Warehousing wonders: Dahl's automation leap with IBM

Saint-Gobain, a global leader in sustainable construction, relies on its subsidiary Dahl to deliver high-performance solutions across building markets. Dahl’s warehouse was operating at 140% capacity, causing inefficiencies, delays, and rising costs. “This situation was not sustainable,” says Roger Sundberg, Development and Operations Specialist. Executives were concerned about customer satisfaction and scalability, prompting urgent action.

To support growth, Dahl launched a modernization initiative to expand warehousing, streamline logistics, and rebuild core IT infrastructure. A new e-commerce site was also introduced to enhance agility, scalability, and customer experience across both physical and digital channels—ensuring long-term success and market leadership.

Dahl partnered with IBM to modernize its warehousing and logistics operations, building a highly automated facility designed for scalability and efficiency. IBM® Instana® Observability for monitoring, IBM Turbonomic® for resource optimization, and Red Hat® OpenShift® for container orchestration played key roles. The initiative also included a full digital infrastructure overhaul and a new e-commerce site to ensure seamless customer experiences across all channels.

The transformation unified multiple brands under Dahl and introduced automation testing in the new warehouse. “The facility was purpose-built to achieve 85–90% automation per order line,” says Sundberg. “Initial testing shows promising results—reduced manual processes, increased throughput—and we’re validating performance under real-world conditions.” Turbonomic helped scale pods in OpenShift with precise resource recommendations, assuring consistent performance.

Instana Smart Alerts and AI-based dashboard enabled proactive monitoring of all applications in a single, color-coded view. “We can now visualize everything better,” says Sundberg. Dahl also leverages Instana Smart Alerts feature to monitor the entire application chain, including its API gateway. By analyzing error patterns over a 10-minute interval, Smart Alerts provide early warnings when anomalies occur, helping the team act before issues escalate. Unlike traditional monitoring that focuses on isolated resources and requires complex configurations, Instana automatically correlates data across services to trigger meaningful events. Combined with open-source visualization tools and telemetry, this approach gives Dahl full-stack observability and proactive control over its critical workflows. “Now we see the complete application portfolio, with live data flow. If something turns red or yellow, we can immediately identify and address the potential issue before it affects customer response time.” This strengthened Dahl’s DevOps capabilities, ensuring application performance and code quality before going live.

The launch of Dahl’s new e-commerce site was a pivotal milestone in the company’s transformation. After two failed launch attempts caused by backend integration issues with the ERP system, the team leveraged IBM Instana to gain full-stack observability and identify root causes in real time. “Before Instana, we were crunching logs and hoping to look in the right place,” says Sundberg. With Instana Smart Alerts and live telemetry, the third launch succeeded smoothly, enabling the team to resolve issues as they emerged. The site went live four months ahead of schedule, achieving a 100% ROI on Instana within just a couple of months. Performance also improved dramatically, with response times dropping from up to five seconds to under two milliseconds—boosting customer satisfaction and driving increased purchases.

Following the transformation, Dahl achieved faster order processing and delivery, supported by a centralized logistics strategy and 24x7 unmanned stores across Sweden. IBM’s tools enabled proactive issue resolution and helped consolidate monitoring from ten solutions to four, increasing observability and reliability.

Instana’s incident remediation capabilities accelerated the launch of Dahl’s new e-commerce site by four months, delivering 100% ROI within weeks. Response times dropped from five seconds to under two milliseconds, boosting customer satisfaction and purchases. Automation in order fulfillment rose from 60% to 80–90%, with 10 of 12 tests successfully running warehouse automations at 120% of peak order volume.

“The combined use of Instana and Turbonomic provides us with end-to-end monitoring and optimization, enhancing our ability to manage resources effectively,” Sundberg notes. “This has allowed us to consolidate our monitoring environment from ten solutions to four, increasing observability and spotting potential issues sooner.”

“Instana and Turbonomic pinpointed and eliminated performance problems that interfered with package movement,” Sundberg explains. “After 10 of 12 tests, we successfully ran warehouse automations at 120% of peak order volume, demonstrating the system’s potential. These tests are part of an ongoing validation process to ensure consistent performance before full-scale deployment.”

These outcomes have not only improved operational efficiency and customer satisfaction—they’ve also strengthened Dahl’s competitive edge in Sweden’s fast-moving logistics sector, positioning the company as a benchmark for innovation and responsiveness.

Dahl is a hub of construction and development in Sweden, providing HVAC, plumbing and building materials across the country. Based in Stockholm, Dahl is a subsidiary of Saint-Gobain Distribution Sweden, which owns multiple subsidiaries.