Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Value of Logistics Providers with Roger Garza
96 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Roger Garza, Director of Global Product Management at xpd global, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- The problems that logistics providers solve for their customers
- Challenges in supporting manufacturers
- How xpd organizes data across their company and customers
- Why project planning is a pivotal part of his role in product management
- The value logistics providers bring to the market
Roger Garza, Director of Global Product Management at xpd global, a prominent supply chain logistics solutions provider, oversees the development and implementation of cutting-edge products and services designed to meet the needs and expectations of global manufacturers.With over two decades of experience in the logistics and sales industry, Roger boasts a proven track record of delivering exceptional results, adeptly managing teams, and generating substantial value to the company and its customers.
Connect with Roger
Connect with Brian
Connect with Chain.io on LinkedIn
Follow Chain.io on Twitter
Recommended
Transcript
The Power of Problem Articulation
00:00:05
Speaker
One of our co-founders, Jose Morales, once told me, Roger, if you help people articulate the problem, you have half of the solution right there. Like, it is very hard to really articulate the problem that you're trying to solve, but if you spend enough time
00:00:25
Speaker
doing that, you have half of the problem solved and the rest is going to come up by itself. And so I take it as a mantra, like let's articulate the problem. Let's find out what's there and go after that.
Introduction to Supply Chain Connections Podcast
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. And on today's episode, we have Roger Garza from XPD Global. This is a particularly interesting episode if you were
00:00:54
Speaker
interested in product design and really the shift that's happened in the supply chain industry over the last say 10 years between when we used to just sort of move freight and get paid for it to this much more thoughtful approach to thinking about what products companies offer
00:01:13
Speaker
what services different verticals need and how to repackage what we do and think about it in a very thoughtful and entrepreneurial way. We're going to talk about what that looks like from a customer solutioning process, as well as with a company that has just gone through a massive global rebranding. So I hope you enjoy the episode. Roger, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Ryan.
00:01:42
Speaker
Why don't we start by, give us a little bit of your background and how you got into the industry.
Roger Garza's Career Beginnings
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, I have been in the industry about 19 years now. Funny enough, it all started at my current company. Back then, it was in Mexico. The name of the company back then was Euro Partners Group. I started doing my internship just fresh out of college. That's awesome. Tell us,
00:02:10
Speaker
You started at your partners, which is now XPD. What brought you back? How did you end up going away and coming back? How did that happen?
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, it was a whole journey, right? I started with Europartners doing my internships, then the internship was done. And I got an opportunity out of college to work in Citigroup as a corporate banking. So that was very interesting. And I thought, let me go through the finance. But funny enough, the logistics industry is very
00:02:47
Speaker
And I found the pace in the finance industry very slow and very repetitive, right? So after a couple of years working there, I decided to come back to logistics. And I started working for civil logistics, one of the big players out there. Again, it started in operations. I was doing some air exports at the time.
00:03:16
Speaker
they move up to customer service and inside sales. Right about then, I decided that I wanted to be in front of the customer to start doing some outside sales and promoting our capabilities. I didn't have the opportunity to do it at SIBA, but I got the opportunity at CUNY Nagel, another powerhouse in the logistics industry.
00:03:41
Speaker
I was working there for almost four years. That was back in Monterrey, Mexico. I was in charge of the automotive area in the northeastern Mexico side. That was when we made a personal decision to move to Canada, to Toronto.
Return to XPD Global and North American Operations
00:04:02
Speaker
I moved to test the waters over here in North America. Here, I started working with Jodis Wilson, another big freight forwarder, the French. I was doing sales still. It was a learning experience for me because the market in Mexico is more relationship-based and they're always looking to save a few cents in here and there in North America.
00:04:31
Speaker
value, and they like stability, right? So if it wasn't this tactic that I learned back in Mexico, we're not working the same over here. But again, it's a learning experience, right? Then I do some corporate selling for Siemens. And finally, in 2012, I circled back
00:04:52
Speaker
Europe partners reached out that they were expanding into North America and opening their first office here in Canada. They asked me if I wanted to help setting up the operations over here. And that's what I did. And then a lot of learning, setting up a freight forwarding from operation from the ground up.
00:05:13
Speaker
and I was doing operations, sales, sourcing, IT, you name it. I learned a lot. I know what that feels like.
Customer Experience Design Leadership
00:05:24
Speaker
During the last decade, but right now, at the moment, I'm leading the customer experience design for the group right out of here, Toronto, and enjoying a lot this new chapter of my career. What is customer experience design?
