On this week’s episode of Check Call, Eric Rempel, chief innovation officer at Redwood Logistics, joins FreightWaves host Mary O’Connell to dive into carrier compliance and the role of technology within it.
Key quotes from Rempel:
“If you think about [technology innovation] in terms of simplicity, innovation can mean more than what I need to invent, create or make. It also means what don’t I have to do to get to a result faster? A lot of times buying software rather than building gets you there, and if you are amazing at something, that is your competitive advantage.”
“As an exec you’re saying, ‘Well, this is so obvious we need to [upgrade].’ Organizations where the top-down vision is not about the tool. The top-down vision is about the type of organization we want to become and how we deliver value to our customers. When that is hyper clear, you start getting people excited before a tool selection is even made. You bring them in on procurement and you know there’s always opinions and voices to balance it, but you bring the folks in on procurement and make people understand that they’re part of the process. All of a sudden, now we’re all excited about the same thing, even though we may be excited about it for different reasons.”
“When it comes to buy vs, build, think about what value does it bring to the organization? And what would it cost you to get it done? What would it cost you to get it by just cleaning house and getting a new platform that supposedly does everything. What would it cost you to work with a partner to have them take a look at what it is you’re trying to accomplish? And try to give you a road map.”
“We want, let’s just say, transportation life cycle management workflow to be automated from end to end, but maybe you already have the systems in place that can handle it and all you really need is some OCR software at the end for invoice ingestion, you know, why throw the other things out? Put it more along the lines of, when an organization looks to do this should be after they have had an internal discussion from stakeholders to the CFO and CEO, and day-to-day users. You can at least communicate and have alignment between everyone in your organization of what you want to do, and why you want to do it and what value do you think you’ll get from it.”
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.