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005 - Mark Ketcham, Vice President of the Americas For Riege Software International
122 Plays7 years ago
PROFILES SUPPLY CHAIN CONVERSATIONS
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EPISODE 5 MARK KETCHAM, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAS FOR RIEGE SOFTWARE INTERNATIONAL
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Welcome to Episode 5 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.
Our guest this week is Mark Ketcham. Mark is a sales and marketing professional with nearly 20 years of executive management experience, growing multinational companies in the engineering, software and technology industries.
Presently the Vice President of the Americas for global freight-forwarding software supplier, Riege Software International, Mark is spearheading the company’s expansion to North America and directing all sales operations and new business development for the entire territory.
“...Empowering people and attempting to influence those people versus arguing...really makes those small steps of success that compound into the ultimate success, both personally and professionally.”
Listen in as Brian and Mark discuss:
- Transportation management systems and solutions for international clientele.
- What it was like transitioning to the operations side of the supply chain with a software background.
- How the idea of success compounding has manifested itself in Mark’s career.
- The historic one-size-fits-all trends of the industry versus the “stitching together” trend that has now emerged.
Resource mentioned in the show:
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts so that you’re updated when we post a new episode!
Take care, and until next time,
Brian Glick, CEO
chain.io
Recommended
Transcript
Global Cultural Interactions in Logistics
00:00:02
Speaker
It's a very dynamic industry. You meet so many from cultures across the world and you really see the drivers of the economy globally.
Introduction to Profiles by Chain.io
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to Profiles by Chain.io. I'm Brian Glick, Chain.io's founder and CEO. Over the coming weeks and years, we'll feature the partners and customers who make up the Chain.io network. We'll focus on learning about the individuals within these companies
00:00:31
Speaker
and how they've helped build the organizations that drive our network. Together, we'll learn what drew them to the industry, why they made it such a big part of their lives, and where they see us all going in the future.
Meet Mark Ketchum and His Logistics Journey
00:00:45
Speaker
Today, we're going to talk to Mark Ketchum. Mark is Vice President of the Americas for Riga Software International. Riga is a transportation management system based in Germany that has hundreds of customers and thousands of users all over the world
00:01:00
Speaker
and services TMS solutions in 34 different countries. Mark has a really interesting industry perspective as he's a lifetime industry insider who's worked for a number of software companies and really helps us in this episode tie what's been going on in the history of the industry from an integration perspective right up into where we're headed in the future. So I hope you enjoy the episode. Hey Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.
00:01:30
Speaker
So can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry and why you stayed? Yeah, Brian, thanks for having me today. I appreciate it. We always somewhat laugh that I was really born into logistics and my father worked in IT for flying tigers. So as I grew up, we spent a lot of time vacationing and flying tigers airplanes all over
00:01:56
Speaker
and had a great time on the weekends flying in the flight simulators of tigers and of course he went on after FedEx acquired them to Bax Global and so we somewhat have the aviation
00:02:11
Speaker
logistics supply chain management in our blood, so to speak. So what made you stick around after you had the blood requirement to try it, but not everyone stays? What made you stay? Yeah, I think when I started, I had an opportunity with a company called TD&I, which was started to initially, in the late 90s, start communication between the airlines and freight forwarders. And
00:02:37
Speaker
When I started, I thought, there's got to be just a simple software that does all of this. And as naive as I was at that point, I thought, this is relatively simple. And as I learned more and more, the complexity
00:02:52
Speaker
of the industry really became apparent. And so I really learned it's a very dynamic industry. You meet so many from cultures across the world and you really see the drivers of the economy globally. And so the challenging nature of it and how dynamic it is, I'd say are the real reasons I stayed for so many years.
00:03:14
Speaker
What do you think is a little bit different for those of us who are in the software space versus operations? How does that affect your perspective, you think, on the industry?
From Data Management to Software Applications
00:03:23
Speaker
Well, most of my career is spent in the messaging value-added network and somewhat high-level application side of things. So I made the transition to software primarily because I could finally take all of that I learned on the data side of things and saw them applied in the operational side of things. And so it was an extension of the career that I've already had.
00:03:50
Speaker
while getting a completely different perspective and seeing how all those data elements were applied in an operational environment. So it became another step in that challenging environment to see more of how this business works. Was there anything that was particularly eye-opening about making that transition?