00:05:42
Speaker
So as you know, free forwarding was pretty much the same for the past. I don't know. I guess we started changing in the last 10 days, but before that, everybody was doing the same, right? Like there was not much difference rather than prices. And
00:06:02
Speaker
we talk about commoditization of the service. But funny enough, the digital revolution started in straightforward in customer startups.
00:06:14
Speaker
services, right? They want to be able to see where the cargo is at any given time. And then we invented truck and trays and then we wanted the boats in the spot, right? So now we have all these marketplaces. And now I guess we are integrating a lot on our customer needs.
00:06:36
Speaker
in trying to work together to tackle all of the supply chain challenges that are arising every day. What is your typical day look like in this role? What's it feel like on the ground? There's two aspects of it. First one is in front of the customer. I tend to do meetings with them to understand what are their current challenges,
00:07:06
Speaker
everything is going right if something we need to improve on. And the other party, if they have any ideas, right? So how can we make their life easier? And then we do a process internally when we evaluate if we can
Adopting Agile Methodologies at XPD
00:07:27
Speaker
provide that value while capturing some back for our company. And then we started doing an IEL, we started IEL teams for service design.
00:07:39
Speaker
So we came up with some of our brightest people in the team and run through the ideas and start iterating on them until we came up with a service that we can offer to our customers. Not just to that specific customer, but to standardize it for our customers worldwide. So it's been 11 years since you've been back at what is now XPD. Well, 11 years ago when you started, I'm certain
00:08:10
Speaker
that if you had said the words agile service design to anyone in the business that those are, they said, I know those three words, but if they don't go together into a meaningful sentence, what has it been like for you, you know, kind of learning over that time and bringing to the organization, this idea that you can design and productize something because like you were saying, we all used to just clear free, right? And it was just move the boxes and this like, was it hard to bring,
00:08:39
Speaker
the rest of the organization along in that idea that we have to think about this as a product? It is. And at the same time, we have a lot of health of our leadership. So one of the things that I enjoy working at Expedia Global is
00:08:59
Speaker
they let us think outside the box and they treat us as entrepreneurs, even though we're employees, right? But the owners really let us run with our projects and they make sense. And if they're feasible, we are free to expand on them, right? And this was one of those projects where I was curious to understand how other companies started working
00:09:27
Speaker
on product management and start building on top of their capabilities using these Agile methodologies. It clicked, they like it, and we started running. Now, I have to admit that it was five years in the making. It wasn't an instant buying from the rest of the organization. But today, I can almost assure you that most of my meetings are in the Agile environment.
00:09:58
Speaker
in your job in particular, you know, you have that customer facing kind of get the feedback from the customers. And then there's the working, you know, with operations, figure out how you could actually incorporate that into something that would work. And there's the financial design of can you exchange value for money and in a profitable way, kind of which of those things gets you the most excited? What's your favorite part of your day?
00:10:20
Speaker
Well, something, and I know that it's not something to be proud, but I understand that part of myself tends to people pleasing. It's part of my personality and the fact that a customer feels that I understand their problems and that we were able as an organization to come up with a solution that is not just something to
00:10:50
Speaker
they're going through the root causes and really attack their main problems. That's very gratifying for me. I guess most of the effort I do it for that moment when they say, this is amazing, great job, pat on the back. It's funny. I'm addicted to a very similar thing, which is that idea of getting at the root cause or solving
00:11:18
Speaker
the real problem, not necessarily the problem the customer brought to you. And it's sometimes actually frustrating for our customers here at chain IO when we start working with them, because to say, you know, my agent has this XML file and I have to get this XML file into my TMS. We say, okay, but why? Think about because I have it and it needs to go. And I said, no, no, no, no. Are you trying to make more margin on these shipments? Are you trying to,
00:11:44
Speaker
get better data accuracy because you have a customer that's yelling at you. There's a lot of reasons you might want to bring that data into your system. And let's make sure we optimize the solution for the problem that you're trying to solve. That's actually, I get excited
XPD Global's Rebranding Journey
00:11:58
Speaker
about the same thing. Like, okay, well, what we realized was you didn't need that file at all. All we needed to do was redirect something you already have to somewhere else. And suddenly, you know, the problem releases itself. So I can very much kind of,
00:12:11
Speaker
I understand where you're coming from with that one. One of our co-founders, Jose Morales, once told me, Roger, if you help people articulate the problem, you have half of the solution right there. It is very hard to really articulate the problem that you're trying to solve, but if you spend enough time
00:12:34
Speaker
doing that, you have half of the problem solved and the rest is going to come up by itself. So I take it as a mantra, like let's articulate the problem. Let's find out what's there and go after that. Yeah, it would be impossible for me to agree more with you. So tell me a little bit about, you know, you guys have rebranded and changed, you know, this whole new brand out there. Tell me a little bit about how that
00:13:01
Speaker
came to be or how it fits with the products. So we realized we were growing very fast in the past 10 years. And suddenly, this entrepreneurship that I was talking about earlier, our CEOs,
00:13:20
Speaker
let us have causes us to start building different brands for different projects. So we have Expedited America that's focused more on time-sensitive, time-critical. Then we have Europartners, which is the original brand that everything started because we were doing imports from Europe into Mexico. Then Wasipi America, because we were told by an expert marketing firm that Americans love to have
00:13:51
Speaker
So in North America, we went with EP America. And finally, in Europe, we were working on their linking partner, right? So something that caused having these many facets of our business is even though we were the same ownership, the same
00:14:13
Speaker
started working on silos. And we figured it out that sometimes we were competing with each other. Sometimes we were working in the same things, but with different resources, with different times. And it was a waste, right? So a few years ago, Renato joined the organization. He's a genius marketer from Latin America. And he built with the owners, the new brand.
