Richard Greening’s goal is to bridge the gap between manual and digital processing for less-than-truckload (LTL) companies.
This is just one of the few topics Greening addressed in a one-on-one sitdown with FreightWaves’ CEO Craig Fuller as part of FreightWaves.TV Fuller Speed Ahead.
Global director of technology for The DDC Group and its freight-focused division, DDC Freight Process Outsourcing (FPO), Greening joins the Blockchain in Transport Alliance’s standards development division (BiTA-S) as the newly elected co-chair of Bill of Lading (BOL) Working Group. The goal of the working group is to set modern bill of lading standards across industries.
“The beauty is that you’re there with like-minded people,” Greening said. “Everyone in the group is there because they can see what the future will hold.”
Greening continues, “If we can even get close to setting standards across industries, then it opens up a world of potential.”
Greening brings an extensive background in logistics, as well as air cargo to BiTA. Greening’s freight-focused division at DDC processes nearly 30 percent of all North American LTL bills. The DDC Group has over 7,000 employees based in nine divisions all over the world.
Using optimal character recognition (OCR) tools, DDC continues to build on its data capture services, including handwriting recognition, to read freight bills and then maximize that data.
With more than 300 member companies, BiTA is one of the largest blockchain alliances worldwide. The organization’s members are mostly from the transportation, logistics and freight industries. BiTA members strive to adopt new technologies by setting industry standards and learning the importance of blockchain applications.
President of BiTA Patrick Duffy is excited to see Greening join BiTA and spoke on its mission.
“What we’re working on is creating normalized data structures, so that all the stakeholders in a supply chain are working with the same, high-fidelity data about components like party, shipment information, and location,” Duffy said. “One of the exciting opportunities that BITA has, by normalizing the different components of data that make a supply chain move, is around the collaborative opportunities that it creates between stakeholders across the supply chain.”
Duffy sees a need for stakeholders at every point in the supply chain to have access to the same data.
“Data is locked in silos,” Duffy said. “A single supply chain move associated with getting a pair of shoes from an e-commerce outlet involves numerous stakeholders from the purchase order to final delivery, all of whom hold a piece in the data puzzle.”
