Paxon NAM Mid Market is a third-party logistics company that manages fulfillment operations for clients across the United States. Its teams receive, pick, pack and ship products ranging from clothing and cosmetics to vitamins and beverages across 9 fulfillment sites.
To standardize processes across this network, Paxon NAM Mid Market uses Lumiform for its daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly checklists, as well as incident reports, maintenance requests and other operational forms.
We spoke to Colleen Bowers, AVP of Operational Excellence, and Rebekka Hildebran, Senior Operational Excellence Program and Data Specialist, about how Lumiform supports Paxon NAM Mid Market’s day-to-day operations, and got a glimpse of the powerful Power BI dashboards Hildebran built with Lumiform data to track what is happening across the network.
The need for a shared process
When Colleen Bowers joined Paxon NAM Mid Market, one of her first tasks was to carry out baseline audits across the company’s sites and during her visits to the different locations across the network, she quickly realised that teams had developed their own ways of working, with different checklists and documentation practices in place.
Matters were complicated further by the fact that teams didn’t even use the same medium to execute tasks: Most of the checks were either still recorded on paper, with some teams using Word documents or Excel which meant that, during an audit, Bowers had to work through weeks or months of records, find the relevant forms and put them in order before she could review what had happened at each site.
“We needed everyone to follow the exact same processes, so we could track what each site was doing, how they were doing it,” Bowers explains. The absence of a standardized, centralized, and transparent process highlighted the need for a solution that would ensure consistency, accountability, and visibility across all sites.
This is where Lumiform came into the picture. As Bowers and her team evaluated different digital inspection tools, they were looking for a platform that could support Paxon NAM Mid Market’s requirements as its operational excellence function evolved. “We were looking for a company we could grow with,” Bowers explains. “Lumiform has been extremely dedicated to helping us develop, and we’ve been able to share our feedback along the way. It has been a really great partnership, which is something we were looking for.”
From rollout to routine
Paxon NAM Mid Market started with a test phase of Lumiform of around one month. During that time, the team compared the checklists used across the sites, worked through differences in wording and structure, and began shaping them into a more consistent system. The wider rollout then took another two to three months as the team refined the setup and helped employees get used to completing their checks digitally.
The change was not entirely without its challenges. Moving from paper to a new digital process meant that some users needed more support than others, and the team also encountered a few technical issues during the early stages. Hildebran says that the Lumiform support team played an important role in resolving them: “They’ve been great at listening to our concerns, digging into them and tackling problems.” Since then, she says, Paxon NAM Mid Market has seen far fewer issues and the platform runs smoothly.
One detail we especially enjoyed hearing about was the way Paxon NAM Mid Market made use of the Lumiform platform itself to make the rollout more engaging beyond just classic training. To get people checking the app regularly, Hildebran and her colleagues created a short trivia challenge: the question appeared as notifications on users’ phones for one hour, and the first three people to answer correctly won a prize. “It was a fun way to get people engaged, have them keep an eye out for the notification and everyone was eager to answer quickly,” Hildebran recalls. They later used the same approach for safety communication, sharing a new question, procedure or practical tip each week.
That approach helped the rollout become part of everyday work and it paid off. In a recently conducted internal survey, employees confirmed that the new digital process of working with Lumiform was faster, more efficient and easier than using paper forms.
Operational excellence is all about continuous improvement. There is no final destination—we’re always looking for opportunities to improve, standardize, and optimize.
How Paxon NAM Mid Market assigns checks and routes follow-up
When we asked what using Lumiform looks like during a normal working day, Hildebran described a setup that has to accommodate far more than one standard shift or one type of user. At Paxon NAM Mid Market, the same inspection structure has to work across different sites, time zones and shift patterns. The operational excellence team sets up each form around the site’s staffing and working hours, including overnight operations, while general managers can request changes when responsibilities or coverage needs change.
“We set our forms up based on the GM’s requests, including who should be assigned to what and on what timeframe,” Hildebran explains. Because the assignments and deadlines are built into the schedule, the team can see who is responsible for each check and whether it was completed on time. The setup also reflects the different levels of responsibility within each warehouse, with separate checklists for leads, supervisors, operations managers and general managers.
Some forms are divided into sections for the beginning of the day, during the day and before leaving, so a team member can save the form and return to it later instead of carrying a paper document around or walking back to the office to retrieve it at the end of a shift. “With Lumiform, everyone has their forms available on their phones or tablets. It’s accessible the entire day and therefore much easier to complete,” Hildebran says. This makes it easier for employees to complete their checks as part of their normal routine, while giving Paxon NAM Mid Market a record of when the work was done.
