Today, most people think of logistics as sending an envelope from one place to another or having a package that was ordered online delivered to their home or business.
To industrial and manufacturing sites, finished products logistics starts at the packaging line and ends with the customer. Plus, what’s being sent from one place to another usually weighs hundreds or thousands of pounds and is being delivered to locations all over the world. What may surprise people most, however, is that there’s a company here in Baton Rouge that’s providing multinational Fortune 500 chemical manufacturers with best-in-class logistics solutions. It’s Brown Eagle.
Though the company could be considered one of the city’s best kept secrets, Brown Eagle is at the forefront of providing innovative 3PL and 4PL logistics solutions for chemical manufacturers in Louisiana and across America. The company operates projects and supplies everything from end-to-end logistics project management to a single forklift driver. Brown Eagle also manages over 600,000 square feet of warehouse space across six sites in the Capital Region, providing contract warehouse operations, dedicated storage solutions and public storage options to clients whether they need to store one pallet or thousands.
“Our pitch to prospective clients is pretty straightforward,” says CEO Lela Mae Wilkes. “Their core competency is not packaging, warehousing and shipping—their core competency is making the product. Brown Eagle has the people, systems and expertise to package the product and get it to the customer while the client can focus on making the best product they can.”
This approach has worked well as Brown Eagle has developed long-lasting relationships with some of the chemical industry’s top companies. In fact, Brown Eagle has an average client tenure of 28 years. “Being locally owned and managed lets us respond to our clients’ needs quickly,” says Lela Mae. “That responsiveness and our expertise has enabled us to double sales and employees, as well as triple our number of new clients over the past five years. This is a strong testament to our ability to customize services to our clients’ increasingly complex and global needs.”
While speed is important, safety and accuracy are Brown Eagle’s passion. Brown Eagle recently completed 2.4 million man hours without a lost-time incident, dating to 2014, and has a Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) of zero for four of the past five years. The company also touts a shipping accuracy rate of 99.999 percent with one location going an amazing 41 years without an error or customer complaint. Brown Eagle’s president, Billy Bellefontaine, gives credit to the company’s focus on work processes and training.