On this week’s episode of Check Call, Kyle Ingraham, chief commercial officer at AFC Logistics, joins host Mary O’Connell to dive into technology upgrades, when to abandon a legacy system and whether you can have too much technology.
Key quotes from Ingraham:
“The goal when you go looking into changing your tech stack, updating your technology, talking to your teams, talking to your customers, the biggest things that you need to focus on is what’s going to make it easier for my customers, my carrier partners, my employees to do business with what’s going to make it so that people can be more productive in a shorter period of time.”
“Walk around and see how many windows and tabs everyone has open. If you see someone flipping between 10-15 tabs, you know you’ve done something wrong. When you look at that and see everyone just clicking back and forth or tabbing back and forth, you know they’ve gone too far in your implementation process and you need to start reeling it back.”
“A Band-Aid on anything in life rarely solves your problems. Everything today is cloud-based, right? That’s where you really need to look in the mirror and say, ‘We’re spending so much money constantly updating our old legacy system. What would happen if we invested that money elsewhere? … Where would that value be?’ Yes, it’s a large expense going into it, but in reality, long term it’s going to save.”
“Focus on actions that are revenue generating over actions that aren’t necessarily revenue generating but are still important. Focusing everything that you do through the lens of this is going to make it easier to do business. Think of it from an accounting standpoint, sending EDI for 10 invoices so that they’re not having to upload all of these invoices every single day into a portal saves one person so much time.”
“[Make] sure that you’re investing in evaluating what’s going to make it easier for people to do business with from carriers’, customers’ and employees’ perspectives. So I really think what to focus on is ease of doing business. It solves so many different problems and the last thing you want when you’re talking to a customer is for them to say it’s really hard to do business with you. There’s nothing worse than that.”
Got any pain points or things you wish were better in the supply chain and the world of transportation? Contact O’Connell to be on a future episode of Check Call.
