West Coast Distribution Center Celebrates 20 Years of Getting the Job Done
Becky Behrends remembers her first day at the West Coast Distribution Center.
“I came before the grand opening,” said Behrends, an order selection manager. “It was all new. The offices weren’t furnished yet.”
Becky Behrends, an order selection manager at the West Coast Distribution Center, has worked at the center since before its 2001 grand opening.
Behrends had worked for six months in an Exchange warehouse in Oakland, but the West Coast Distribution Center was a new experience – state of the art, highly automated and mechanized.
“We didn’t have a conveyor in Oakland,” said Behrends, who worked in shipping at the time. “You needed to learn how to load from a conveyor, with boxes coming at you. A lot of the crew was new, so they needed to learn the whole warehouse operation.”
That was 20 years ago, when the DC opened July 20, 2001, at the Sharpe Army Depot in Lathrop, Calif., 60 miles east of San Francisco. In July, the DC celebrated the anniversary with a luncheon for all its associates.
“This was a thank you for all the hard work and dedication to what they do every day and for helping us be successful over 20 years” said West Coast DC Manager Mike Martino. “This is ‘family serving family.’ Everybody has a role to play and there’s great teamwork in order to get the job done and tackle the mission.”
According to Martino, more than 20% of the nearly 400 current associates have been there since the beginning.
Mike Martino, right, the current manager of the West Coast Distribution Center, with former managers Kent Altom, left, and Peter Catineau. Altom retired in early 2021 and Catineau retired in 2015.
The West Coast DC is the youngest of the CONUS DCs, having opened more than 10 years after the Dan Daniel and Waco distribution centers. Associates from those centers helped with the West Coast launch.
Mike Martino, West Coast Distribution Center manager, talks to teammates at the DC’s 20th anniversary lunch in July.
It began as an 850,000-square-foot facility that served more than 125 stores in the Western and Pacific regions. Since then, it has added a building, and the Real Estate Directorate acquired another building at the depot, for a total of 1.1 million square feet. Martino says that it now serves more than 750 stores – with a smaller team than it had in 2001.
One of the most major changes at the DC occurred in 2017, when new JDA warehouse management software was implemented for e-commerce fulfillment to prepare for the Veterans online shopping benefit that began on Veterans Day of that year.
In October 2019, the West Coast DC began delivering men’s, women’s, children’s and infant’s clothes and shoes to Exchanges in the Western and Pacific regions. Before that, all fashions were shipped from Dan Daniel.
As order selection manager, Behrends oversees a department that picks the merchandise and sends it to shipping, with a daily goal of getting merchandise to shipping on time so that stores receive it when they expect it.
“We’ve gotten our procedures in place, so now it’s routine,” Behrends says. “We know what we need to do to get the job done.”
