How many distribution centers does a network built by acquisition need, and where should they sit?

ICP Group grew fast from its founding in 2015. Backed by Audax Private Equity, the company scaled through acquisition and organic growth into one of the largest privately held coatings and adhesives makers in North America, with operations in Europe and Asia. Each deal brought plants, distribution centers, customers, and SKUs. None of them arrived with a shared logistics design.

By 2022 the network reflected its history rather than a plan. The footprint worked, and no one could say whether it was the right footprint.

Four questions had grown urgent, and spreadsheets could answer none of them:

• How many distribution centers does the network need, and where should they sit?
• Which facilities should serve which customers, and which redundancies left by acquisition should go?
• Which vehicle types should move the product?
• What does it cost to serve a customer today, and how much of that cost comes from the network design itself?

Network decisions compound. Move one distribution center and delivery distances, service levels, transportation cost, and the case for every neighboring site all shift with it. A competitive market, rising demand, and post-COVID supply disruption raised the price of a wrong answer. Leadership wanted to test the answers before committing capital to them.

ICP had been pitched before, and leadership knew the two outcomes to avoid. The first was the consulting deliverable that arrives as a slide deck and goes stale the day it lands, a snapshot of a network that has already moved. The second was the black box: a model so opaque that the team who paid for it cannot open it, question it, or maintain it without calling someone back. Both outcomes leave a company dependent on an outside party for the same question the next time it comes up.

ICP wanted to own the capability: a model its own planners could run, interrogate, and trust, so network design became something the company did on a cadence. ICP brought SimWell in to build that model alongside its own team.

The engagement targeted three design problems the acquisitions had layered into the network:

• Footprint: how many distribution centers, and where, to serve North American demand
• Asset use: how to realign plants and DCs to strip out redundancy
• Transportation and distribution: how product should move, on which vehicles, and at what cost to serve

SimWell consultants worked inside ICP's team in short cycles: build, validate against real ICP data, review results with ICP's planners, adjust. Each cycle kept the model anchored to the decision ICP cared about most at that stage. ICP's planners learned the system while it took shape instead of receiving it finished at the end.

A model counts as a capability only when its owners can feed it, trust it, and run it again. SimWell designed ICP's architecture around that test, with three components carrying the load:

• Alteryx pulls data from ICP's ERP systems, then cleans and consolidates it on a repeatable schedule. A refresh never means a manual rebuild.
• anyLogistix runs the simulation and optimization. The team moved back and forth between greenfield analysis and network optimization, using one to propose candidate sites and the other to test them. New nodes or changed cost assumptions went in as the questions evolved.
• Power BI puts results in dashboards ICP's planners read directly, validating each iteration and feeding the next round of decisions.

Data flows in from ICP's own systems on a cadence, the optimization runs against current operations, and results come back in a form planners can act on. The standing link to production data makes the system a supply chain digital twin, one ICP can rerun whenever the network changes.

SimWell and ICP built the baseline first: a model of ICP's network as it ran, accurate enough that ICP's team trusted its output. Two analyses followed.

Greenfield analysis answered the siting question. The model showed how coverage changed as the network added distribution centers: what share of demand each configuration reached within 500 and 1,000 miles, and how much each additional location cut average miles to the customer. ICP's leadership got a clear, visual basis for deciding how many warehouses to carry.

Network optimization answered the cost question. SimWell built an optimized baseline that reflected ICP's immediate plans and known limits, then compared it against the 2022 historical baseline. The first experiment alone identified a 7% supply chain cost-saving opportunity.

ICP got a model that showed its work and a number the planning team could defend and reproduce the next time the network changed.

ICP's Kendra Sakoian presented the work at the anyLogistix Conference in 2023.