How Lineage Is Automating Warehouse Receiving at Its Decatur Facility

What you need to know

• 62,000 pallets automatically received by Kargo in the last 6 months
• Current processing power of 500 pallets a day
• 4x ROI

Receiving is one of the most critical workflows in the warehouse.

Kargo identifies, validates, and digitizes inbound pallet data in real time, eliminating manual receiving while accelerating throughput, improving inventory accuracy, and providing end-to-end operational visibility.

The Challenge: Manual Receiving Creates Warehouse Bottlenecks

In high-volume food manufacturing environments, receiving operations must quickly adapt to fluctuating inbound volumes without sacrificing accuracy. 

Whether processing a steady flow of pallets or responding to unexpected volume spikes, warehouse teams must capture critical traceability data — including SKU, Lot Code, Production Date, and Expiration Date — before product can move into inventory. 

At Lineage's temperature-controlled warehouse in Decatur, Alabama, increasing inbound volume created pressure. Processing hundreds of pallets each day required maintaining speed, accuracy, and cold chain integrity.

When receiving relies on manual processes, peak volume periods are labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Bottlenecks can leave product sitting longer than necessary.

Integration

Kargo's IT team partnered with Lineage to implement an API integration that connected Kargo's AI platform directly to the warehouse management system (WMS). By receiving pallet- and order-level shipment data from Lineage, Kargo was able to automatically validate inbound pallets against expected inventory. 

Once all required data elements were confirmed, the validated transaction was returned through the API, enabling the warehouse management system to automatically complete the receiving process without manual intervention. 

The implementation ensured that the receiving operation could transition seamlessly from manual processing to automated execution with minimal disruption to daily throughput.

The Solution: AI-Powered Automated Receiving

During ramp-up, Kargo worked closely with Lineage operations to validate workflows, optimize camera placement and label recognition, fine-tune business rules, and establish performance monitoring to ensure consistent automation across varying inbound volumes.

Kargo’s solution provided more than automated receiving. Kargo delivered real-time visibility into transaction timing, exception trends, and processing delays, enabling operations to identify bottlenecks and workflow inefficiencies that were previously difficult to detect within a manual receiving process. Kargo also automated scans on all master labels and added visibility on case-level serial numbers.

The Result

Over the last six months, the Decatur deployment has automated more than 62,000 receiving transactions.

The facility processes more than 500 pallets daily. Lineage can now receive shipments in a matter of seconds.

By removing manual receiving tasks, Lineage has been able to reallocate labor toward higher-value activities throughout the warehouse while maintaining accurate inventory records.

Benefits for Food Manufacturing Operations

For food manufacturers, the value proposition extends well beyond automation. The combination of strict traceability requirements, limited receiving windows, fluctuating production schedules, and food safety regulations makes inbound logistics a high-risk process. The key benefits Kargo provided:

• Food Safety & Traceability 
• Efficiency & Throughput Gains
• Labor Optimization 
• Operational Visibility 
• Exception Detection & Management 
• Quality & Shelf-Life Management

What's Next

The receiving deployment is part of Lineage’s broader effort to apply automation and computer vision technologies across its cold chain network.

The next phase at the Decatur facility will be automated load scanning, which is expected to increase throughput in the warehouse by an additional 20%.

As more warehouse processes become automated, facilities gain the ability to move product faster, improve data accuracy, and free teams to focus on the work that creates the most value.