Chad Crotty, vice president of sales and business development for DDC FPO, joined Jeremy Reymer on this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road. The duo discussed the importance of operational efficiency, the IT workforce shortage and the benefits of partnering with the consultative industry leader to streamline workflows.
Like many in the transportation business, Crotty grew up around the industry. His father was a sales manager for a regional trucking company in Illinois, allowing him to meet new people and be causally involved in the industry from a young age.
Crotty himself joined the industry when an opportunity with DDC FPO presented itself about 13 years ago. While the organization has been around for over three decades as a data capture company, it has been fully immersed in the transportation space for about 15 years.
“We started getting involved in transportation and logistics because it is a very archaic industry,” Crotty said of DDC FPO. “It is heavily laden with paperwork.”
The transportation industry’s dependence on old-school, manual solutions created an opportunity for DDC FPO to come in and offer innovative options to increase efficiency and automate processes.
The company is also equipped to help fill labor gaps in the industry, taking on the ongoing but often overlooked IT workforce shortage through its outsourcing initiative and training program.
Many medium and large transportation companies continue to use legacy IT systems like AS/400 because they house years of data while also being reliable and more difficult to hack than most modern systems. While these legacy systems still perform well for users, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to backfill IT positions as the professionals who work with older systems reach retirement age.
Recent college graduates are not trained to work with legacy systems like AS/400. When speaking to carriers about their backup plans to fill IT roles as their current staff reach retirement, Crotty realized most companies have no such plans.
That is where DDC FPO comes in.
DDC FPO built its own training program, focused specifically on teaching young adults to work with legacy systems in the transportation space. The organization wrote and established a curriculum, then handpicked candidates to go through its LTL-specific training program.
The goal is for graduates to enter companies as junior programmers working under more seasoned teams to transfer the important knowledge required to keep systems running.
The company’s first group of trainees will graduate and enter the workforce this month.
Click here to learn more about DDC FPO’s IT outsourcing options.
Other highlights from this episode of Taking the Hire Road
Book recommendation: “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing”
Sponsors: Career Now Brands, Carrier Intelligence, The National Transportation Institute, Infinit-I, Workhound, Asurint, Arya By Leoforce, Transportation Marketing Group, Seiza, Drive My Way, DriverReach, F|Staff, Trucksafe, Seated Social, Repowr