[Ontario, Chino & the Inland Empire, San Bernardino & Riverside County]
Software for the Inland Empire
The Inland Empire holds roughly 720 million square feet of industrial space, and transportation and material moving occupations make up 15.9 percent of local employment against 8.8 percent nationally. Warehousing and storage alone employed about 130,073 people in July 2026. It is also not a uniformly booming market: leasing hit a record 15.5 million square feet in the second quarter of 2026 while asking rents slipped below a dollar NNN, and at Ontario International Airport 2025 cargo growth came almost entirely from mail while commercial freight fell 3.6 percent. Operators here are running more volume at thinner margins, which is a good description of when automation stops being optional.
[The businesses here]
Who I work with in Inland Empire
Warehousing is a business of small events priced individually and performed thousands of times a day. That makes it the most quantifiable automation case of any district on this site, and the easiest to get wrong by buying a platform that does not fit the rate card.
Third-party logistics providers
Storing and handling inventory owned by several clients under one roof, with revenue built from receipts, storage periods, picks, packs, outbound shipments and accessorials rather than a single product price.
Retailer and manufacturer distribution centres
Receiving containerised import volume, putting away, replenishing stores or shipping direct, usually running the parent’s ERP with a local warehouse system layered on top and a gap between them.
Drayage and intermodal operators
Pulling import containers from the San Pedro Bay terminals to Inland Empire warehouses against appointment windows, returning empties, and billing per move plus accessorials.
Freight brokers and forwarders
Matching shippers to carriers and living on the spread, which means the reconciliation between the carrier invoice and the customer invoice is the business model rather than an admin chore.
Industrial landlords and developers
With 6.2 million square feet under construction in the core market, build-to-suit and speculative development, leasing and tenant improvement management against long entitlement timelines.
[What slows them down]
The usual bottlenecks
- 01
Activity-based billing that leaks
A 3PL charges for storage, receiving, pick and pack and a long tail of accessorials: kitting, returns, special packaging, labelling, rework. Those events happen faster than anyone records them, and when billing data lives in spreadsheets consolidated by hand from several systems, the leakage is systematic rather than occasional. Client volumes and service requirements also change week to week, so last month’s spreadsheet is never quite right.
What it costs: Work performed and never invoiced, month after month, at a margin that cannot absorb it.
- 02
Demurrage and detention invoices with a 30-day fuse
Carriers must issue a demurrage or detention invoice within 30 calendar days of when the charge was last incurred, and the invoice must carry a specified set of fields including bill of lading and container numbers, free time start and end dates, the applicable tariff rule and rate, and dispute contact information. The billed party gets at least 30 days to request mitigation. Nine ocean carriers collected roughly $15.4 billion in these charges between April 2020 and March 2025.
What it costs: A validation window exactly as long as the issuance window, on invoices nobody has time to check.
- 03
New warehouse development has a compliance layer as of January 2026
AB 98, as amended by SB 415, sets siting and design standards for logistics use developments. The warehouse concentration region covers unincorporated Riverside and San Bernardino counties plus specified cities, which had to designate truck routes avoiding residential communities by 1 January 2026. Developments of 250,000 square feet or more need a separate truck entrance, and within 900 feet of sensitive receptors truck bays must be oriented away from them where feasible.
What it costs: A design and routing constraint that arrives before entitlement, not after.
- 04
Client reporting assembled per client, by hand
Every 3PL client wants inventory and activity reporting, and every one wants it slightly differently. So somebody exports, reformats and emails a spreadsheet per client per week, and the numbers do not always match what the client sees in their own system.
What it costs: A recurring weekly job that scales linearly with the client count, and disputes when the numbers differ.
[What a fix looks like]
A 3PL that bills for the work it actually did
Illustrative example, not a past client
Take a third-party logistics operator in Ontario. Four hundred thousand square feet, about thirty clients, a mix of e-commerce fulfilment and pallet-in pallet-out storage.