One feature Bowers especially appreciates is the control Paxon NAM Mid Market has over how photos are captured during a check. For some forms, the team can require users to take a new picture instead of selecting an existing image from their phone gallery. That gives the site team more confidence that the photo reflects the condition of the site at the time of the inspection. “I like that ability because then people can’t just take a picture and use that all the time,” Bowers explains. “It helps give us some real-time visibility into each of their sites.”
However, not every form is scheduled in advance. Paxon NAM Mid Market also uses Lumiform for ad hoc reports, including maintenance requests, equipment damage logs, safety alerts and incident investigations. Hildebran particularly values the way these impromptu submissions can trigger the next required steps automatically, whether that means creating an action, sending an email report or opening another form.
“I really like that we can follow-up the submission forms, whether that be an action, another form or an email report being generated,” Hildebran says. “Just being able to have that ability has been great.”
With Lumiform, everyone has their forms available on their phones or tablets. It’s accessible the entire day and therefore much easier to complete.
An incident form, for example, can collect the site-specific documents, send them to HR by email and notify the general manager responsible for that location. Because compliance requirements differ across locations, the form dynamically provides state-specific downloadable compliance documents depending on the state selected. Once submitted, the report automatically escalates through the proper channels, notifying the site General Manager, state HR lead, and key leadership instantly.
It can also trigger a separate post-review form for HR. Once the review is complete, the operational excellence team can see whether an incident has been reviewed, remains open or is overdue, keeping the original report and its follow-up connected in one process. This level of tracking also supports risk management. By accurately recording OSHA recordable versus non-recordable incidents and demonstrating audit compliance across every site, Paxon NAM Mid Market strengthens its safety record, opening up potential reductions in insurance premiums.
Using Power BI to see what is happening across the network
Lumiform gives us a tool that allows us to evaluate our sites and gives us full, real-time visibility into each operation on a daily basis.
The checks collected in Lumiform give Paxon NAM Mid Market a consistent source of operational data across its fulfillment sites. Through Lumiform’s integrated Power BI feature, Hildebran has built dashboards that let the operational excellence team move from a broad view of network activity into the details behind it.
From the dashboard, Hildebran can start by comparing completion rates for daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly forms across the sites. If one location needs closer attention, she can select it and see which forms were missed, when they were due and who they were assigned to. That gives the team something concrete to work with during its weekly calls instead of discussing checklist usage in general terms.
“We use this tool on our weekly call with the teams to show them where they’re at and show them where they need to give more attention,” Hildebran explains.
The scale of the data becomes clear in one monthly snapshot Hildebran shared:
- 2,346 daily forms
- 159 weekly forms
- 72 monthly forms
Seeing such staggering numbers makes it easier to understand why a dashboard is useful. With so many checks being completed across multiple sites, the team needs more than just an insight into individual submissions but rather a way to see patterns, find gaps and decide where to focus next.
The same Power BI setup also helps the team examine incidents. Hildebran can see which submissions have been reviewed, which are overdue and which remain open, then filter descriptions by keywords such as forklift incidents or specific injuries. She can also look at responses to individual questions across a selected site, form or time period.
This saves the team from having to review every submission separately when it is looking for a particular issue or response. Previously, analyzing question-level results or prepping for site audits required manually sorting through weeks and months of paper submissions and Word documents across sites. Centralizing this data on a dedicated Power BI page eliminated a substantial amount of manual searching and compiling, making audit results instantly reportable and actionable.
With Lumiform data flowing directly into the Power BI dashboard, Paxon NAM Mid Market can see not only how each site is performing, but which missed forms, incidents and responses need attention.
The results: Network alignment, real-time visibility, and culture shift
At the end of our interview, we asked Colleen Bowers and Rebekka Hildebran to sum up the biggest benefit Lumiform has brought to Paxon NAM Mid Market. Both pointed to the same two things: consistency across the network and better visibility into daily operations.
For Hildebran, the biggest change is that every site now works from the same app and shared expectations. “Having that consistency across our network has been the biggest win for us,” she says. “It’s one app that everyone uses across our entire network, so we’re all operating from the same place. That has been a huge help in keeping everybody aligned on the process, the standard and the expectation.”
Bowers sees the benefit from the perspective of the operational excellence team. As she puts it, “Lumiform has given us a tool that allows us to evaluate our sites and give us full visibility into each operation on a daily basis.”
Looking ahead, Paxon NAM Mid Market sees operational excellence as a continuous journey. As the partnership evolves, the team aims to consolidate other standalone systems, such as learning management systems (LMS), into Lumiform, continuing to streamline software and drive efficiency across the fulfillment network.
We would like to thank Paxon NAM Mid Market, Colleen Bowers and Rebekka Hildebran for taking the time to speak with us and share how they use Lumiform across their fulfillment sites.