Operational Challenges and Complexities
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Again, there's a level of naivete, I guess, in that when I started, but also when I made the transition of going, hey, you know, it's only data, you know, you need to take it from point A to point B and apply it. And as you get into operational environments and see the challenges that forwarders face in meeting their shippers expectations while running a smooth and efficient operation, it really brings home
00:04:41
Speaker
the complexities of this industry while also seeing the challenges that they face every day. I'll share a little story from my perspective coming out of IT and the first time that I went for a company I was working for, I went to Chicago office and we're installing new computers and a network and everything and I just saw somebody, she was on the phone all day, really, really short conversations.
00:05:10
Speaker
And I said, what's with all these phone calls? She says, oh, I have to call the airport every 30 minutes to see if this freight for this important customer is available.
00:05:20
Speaker
All of my theory about how wonderful IT is and how we're going to fix everything went right out the window the moment I saw that that's kind of what you have on the ground. But I think having those experiences certainly helps us develop a lot of empathy. Yeah, you certainly do. I had a similar experience with a forter in the UK, and they were doing essentially the same process of eliminating the good to find the bad. And that was
00:05:49
Speaker
really profound in the sense of going, you're spending 90% of your time to identify where you need to apply the rest of your time to when it should exactly be the opposite. And so shaping expectations and providing applications that solve those types of problems is really fulfilling, I think.
Influence of Family in Career Choices
00:06:09
Speaker
So I suspect I know the answer based on your background, but who was one of the bigger influences in your career?
00:06:16
Speaker
As I mentioned, I think when we were talking the other day, being born into the industry and my father certainly is probably the biggest influencer in my career is both professionally and personally. He's just the type of guy that can sit down, he can program, he can sculpt something beautiful out of wood or build you a
00:06:39
Speaker
big piece of furniture or rebuild a motor. He's just one of those guys that's just good at everything. And so being able to collaborate with him as I started my career and he retired at Bax Global. And so we had the opportunity to work together. He is my customer and me as a vendor to their company. And so being able to have that collaboration and his influence throughout my life has just been a real pleasure and very beneficial, obviously.
00:07:09
Speaker
to me. So there's definitely an advantage there when you're able to kind of live it day to day growing up. But kind of a question and go a little bit off of our agenda here.
Balancing Engineering and Soft Skills
00:07:22
Speaker
But one of the things that I teach people, they say it's engineering, right? And then we get out in the real world and we realize there's some sort of performance art and some sort of soft skills involved.
00:07:35
Speaker
How much of what you guys do when you're implementing with a client, do you think is the strict sort of engineering that people think of the software and how much of it is.
00:07:45
Speaker
sort of figuring out how to make it work inside of a particular forwarder? Well, I think there's what you would say the direct rigors of meeting the need of that specific forwarder. But you're absolutely correct that so many times you're trying to outline their business process and then correlate that to the software processes that meet that operational need.
00:08:13
Speaker
There's a lot of what I would say negotiation, but anytime that you're introducing a new piece of software that affects your operation, if one isn't going to bend, there's going to be a problem because ultimately the software works in a particular way and an operational environment will work a particular way.
00:08:33
Speaker
We're fortunate in that most of our developers come from a forwarding background, so we work so very hard on making sure that that workflow makes operational sense. But a great deal of time in negotiating and understanding the forwarders business, their process or procedure, their SOPs, their KPIs, and then configuring the specifics of the software to meet that operational need. What do you think
Empowering Careers through Small Steps
00:09:02
Speaker
You really wish you knew at the beginning of your career that you know now that you wish to go back in time and tell yourself.
00:09:10
Speaker
One of the things, of course, is that success compounds. I just read a book recently and I was reflecting on, boy, I really wish I understood that better when I was younger and earlier in my career because ultimately enabling small steps, empowering people and attempting to influence those people versus arguing. I think when we're young, arguing to be right and proving your point,
00:09:37
Speaker
isn't really enough and learning that being right isn't enough and building those small steps and enabling success of others and getting that consensus really makes those small steps of success that compounds into the ultimate success both personally and professionally. I very much agree. I think oftentimes the people don't understand the distinction between
00:10:04
Speaker
Uh, getting something right and getting it done, you know, and you can be, you can be right in principle, but we all, we all have, I think we keep coming back to it. You have to live in a real world, right? And in that real world, there's a lot of, uh,
00:10:16
Speaker
lot of compromising and a lot of collaboration that has to go on. It certainly does. And I think, as we mentioned earlier, we're dealing across cultures as well. So people's perception of the right way to do something is very different, maybe culturally as well as operationally and finding the means to
00:10:36
Speaker
meet those goals within those parameters is always a challenge and ultimately communication and getting started and progress is a way to measure that compounding success.