Before: the warehouse system records receipts, picks and shipments. Accessorials, the kitting, the relabelling, the returns processing, the special packaging, are written on a clipboard by the supervisor and typed into a spreadsheet at the end of the week, if the week was calm. Invoicing is assembled monthly by one person pulling from the warehouse system, the spreadsheet and a rate card held in a document. Storage is billed on a snapshot rather than on occupancy over the period. Nobody can say which clients are profitable.
After: accessorial work is captured at the point it happens, on the same handheld the picker already uses, against the client and the order. The rate card is data rather than a document, with each client’s rates and minimums held as rules, so an invoice is generated rather than assembled. Storage bills off actual occupancy. Every line on the invoice traces to an event with a timestamp, which turns a billing dispute into a lookup.
The recovered accessorial revenue usually pays for the project on its own. The strategic gain is knowing, per client, what the work costs and what it earns, which is what lets the business renegotiate the accounts that are losing money.
[Where to start]
Services that fit Inland Empire
Process automation
Capturing accessorial work at the moment it happens is the single highest-return automation in this district, because the revenue is already earned and simply not being billed.
Learn more →0053–8 weeksSystem integrations
The warehouse system, the rate card and the accounting system have to agree before billing can be trusted, and connecting them is what makes per-client margin visible.
Learn more →0026–12 weeksCustom web applications
A client portal showing inventory and activity removes the weekly reporting job entirely, and it is what the larger operators you compete with already offer.
Learn more →Every project runs the same way, from first call to handover: how it works.
[Related]
Go deeper
[Inland Empire questions]
Questions
Our warehouse management system came with billing. Why would we build anything?
If its billing module fits your rate card, do not build anything. The usual finding is that it handles storage and standard handling well and accessorials badly, which is exactly where the leakage is. The fix is then a layer that captures the accessorial work and feeds the existing system, not a replacement.
Will pickers actually record accessorial work?
Only if it takes seconds and happens on a device already in their hand. If it needs a separate login or a trip to a terminal, it will not happen and the project fails. That constraint drives the whole design, and it is the main reason I want to watch a shift before scoping anything.
Can you check our demurrage and detention invoices against the rules?
The mechanical parts, yes: whether the invoice arrived inside the 30-day window and whether it carries the required fields. Those are checkable and they are worth checking given the volume of charges in this corridor. Whether a specific charge is properly owed is a commercial and legal question for whoever handles your claims.
Does any of this help with the new warehouse development rules?
Not directly. AB 98 and SB 415 are siting and design law, which is a matter for your land use counsel and your architect. I mention it because it is a real constraint on new development here as of January 2026, and operators are sometimes hearing about it late.
Do you come out to Ontario or Chino?
By appointment, yes. It is outside the standard on-site radius so the visits get agreed as part of the scope rather than assumed. For a warehouse project I would want at least one full shift on the floor, because the gap between the documented process and the real one is where the whole opportunity sits.
[Nearby]
Sources for the figures on this page
- Kidder Mathews Inland Empire industrial market report, Q2 2026: total inventory, vacancy, absorption and asking rents
- CBRE Inland Empire industrial figures, Q2 2026: record leasing volume, vacancy and construction pipeline
- FRED / BLS: warehousing and storage employment, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, July 2026
- BLS occupational employment and wages, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, May 2025: transportation and material moving concentration
- Ontario International Airport 2025 cargo results
- Federal Maritime Commission: demurrage and detention, including total charges collected April 2020 to March 2025
- 46 CFR 541.6: required contents of a demurrage or detention invoice
- 46 CFR 541.7: 30-day invoice issuance deadline
- Allen Matkins: California SB 415 amending AB 98, standards for logistics and warehouse projects
Based nearby. Let’s talk.
Evenbuilt is in Los Angeles, on-site across Los Angeles and Orange County, Inland Empire by appointment, remote everywhere else.
● Booking projects for Q4 2026