We last visited with Kevin Kuntz, the senior vice president of global logistics fulfillment for Gap Inc. Inc., in November 2018. At the time, Kuntz was gearing up for the holiday season in a new facility in Gallatin, Tenn. The 500,000-square-foot e-fulfillment center was a showcase for the technologies and processes that Gap Inc. planned to roll out on a global basis, including dense storage using mini-load automated storage and retrieval, a handful of piece-picking robotic putwalls from Kindred AI and Vargo's warehouse execution system. But what really made the facility stand out was the story of how it came about. In August of 2016, just a few months before that year's holiday season, Gap Inc.'s new 1-million-square-foot e-fulfillment center in Fishkill, N.Y., burned to the ground. That was the DC that was supposed to set the standard for e-fulfillment until it was destroyed. Undaunted, Gap Inc. got the Gallatin DC up and running in time for the 2016 holiday season and then improved upon it. It was an illustration of resilience, a term that's very much a part of the supply chain lexicon these days as we all grapple with COVID-19. Faced with a disruption, the best supply chain organizations quickly shift gears, take an unplanned detour and then get back on the original path. That's what Gap Inc. did in Gallatin.
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