Case Study, Emco Lockers
The counter closes at five. The trades don’t.
Emco Lockers is after-hours will-call pickup built for EMCO, a national plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks distributor. A contractor taps one secure link and every locker holding their staged order opens, day or night, no staff on site. Same lens as always: what was broken, what it cost, what changed.
24/7
pickup, no staff on site
1
link opens the whole order
<1
minute for staff to stage an order
0
apps, keypads, or codes
The whole customer experience: the link arrives, the order is shown, one confirm, every locker opens.
What Was Broken
The pickup counter keeps banker’s hours.
EMCO is one of Canada’s largest plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks distributors, with branches across the country. Its customers are trade contractors, and the will-call counter is where they collect the parts they ordered ahead. The counter keeps business hours. The trades do not.
A plumber’s day starts before the branch opens, and an emergency call ends long after it closes. Every order that could not be handed over outside counter hours meant a contractor queuing at open, a crew waiting on a part, or a Friday-night job supplied by whoever could actually hand over a water heater at nine in the evening.
What It Cost
The sale was made. The handover failed.
The strange thing about will-call is that the revenue is already sitting on a shelf with a customer’s name on it. What counter hours put at risk is everything around the sale: the contractor’s morning burned in a lineup, the crew standing idle waiting on a part, and the emergency job that goes to whichever supplier can physically hand it over. Miss enough of those moments and the next order goes there too.
Off-the-shelf smart lockers exist for this, but the typical kiosk bolts a touchscreen and keypad to the bank, outdoors, where it freezes, fogs, and gets vandalized, and it usually opens one compartment at a time. A plumbing order is not one compartment. It is a water heater in a cage and a box of fittings in a locker, and the contractor needs both, in the dark, with gloves on.
What Changed
The link is the key. The order is the system.
A complete pickup platform built from scratch: staff console, customer flow, lock control, ERP integration, and the audit trail underneath it all.
The order is the key
The system of record is the order, not the box. One secure link opens every locker the order is staged in, all at once: the cage holding the water heater and the compartment holding the fittings together.
No app, no keypad, no code
The customer taps a single-use link sent by text and email. Their phone is the screen, so nothing is bolted to the lockers to freeze, fog up, or get vandalized. Built to run unattended, outdoors, around the clock.
Staged in under a minute
Orders land on the staff board from the counter or the ERP. Staff pick the customer, tap the lockers, and the link goes out. Repeat customers are saved, so the next order takes seconds.
Audited and revocable
Every unlock is logged. Links expire on their own, a re-issued link cancels the old one instantly, and a confirm step means doors never open early or by accident.
Plugs into EMCO's own systems
Orders flow in from the branch's existing order system on their own, and pickup confirmations flow straight back. Structured from day one for a national network: adding a branch is setup, not a rebuild.
Bring your own lockers
The lock controller drives whatever hardware the branch builds or buys, tall cages for water heaters, banks of compartments for parts. The software handles the technology and keeps the hardware open.
The P&L After
The branch keeps selling after close.
A branch with lockers keeps handing over orders after the counter closes. The after-hours emergency that used to be a lost sale becomes the stickiest kind of order there is, and the morning lineup gets shorter because yesterday’s orders left overnight.
The contractor’s side of the ledger matters just as much. No second trip, no crew waiting on a part, no keypad to fight in the cold. The customers with the most reasons to switch supplier become the ones with the fewest.
The system is built and running end to end, from the order arriving to the doors opening to the audit log, with a live single-branch pilot as the first step of the rollout. It was designed for that path from day one.
Where does your business stop when the staff go home?
A counter, a front desk, a phone line. We build the systems that keep serving customers after hours, and train your team to run them.