Integrating New Technologies in Logistics
00:10:50
Speaker
So what do you think some of the challenges are for people who are just getting started in the industry versus those of us who have been around for a little bit longer? Well, just a little bit longer, right? Yeah, just a little. So I think
00:11:03
Speaker
you know, when in comparing when I entered, I kept looking around saying there's got to be something that solves someone's got to write software that solves this problem. I think that same challenge exists when people enter the market today in this industry, because ultimately, how hard can it be, we're delivering freight, and is kind of a perspective. And so understanding that the historical complexities and embracing that
00:11:29
Speaker
and not being overwhelmed by that, I think is a huge challenge. But they also need to take all the ingenuity and things that they've learned and the new technologies and marry that, merge that to be successful. So you can't necessarily abandon one for the other, but you have to understand the first before you can deal with the latter. So, yeah, there definitely is a view out there amongst some of the
00:11:57
Speaker
sort of startups, you know, whether they be digital forwarders or AI software or what have you, that that outside perspective can sort of fix everything that you can kind of just, you know, that we've all been doing it too long and we can't see the forest for the trees. Do you think there's sort of a balance or how much, you know, kind of what are your thoughts on that newness versus the oldness?
00:12:22
Speaker
Well, I think you nailed it. I think it's a balance. We've seen so many entrants in the market that come in and just say, you just need to quit doing it this way, do it this way, and follow those four easy steps to success kind of thing. And you see it fail all the time. We can't abandon everything that has occurred in all the historical hurdles that have been overcome. Yeah, it would be easy to say,
00:12:51
Speaker
let's forget all about Cargo Imp or let's forget all about ANSI X12 and just do something new and we'll all agree. So we hear that all the time that we just need to have one big portal.
00:13:04
Speaker
And that'll make everybody's life easier. And of course it would, but that will never happen because there's commercial issues. There's, you know, all kinds of logistical issues, legal issues. So all of those, both the old and the new really have to be bridged. And until we
00:13:23
Speaker
do that effectively, we really can't make progress. I mean, some of the new disruptors in the market and the challenges that existed, I mean, we thought, you know, in the early 2000s that the integrators were going to run away with the business and that didn't happen. As we've talked about the largest freight forwarder in the market,
00:13:43
Speaker
is only in control of a very small part of the global business. So with so many players involved and so many intermediaries, the only way for us to make progress is to be pushed forward. So yeah, there's great new technology. Your company, our company, others are providing some great software and technologies to help get them into the future.
00:14:10
Speaker
But if you don't really understand the historical references, you really can't make progress that way. And I think you even mentioned in our pre-interview that freight's really easy until you have to file a drawback or deal with a 301 or deal with import compliance as a general concept.
Adapting to Industry Disruptors
00:14:33
Speaker
So I certainly hear what you're saying that those kind of surface level easy shipments are
00:14:40
Speaker
prime for optimization, but the hard stuff's a little different. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, for Ford's to succeed in this market, they're having to provide more value. Ultimately, the manufacturer, the shipper's expectation is they want that same experiences that they have when they're buying something online and can see from the time that they've purchased it to the time that it's on their doorstep. So they want that customer experience and that's extending into the corporate level.
00:15:09
Speaker
But that obviously is much more difficult when you're dealing with all the intermediaries, customs, and the things that we just talked about. But ultimately, the disruptors that are entering the market are pressing the forwarders to move forward. So I think that's a very good thing.
00:15:24
Speaker
because forwarders that don't adapt and don't embrace the things that are coming in the future are going to have a very difficult time as their value decreases in their offering where they're going to have to really embrace that change because ultimately it's going to be e-commerce. They're going to be having to provide things like assemblies and some advanced logistics and provide tracking at the SKU level. We can't deal with just pallets or shipments
00:15:54
Speaker
anymore. So let's talk about that skew level thing for a second because I've been it's a big bugaboo for me that I you know that I think people don't really understand that.
