May 19, 2026 – When she punched in at Medline for the first time 20 years ago in Fontana, Calif., Angelica Chavez was a college student who’d just picked up a temporary warehouse job where some of her friends worked, not expecting to stay very long, not thinking it would lead her anywhere in particular.
Today, she’s somewhere particular, all right: the company’s 545,000-square-foot distribution center in Aurora, Colo., where last week she added “proud host” to her litany of Medline roles over the years.
The Aurora facility is the most recent of Medline’s 45 U.S. DCs to add AutoStore, the robotic storage and retrieval system by Swisslog that the company uses at its busiest sites to help employees fill orders faster, more efficiently and in greater volume. Chavez has been Aurora’s director of operations since 2024 and a strong proponent for adding the system, which was implemented in four phases from January into March.
…The Aurora facility, already covering one of Medline’s largest service regions across Colorado and parts of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, has seen its order volume increase by an estimated 25% with the recent addition of a large healthcare customer in the area, Chavez said. Aurora employees can now more easily handle this growth with an AutoStore setup that includes 96 robots, 38,000 bins, eight induction stations for loading products into the system and 10 employee picking workstations…