About the speaker

Pär-Johan Ekman has spent nearly 23 years building his career from the warehouse floor up — starting as a machine operator at Arla Foods’ cheese facility in Götene in 2004 and working his way through team leadership, logistics operations, and project management to his current role as Associate Director Operations.

Along the way, he has led major logistics transformation projects, including the implementation of SRS full-pallet grey across Arla Sweden, and has held roles spanning warehouse management, customer logistics development, and operations leadership. He holds a Warehouse Design and Management certification from Cranfield School of Management and brings a deeply practical, Lean-grounded perspective to every challenge.

Pär-Johan speaks from the inside of one of Europe’s largest dairy operations — where theory meets the daily reality of running a high-volume, automated warehouse at scale.

Retrofitting a Live Warehouse: Arla’s Modernisation Journey

Across the Nordics, a wave of warehouse systems installed in the 2000s and early 2010s are reaching end of life — and the question of how to replace them without stopping operations is one more and more companies will face in the years ahead.

At Arla Foods’ Götene facility, that challenge was already real: high-bay storage, miniload, and AGV systems, some 15–20 years old, all needed replacing. The scope was extensive — refurbished cranes and AGV hardware alongside a complete software overhaul spanning WMS and WCS, covering everything from high-bay storage to AGV fleet management — all while keeping production and distribution running.

Pär-Johan Ekman, Associate Director Operations, shares what a retrofit of this scale actually looks like from the inside, and what Arla learned about complexity, testing, and keeping the business first when the stakes are high.