Importance of SKU-Level Tracking
00:16:04
Speaker
Why is that important to maybe people who aren't out dealing with this every day? Well I mean ultimately as the freight is being shipped I mean we're looking at it from a logistics provider of hey we're just delivering it.
00:16:19
Speaker
But ultimately, the people that are placing that on the shelf, they have to maintain those items that have a particular amount of shelf life. They have a particular amount of inventories. And so they don't care where a pallet is. They don't care where a container is. They need to know
00:16:37
Speaker
you know, that I'm going to have four brown shirts and not 12 green shirts because I'm out of the brown and I have green. So ultimately at the end of the day that the consumers or those that are selling to the consumers, they want a particular product and they could care less about, you know, how it's being transported or what it's, what container it's in. They only care about the commodity that they're looking for. Do you think that's different
00:17:06
Speaker
between big importers and small importers, or is it really universal? I would have to say it's more universal. I think that the emphasis can change somewhat between the two, because I think on a large importer, they build more contingencies in. They have more distribution centers. They probably have a greater margin of error.
00:17:30
Speaker
Ultimately, no one wants to store anything because it's a liability. So everybody wants to move things, get it to the consumer and have it sold, and not sit on a shelf a minute longer or a minute less than they need it.
Leveraging Technology for Competitive Advantage
00:17:45
Speaker
I'm going to do my best to stump you here. But one of the things that I see is a challenge from my perspective of talking out to a lot of companies right now is there's so much tech out there.
00:17:58
Speaker
And the big companies have, from a forwarding perspective, the big companies have the rates, right? And they often have the tech. If you are sort of a mid-size forwarder, how do you think you can use, whether it's tech or something else, how would you differentiate if you had to be in one of your customer's shoes as sort of a mid-size forwarder?
00:18:25
Speaker
Well, I think mid-sized forwarders really have an advantage right now because they can be nimble and really add value in different areas of their business that a large forwarder has a huge endeavor to make changes operationally because of their global environment or what have you.
00:18:46
Speaker
There's tech out there now that's reasonably inexpensive that can be deployed. And I think for us, we look at providing our application to afford to be the heartbeat of their operations.
00:19:02
Speaker
but we don't intend for them to look to us to be their best TMS provider, their warehouse provider, their necessarily every customs application globally. We see
00:19:17
Speaker
integrating to best in class providers all over the world is really the answer. So you have a great deal of options as a mid-sized forwarder today. You can pick some off-the-shelf applications and use Chain.io and someone like Riga to integrate the two.
00:19:36
Speaker
and be able to have a more competitive offering with a much higher level of customer service than a large forwarder. And you can do that much quicker and jump on those opportunities. So the prevailing wisdom of the 90s and even into the mid 2000s was one system to rule them all.
Integrated Solutions in Logistics Software
00:19:56
Speaker
So if we step away from forwarding software through a large enterprise, you bought SAP or you bought Oracle and you said, you're going to run my whole business.
00:20:06
Speaker
Do you think that that is no longer the wise path then and that it is more about stitching together and why? Well, I do think it is stitching together, not only because it's our philosophy at Riga, but I think the tremendous investments that you're going to make at an enterprise level is so daunting that by the time it's implemented,
00:20:35
Speaker
your goal that you had intended is long gone and now your next goals have already been set and missed. The one size fits all was an approach that largely was governed because of the lack of capability in integration. So we went from the mainframe
00:20:55
Speaker
Then they went to the land distributed architecture and because of the inability to communicate effectively, they went back to hate by one piece of software that does it all. That was a valid argument, but ultimately, now because of the capabilities of application to application integrations and the collaborative nature of the technologies that are out there, there's no reason to do that. I can buy
00:21:22
Speaker
We commonly talk about accounting software. We have competitors that include accounting with their forwarding software. We do all of our AP, AR, customer-facing activities through our application, but all of your corporate tax, your depreciation, all of those types of things, why would you want someone who writes forwarding software to supply you with software for those things?
00:21:47
Speaker
To be able to do that well and effectively in the 38 countries we do business in, it would not be very good software. When I can integrate to NetSuite or QuickBooks or whatever application that might be used, Sage for instance, they can pick the best in class application that fits their business enterprise and use that to exchange data with scope.
