This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Domestic Supply Chain Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Technology as the great supply chain equalizer.
DETAILS: Kyle Wegman, vice president of product at Turvo, and Robert Martin, director of sales and operations at Reibus Logistics, look at how technology helped the domestic supply chain with inventory, logistics and profits while amplifying customer experience.
KEY QUOTES FROM WEGMAN:
On working with Reibus Logistics: “The big thing that made us say, ‘We have to work with these guys,’ was, I actually have the notes from our original sales demo. It said these guys are obsessed with the end-user experience. That was really what drove us to want to work with them. They’re small, we’ll help them figure it out and we will get them out onto the platform. That combination of their drive and their vision of knowing what they wanted to do, as well on our side just making it as simple and as cheap as possible to get into the world of TMS tech, was a match made in heaven and it’s worked out really well so far.”
On how TMS has changed: “[A decade ago,] it was a lot of what I call brutalist software design in the space. Over time, we’ve become a lot less tolerant to these kind of half-baked and inefficient systems — especially in TMS. The big change over the last 10-15 years was that, before, you were expecting your TMS provider to do everything. When it came to integrations partnerships, there weren’t that many other companies out there in the tech world. So now, we have so many different types of companies competing with different software solutions every step of the line.”
Looking ahead to 2024: “I think that especially in [2020 and 2021], there was a lot more of an adventurous attitude of ‘I’ll throw cash at this newer company, see what they can do and what works with them.’ I think in 2023 and 2024, companies are buying less new technology. They’re more focused on working with the providers that they’ve got to really perfect things and say, ‘Do you belong in my stack or not?’”
KEY QUOTES FROM MARTIN:
Why Reibus has benefited with a TMS: “You go out to these larger shipper partners, and we started upstream in the supply chain with very, very large mills. You need to be able to integrate with their tech. We didn’t have that ourselves. Obviously, we went the route with Turvo instead of building our own, which is extremely complicated, extremely expensive, extremely time consuming. What Turvo has enabled us to do is integrate not only with their TMSes but [also] tracking aggregators, giving us the data we need in real time to partner with these carriers.”
“In the last decade or so, everyone’s made it a requirement. If you can’t integrate with XYZ, you can’t be a carrier.”