When logistics companies update their technological systems and solutions, their biggest concerns often revolve around training and usability. Sleek, user-friendly solutions are all the rage, and for good reason. Companies do not want to undertake huge training commitments that tie up their staff for days and threaten short-term profitability.
As the industry continues to move away from clunky legacy solutions, more companies are choosing solutions based on user interface. While an intuitive interface is important, this can sometimes come at the expense of a strong back-end product.
In the changing world of logistics, a product must do more than meet a customer’s current needs to be considered a strong offering. Companies must be able to be nimble and adapt swiftly in accordance with market shifts.
“In our industry, things change very quickly,” Redwood Logistics Chief Innovation Officer Eric Rempel said. “What happens when you need to change how you do things? Can the solution support shift? Is it seamless or does it require a lot of heavy-lifting?”
Inflexible solutions are all but guaranteed to lead to stress, frustration and lost customers eventually.
“Almost every company is going to select a tool where 20% of its features represent 80% of its use cases,” Rempel said. “At some point, business requirements change. The system isn’t horrible, but it was built to do a specific job. When you need it to do a different job, you have a choice of fixing it, upgrading it, or finding a way to leverage the first solution and integrate with something more tailor-made for the use case you’re moving toward.”
The above third solution — rapid and flexible connectivity — is where Redwood thrives. RedwoodConnect™ is a connectivity solution allowing shippers of all sizes to mix-and-match all their systems with a single integration platform. “We connect legacy systems, new cloud-based solutions, trading partners, and anything in-between in a scalable and secure way, all in real-time,” said Rempel.
As a bonus, the platform boasts an attractive and intuitive no-code interface.
The solution allows shippers to save time, money and a lot of headaches by connecting all their tools together in one place without complex code or implementation support from internal IT teams. This allows companies to stay focused on what they do best without sacrificing the quality of their technology in the process.
“We have a lot of open solutions at Redwood,” Rempel said. “Every customer is unique, but the patterns to optimize, integrate and orchestrate are the same. We’ll connect any technology, partner or solution to help our customers create a united supply chain.”
RedwoodConnect™ illustrates the company’s overall dedication to increasing integration and collaboration across the logistics landscape. “Our mission is to create an open ecosystem for digital logistics where we’re not just connecting the things that we think are important, but we’re also looking to our customers and our customers’ customers as partners to build this back-end together.”