened, their forward-thinking founders built custom software to manage internal logistics at a time when everything was on paper. That early commitment to innovation gave Wilson Warehouse a competitive edge that lasted for decades.

By 2022, Wilson Warehouse's leadership recognized that sustaining their legacy of innovation meant taking the next leap forward. Rather than patching aging infrastructure, they made the same bold decision they did fifty years earlier: build something new, build it right, and set the stage for another generation of growth. Wilson Warehouse partnered with Clean Coders Studio to design and implement its new custom software to stay ahead of the game.

[quote-block {:text "We are not warehousemen who happen to know how to code. We are coders who just happened to own warehouses." :portrait "/images/case-studies/wilson-warehouse/c-wilson-baldridge.jpg" :portrait-alt "Portrait of C. Wilson Baldridge, CEO and President of Wilson Warehouse" :attribution "C. Wilson Baldridge" :role "CEO/President, Wilson Warehouse"}]

Challenges

Wilson Warehouse's original software, written in RPG II, RPG III, and RPG IV, was revolutionary for its era and served the company for decades. By 2022, however, the technology landscape had drastically changed, and Wilson Warehouse's leadership knew it was time to evolve. The legacy codebase, while reliable for stable business rules, lacked automated testing and wasn't built for the kind of flexibility modern integrations demand. Ever-expanding overtime regulations, mobile devices, and cloud connectivity all called for a fresh foundation.

Beyond the software itself, Wilson Warehouse saw an opportunity to rethink its people systems. Warehouse employees tracked daily tasks on paper activity sheets and used physical punchcards to clock in and out. Wilson Warehouse's leadership was candid about these inefficiencies and eager to eliminate them. The full rewrite was a chance to honor the company's vision of a streamlined, paperless operation. Clean Coders was brought in to do exactly that: modernize the technology, replace paper processes, and build a foundation for the next generation of Wilson Warehouse.

Our Strategy

Clean Coders began by thinking holistically about what a truly modern version of Wilson Warehouse's vision would look like. Cloud technology opened the door to capabilities that weren't possible before: warehouse employees could clock in and out from a mobile device, record their daily tasks in real time, and submit everything directly to the database from the floor. At the same time, new tooling for office admins would make reviewing and reconciling data faster and more accurate than ever. The goal was to deliver improvements at every level of the organization simultaneously. By connecting the warehouse floor directly to the back office through a unified system, Wilson Warehouse could eliminate redundant data entry, reduce errors, and give its team back time to focus on what they do best.

Time Cards / Payroll

Clean Coders Studio took an incremental approach to modernizing Wilson Warehouse's payroll, delivering real improvements months before the full mobile vision was complete. Under Wilson Warehouse's old workflow, office admins manually processed each time card at the end of every week, typing its contents into the legacy system by hand. As a first step toward a fully paperless payroll system, Clean Coders designed a new desktop interface for time card data entry that made the process faster, reduced errors, and gave admins a clear and intuitive way to spot and correct mistakes.

Activity Sheets

At the core of Wilson Warehouse's financial strategy was a custom billing model: for each warehousing task, the inventory owner paid for the time spent. Whenever a client's items were packed, moved, or unloaded, they were billed by the minute for the time spent attending to their merchandise. Transparent, fair, and competitive, this model served Wilson Warehouse well for decades. To keep this strategy accurate, warehouse employees reported their tasks throughout the day on documents known as activity sheets. At the end of each day, office admins transcribed those paper pages directly into the database. Wilson Warehouse's team executed this process with precision for years, and it showed in the quality and accuracy of their client relationships.

Wilson Warehouse and Clean Coders Studio shared a clear vision to simplify the workflow while preserving the precision their clients depended on: a mobile interface that would allow warehouse employees to record their activities directly from the floor, eliminating paper and redundant data entry in one step. Rather than wait for the full solution, Wilson Warehouse made the pragmatic decision to move in stages. Clean Coders Studio first built a desktop interface for activity sheet entry, giving admins a faster, more accurate way to process data while the mobile experience was being developed.

Reconciliation

Occasionally, the total time reported between an employee's time card and activity sheet would add up to a different amount. Tracking down the source of these discrepancies was time consuming, and took attention away from higher value work. Clean Coders solved this by automating the comparison between time cards and activity sheets, surfacing all discrepancies in a single interface. What once required significant admin effort was reduced to a single, informed decision: review the flagged difference and choose which account to accept.

Mobile

With the new codebase complete, Clean Coders Studio extended Wilson Warehouse's system to mobile, the final piece of the solution. Leveraging the same back end that powered the desktop experience, Clean Coders Studio built a mobile front end that put the full power of the system directly in the hands of warehouse employees. Upon arriving at work, employees could open their mobile device and clock in with a single tap.

Warehouse employees could also record their activity sheets in real time, from the floor, submitting everything directly to admins with no paper required.

Together, these features eliminated data entry entirely, with information flowing directly from the warehouse floor to the back office in real time.

Impact

Wilson Warehouse came to Clean Coders Studio ready to invest in their next generation of technology. Clean Coders Studio delivered a fully tested, bug-free mobile and web application that retained all legacy functionality while modernizing both their software and people systems. Admins have reclaimed hours previously lost to data entry. Warehouse employees report their work in real time from the floor. And the precision and transparency that have always defined Wilson Warehouse's client relationships are stronger than ever.

The same spirit of innovation that defined Wilson Warehouse in the 1970s lives on, now powered by modern, built-to-last software.