00:22:14
Speaker
and be far ahead of the game. And that applies to rate management, BI, AI, blockchain, TMS providers, et cetera. I got through about 22 minutes without mentioning blockchain. So I think for two IT guys, we should take credit for that record, right? We broke that seal. Now that the word is out there, whether it's blockchain or AI, what emerging techs are you particularly
00:22:43
Speaker
excited about or afraid of or what's in your mind in the emerging tech space?
AI and Predictive Analysis in Logistics
00:22:49
Speaker
I'm a fan of AI.
00:22:53
Speaker
because as a SAS provider of software we are starting to house a tremendous amount of data and looking at that data and applying machine learning to that to not only give us some predictive analysis but to give us a better understanding of what we do and how we do it. To me that's very exciting because as we
00:23:18
Speaker
are collecting all this data and our customers are collecting all this data, we realize that there's value in that data. And there's a tremendous amount that we can learn in it. So I think that's an exciting aspect of what's coming about. Blockchain, of course, I think we still need to find more applicable applications in forwarding for it.
00:23:39
Speaker
And there's a lot of questions about it still. But at the same time, the accountability and the requirements that we have in our industry, I think more and more examples will emerge for that technology. Don't be polite with this answer. But I'm curious on your opinion, you know, where we've had some success with blockchain has been in our vault product, which is very small in scope. So it's just
00:24:08
Speaker
Take a fingerprint of a document and store that on the blockchain for compliance purposes. You can look it up later. We're not trying to redefine global customs. We're not trying to collaborate between 15,000 parties on a supply chain.
00:24:22
Speaker
Do you think that with blockchain and even with AI that those narrow scope projects are better or should people be taking those home run swings? For us in our industry, I think that the small applications are where the money is. I think we're going to learn a lot from those and of course
00:24:45
Speaker
As we've talked about earlier, success compounds when we find areas in which it will be effective and those are applied and that success is achieved will learn more and be able to apply it.
00:24:57
Speaker
I think there are big companies out there that are applying it all over the place that have the financial resource and the global reach to the IBM's in such of the world that can crunch billions of bytes of data daily on different topics. But all of those things will emerge over time and the financial markets will push some of those things as well. But for us, finding small bytes of where I can apply this technology and see that work
00:25:24
Speaker
and then apply it and grow and learn from it. I think that's where we're going to get the biggest bang for our buck. Given that, what do you guys at Riga, what do you guys have coming up in the future or you personally?
Riga's Vision for Collaborative Software Solutions
00:25:35
Speaker
What should we all be looking out for?
00:25:37
Speaker
I think our product scope, it's a great forwarding application. I think we are someone that have been supplying forwarding software for 30 years. So while we understand the old, we're looking at the new as well. And because of the fundamental nature of the collaborative perspective in the way that we do businesses, as well as the way that we deploy our software, I think we're really providing our
00:26:04
Speaker
our customers a lot of options that our competitors are not. And we really have a long-term collaborative approach with our customers. I know so many speak to the issue of partnerships, but our average customers are with us over 12 years. So we work with our customers for a long period of time to bring that enterprise level success.
00:26:28
Speaker
generation after generation. And so as we apply the new technologies while covering all the old requirements, so to speak, we continue to have our applications evolve and meet the needs of our customers and the industry. That's awesome. Any further parting thoughts or you think we're good to wrap up here?
00:26:49
Speaker
I think we're good. It's always fun to talk about where the industry has been and where it's going. As we see it roll out and some new players and entrants come into the market, it'll be interesting to see how these technologies evolve.
00:27:06
Speaker
We have to have a somewhat entrepreneurial look at it. So much of our industry are kind of wait until they're either required to from a compliance perspective or regulatory requirement.
00:27:22
Speaker
there are ways for people to examine and move forward into some of these areas in technology without breaking the bank. And so my encouragement would be test the waters, get out and try some things. I think that's awesome advice and a great place to wrap up. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Brian.
00:27:47
Speaker
So that's a wrap for this episode. Thanks so much to Mark for taking the time to join us. I think we all learned a lot from his industry insights and join us again next time as we continue to explore the people that make the supply chains work.