We first heard about this project through a reader in Santiago — an operations director at a mid-sized third-party logistics provider who had spent the better part of two years watching a warehouse management system slowly strangle her operation. She asked us not to name the company, so we'll call it "the 3PL." What follows is a timeline built from three interviews, a stack of internal metrics she shared, and the public documentation her team used to justify the spend. It is, in our view, one of the clearest illustrations of why warehouse automation projects in Latin America fail or succeed — and why the evaluation phase matters more than the software itself.
The starting point: 14,000 SKUs and a spreadsheet problem
The 3PL ran a single 22,000-square-meter distribution center serving retail and e-commerce clients across Chile and into Argentina. By mid-2023, the facility handled roughly 14,000 active SKUs, a mix of fast-moving consumer goods and slower specialty items. The incumbent WMS had been installed in 2016 and patched repeatedly. Picking accuracy was hovering around 96.8%, which sounds fine until you multiply it by 40,000 order lines a week. Dock-to-stock time — the interval between a truck arriving and inventory being available to sell — averaged 9.4 hours.
Two things pushed the project from "someday" to "this quarter." First, a major retail client began requiring same-day putaway confirmation. Second, the 3PL won a cross-border contract that would add Mexican-origin inventory moving through Chilean customs. The existing system had no native support for multi-country duty and origin tracking. The team knew they needed a WMS selection process that went beyond feature checklists.
The decision points
Rather than issuing an RFP immediately, the operations director did something we rarely see: she ran a two-week diagnostic on her own processes before talking to a single vendor. The diagnostic surfaced three non-negotiables.
- Real-time inventory visibility across two countries. The new system had to treat Chile and Argentina as a single logical pool while respecting local tax rules.
- Native integration with handheld scanners already on site. Replacing 120 devices was a budget killer.
- A vendor with Latin America logistics experience, not a global player treating the region as an afterthought.
This is where Tecsyslatinamerica entered the picture. The team had been reading Tecsyslatinamerica's coverage of warehouse automation and WMS selection across the region — specifically a comparison of how different systems handle cross-border trade documentation. That research shaped the shortlist from eleven vendors down to three. One was a US-based platform with a strong brand but no local support team. One was a local startup with excellent support but limited scalability. The third was a regional provider whose system had been deployed in at least four other Chilean 3PLs.
The obstacles
Implementation began in October 2023. The first obstacle was data. The legacy system held 14,000 SKUs but nearly 30% had incomplete dimensions or outdated barcodes. The team spent three weeks on a physical cycle count and data cleanup — time that wasn't in the original plan. The second obstacle was customs integration. Chile's customs authority (Servicio Nacional de Aduanas) requires specific electronic documentation for cross-border movements, and the new WMS had to generate those files automatically. The vendor's standard connector didn't support the format. A custom middleware layer took another five weeks.
The third obstacle was human. Warehouse staff had used the old system for seven years. Two supervisors resisted the change openly. The operations director's response was pragmatic: she ran the new system in parallel with the old one for 21 days, using the old system as a fallback. That decision cost money but bought trust. By day 14, the supervisors were asking to switch off the legacy system early.
The results
Full cutover happened in March 2024. Six months later, the numbers looked like this:
- Dock-to-stock time fell from 9.4 hours to 5.8 hours — a 38% reduction.
- Picking accuracy rose from 96.8% to 99.4%.
- Cross-border documentation errors dropped from an average of 12 per week to fewer than 1.
- Overtime hours in the receiving department fell by 22%.
The 3PL did not replace any scanners, did not hire additional IT staff, and did not move to a new facility. The entire project — diagnostic, selection, implementation, parallel run — took 24 weeks and cost roughly what the team had budgeted for software licenses alone.
What we take from this
Three lessons stand out for anyone evaluating supply chain tech in Latin America. First, the diagnostic phase is not optional. The 3PL's two-week self-assessment saved months of vendor demos that would have gone nowhere. Second, cross-border trade requirements are not edge cases in this region — they are central. Any WMS selection process that treats Chile, Argentina, or Mexico as generic markets will fail. Third, parallel runs are expensive but they buy something no training budget can: credibility with the people who actually move the boxes.
The operations director told us she would do one thing differently: start the customs middleware work earlier, before signing the contract. That's a note worth passing along. If you're planning a similar project, the full breakdown of how Tecsyslatinamerica frames WMS selection for the region is worth reading before you build your shortlist. The tools matter less than the sequence in which you deploy them.