This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ 3PL Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: A guide on how to evaluate FreightTech products
DETAILS: In this fireside chat, Ryan Schreiber, chief growth officer at Metafora, dives into the critical considerations leaders must ponder when assessing their companies’ FreightTech requirements. He dissects the distinction between early and late technology adoption, pinpointing key business challenges.
KEY QUOTES FROM SCHREIBER:
“Number one, you need to understand what business problem you are trying to solve. … Let’s say you’re looking for a capacity solution. Are you looking to drive automation around the capacity network you already have, or do you feel like you need better carriers to haul your freight?”
“There are a lot of companies that aren’t making [technology investment] choices right now, and those companies are the ones who are also wasting money on technology and who are not getting value in the benefits they expect to get from technology. They expect technology to solve all of their problems. They are not doing some of the foundational work and discovery necessary to get the benefits of technology. They are building random pieces of tech that don’t do them any good and not being intentional about their strategy. … I tell our clients all the time that any strategy can work — you just have to understand the limitations of that strategy and then invest around those limitations.”
“Your phone, your phone systems, as a 3PL is especially the single greatest source of information that you could imagine. And not for like, how many calls has someone made today, but getting specific on what that call was associated with. What vendor or customer was that call associated with? Why did that call happen? So when I talked earlier about focusing on user enablement before automation, this third-party data is a part of it. … If you can start getting focused on gathering this data in a tech-connected ecosystem, you can have better access to it. That is the absolute first step in AI readiness too.”
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