This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ North American Logistics Tech Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: The importance of access to technology and transportation management systems for shippers of all sizes
DETAILS: A discussion on small and midsized shippers making the move to a cloud-based TMS
INTERVIEWER AND SPEAKER: Andrew Cox, senior retail analyst at FreightWaves, and Chris Scheid, co-founder, president and COO at MyCarrier, a software-as-a-service provider with a less-than-truckload TMS for small and midsized shippers
BIO: Scheid started MyCarrier to ease the shipping experience for smaller shippers by providing a carrier-sponsored, multi-carrier site. Prior to MyCarrier, Scheid was VP of pricing at third-party logistics provider GlobalTranz.
KEY QUOTES FROM SCHEID:
On democratizing the access to a TMS: “We saw a need in the SMB space to have affordable software that any and every shipper, no matter how small they are, could gain access to. We set apart building it in a way that you do not have to have a consultant or a robust team to be able to implement the application. You can, rather, incrementally adopt it.”
On the lack of time required to implement the service: “Instead of having a long project-based approach setup where you would be uploading historic data and doing things of that nature … instead, we’re using real-time APIs and then building your profile over time. So the more you ship, the more we can learn about you as a shipper and configure your profile.”
On the improvement in operations shippers see when making the technology change: “Their experience, I would say, is the largest upgrade from what they were doing historically. A lot of those were based off of either Excel sheets, paper files or various arcane systems. Now it’s a cloud-based TMS. Especially in the world of COVID and work remote, it’s decentralized access to these applications to where you can have customer service at home tracking shipments, you can have warehousing and fulfilling orders and everyone can have real-time visibility.”
