On this week’s episode of Check Call, Alex Schwarm, chief innovation officer at Arrive Logistics, joins FreightWaves host Mary O’Connell to dive into all things tech innovation and integration.
Key quotes from Schwarm:
“The first thing is to define the problem that you’re trying to solve. You have to have a very clear definition of that. It can’t be well, I want to have a better prediction or I want to have some model that does something. It’s about defining the business problem because once you have that well defined, all the other pieces fall from that. Now you can talk about what prevents you from going on to the next level. What prevents you from increasing your booking and your ability to have better coverage on a specific lane, etc.? Having those definitions, then you can start talking about what are the solutions that you need to have places where the process helped to solve that problem.”
“In order to even define the problem, you need to have data to assess. What is actually driving us lower than optimal performance or whatever you’re investigating. Typically you have to have data, several levels of data, whether it’s a staffing problem or a scheduling problem or what have you, in order to get an answer to where the problem is really coming from. There’s some level of analysis that needs to happen.”
“If you now know what problem you’re trying to solve and then you start to collect data, if you didn’t have that data before and had no way to do any automation and now that you start to collect data, now you can start to help go through that maturity. That maturity curve of, OK, do you have information or are you going based on intuition? Going based on intuition can be OK for a while with great people but not a long-term successful solution.”
“Apply the algorithms and technology to broader problems. The exceptions and problems that can’t be solved with algorithms, use the institutional knowledge and manpower on things that can’t be automated.”
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.