For a homegrown Medline leader driven to do more, cue AutoStore

For a homegrown Medline leader driven to do more, cue AutoStore

Company's 24th installation of automated product-routing system is a winning hand for Colorado facility director and the customers, employees on her watch

Aurora-AutoStore-MAIN

Angelica Chavez, director of operations at Medline's distribution center in Aurora, Colo.

When she punched in at Medline for the first time 20 years ago in Fontana, Calif., Angelica Chavez was a college student who'd just picked up a temporary warehouse job where some of her friends worked, not expecting to stay very long, not thinking it would lead her anywhere in particular.

Today, she's somewhere particular, all right: the company's 545,000-square-foot distribution center in Aurora, Colo., where last week she added "proud host" to her litany of Medline roles over the years.

The Aurora facility is the most recent of Medline's 45 U.S. DCs to add AutoStore, the robotic storage and retrieval system by Swisslog that the company uses at its busiest sites to help employees fill orders faster, more efficiently and in greater volume. Chavez has been Aurora's director of operations since 2024 and a strong proponent for adding the system, which was implemented in four phases from January into March.

When around 60 Medline leaders, community members and customers arrived Thursday morning for the formal unveiling, they were essentially stepping into Chavez's house.

"There's a tremendous sense of pride in what we're able to do for our customers, and also in our teams and the surrounding community seeing how important this is," Chavez said of the new installation, Medline's 24th nationally with Swisslog since 2013. "This is something that everybody is just really excited about."

It comes at an ideal time. The Aurora facility, already covering one of Medline's largest service regions across Colorado and parts of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, has seen its order volume increase by an estimated 25% with the recent addition of a large healthcare customer in the area, Chavez said. Aurora employees can now more easily handle this growth with an AutoStore setup that includes 96 robots, 38,000 bins, eight induction stations for loading products into the system and 10 employee picking workstations.

"Our picks per hour are now up from about 60 per employee to 200-240," Chavez said. "Our on-time delivery has increased. Customers are finding there's more flexibility in our ability to accommodate later orders and special requests. They're confident in us, they're adding more business, and they want to see what Medline's willing to invest in for them."

Special guests Thursday included Mike Coffman, mayor of Aurora; Rene Simard, CEO of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce; Robert Humphry, Swisslog's vice president of sales, new business, and Paul Holbert, senior director of system supply chain operations for UCHealth. Chavez also gave remarks, along with Sean Halligan, Medline's executive vice president of supply chain, and Greg DeTuerk, vice president of regional sales.

Aurora-AutoStore-Guests

From left: UCHealth's Paul Holbert, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, Medline's Greg DeTuerk and Angelica Chavez, Swisslog's Robert Humphry and Rene Simard of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.

Holbert lauded not just the AutoStore installation but the people behind it who make it effective.

"The Swisslog capabilities with AutoStore and the information that's provided to that system through human interaction provide a stable experience for us," Holbert said. "The consistency doesn't happen without the Medline planners, pickers, loaders, drivers and supervisors here today in the distribution center making sure things happen the way they need to."

Aurora-AutoStore-Speakers

Clockwise from top: Humphry, Holbert and Medline's Sean Halligan celebrate the new installation.

More than 100 of the distribution center's 240-plus employees also joined the celebration, from entry level to upper management.

Chavez has been in nearly all their shoes at one time or another. She was just 20 when she started as an hourly order-picker at the small distribution center in Fontana, just outside Los Angeles, in 2005. Fascinated by the real-world impact she saw Medline making, including at a hospital where one of her family members was receiving care, she began to see the company not as a brief stop but as an essential part of healthcare and a place where new employees like her were encouraged to contribute to solutions.

"Medline allows you to be a part of the change you want to see," Chavez said. "A lot of our national processes and improvements have started with hourly team members realizing those changes needed to happen."

She spent five years as a team lead and warehouse manager, moving from Fontana to its larger replacement facility in San Bernadino, then primarily worked in a textile division, building skills in budgeting, reconciliations, inventory health and other non-physical aspects of supply chain. In 2012, she enrolled in a supervisor-in-training program. Before long, she was spending a few weeks or months at a time on safety and process improvements at other DCs around the country, even as she remained based in Southern California at the massive, 1-million-square-foot Rialto facility that Medline opened in 2017.

It was there that she first worked with AutoStore, observing firsthand how it allowed employees to get more done for customers with less physical toll. Taking the reins in Aurora - the realization of Chavez's goal to one day lead a DC herself - and introducing her team to the technology has been a thrill.

Aurora-AutoStore-Employees

Greg DeTuerk (second from right) greets employees of the Aurora distribution center.

"It's so much different, and at first, they didn't know really what to think of it," Chavez said. "Even seeing videos, it can be hard at first to fully understand what AutoStore is until you're using it. But when they realized how big of an investment was being made in our building, there was excitement. And when the picking teams understood how it was going to be better on their bodies - that AutoStore would bring products to them at their stations and they no longer needed to push carts, walking 10 or 12 miles a day on average - the excitement was overwhelming. Suddenly, everyone wanted to work in automation. Little by little, we're cross-training as many team members as we can."

And with that comes more job mobility. Since the first AutoStore-assisted orders in January, the Aurora site has added three more team leads and two more warehouse supervisors through promotions.

These are roles Chavez would have jumped at herself years ago as she realized that making healthcare run better wasn't just a short-term gig but a calling.

"AutoStore will give many people here a clearer path to do more for our customers, their patients and the company, and they're seeing that," she said. "Team members are working hard to be considered for these lead positions. There's a trajectory there."

AutoStore is just one area where Medline is making major strides in DC operations. Read about the company's new Pick Pack Pro™ system and an additional facility coming to the Dallas area in 2027.