00:14:41
Speaker
Speedy Global and brought us, everyone together. I know it just seems from the outside like a rebranding, right? But from the inside, it was a lot of work building a corporate identity to make us feel that everybody was part of the same organization, breaking those silos and finally sending that message to the market, right?
00:15:09
Speaker
be focused on time sensitive and time critical logistics. So you did something there that's, I'm going to say backwards from the way that I've seen it normally done. And this is a compliment. Making the unification happen inside the company first and then bringing it to market is very different than the way that most, you know, and we've both worked for a lot of companies that have done a lot of acquisitions and a lot of things and it's usually
00:15:38
Speaker
The name on the wall changes, and then it takes 10 years for the organization to maybe catch up. So yeah, kudos to that. I watched this morning as a video on the About Us page on your xpdglobal.com website. That's really interesting framing of kind of bringing these brands together. So I would have to get a link to that in the show notes because it's a very good kind of explanation of how that comes together.
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah, it was an amazing work and very proud of the whole organization that came together. It wasn't easy because as I said, we have people that feel very strong about e-commerce and we let it go. That's not an easy decision. We have to decide where was going to be our specialization, our place in the market.
00:16:30
Speaker
and we put our heads together and come up with the area where we feel that we can deliver the most value to our customers and that we will not disappoint, right? So I know because I've looked at your website because we've talked, but
00:16:45
Speaker
Tell everyone what is that specialization? What is the area that XPD focuses on?
Focus on Time-Sensitive Logistics
00:16:49
Speaker
We decided to target the manufacturing space, industrial manufacturing and specialized manufacturing like automotive aerospace. If you're manufacturing, you know how important it is to keep your production lines running.
00:17:05
Speaker
in how any disruptions in your supply chain can lead to very costly situations, both monetary and with the trust of your customers, right? So we know that we have a very strong specialization on first preventing these situations from happening, delays. We always are proud of our coordination
00:17:29
Speaker
with vendors, with customers, with customs to make sure that nothing stops the flow of your shipments. But again, this is logistics, right? And now more than ever, there's things that the market throws to you that you cannot prevent. And that's the second part of the specialization, right? Time critical services, when something went off the rails, we are very capable to react and make sure that we are
00:17:57
Speaker
we bring your freight to whatever you need it to be on time. What are some of the challenges in supporting those manufacturers that are different than general freight? Well, first of all, is collaboration in the communication with their suppliers. Most of the freight forwarders that I work with
00:18:19
Speaker
start the achievement when the customer asks for a quote, when the freight is ready to move, or when they already have a contract, right? But we try to make sure that we are involved when you're setting up the purchase order, because that's when we can prevent some of the line spots, right, that they may have
00:18:40
Speaker
when setting up the size of the crates or everything. If you want everything to fit on a container or if it's going to be delivered by plane, we need to make sure that it's optimized for that service. I guess some of the value-added services that we do is helping on that collaboration between our customers and their vendors to making sure that everything is ready
00:19:09
Speaker
before the achievement is ready. That ties into something that I used to talk to our customers about all the time when I was more in the operational end of IT, which it's one thing to have that visibility, which is always important. But, you know, if I tell you two days before something's going to arrive at the port that it's going to be late, you have very limited options to what you can do. But if I can tell you 150 days before,
00:19:38
Speaker
that it's going to be late. There's lots and lots of things you can do. And that 150 or 180 or however many days before, that's the purchase order. That's the project planning phase. That's when everything else is just like, that's the big bang, and everything else is just the unfolding of things after that. And understanding, because especially in automotive,
00:20:01
Speaker
They have the preferred supplier, but they have emergency suppliers. But most of the time, they don't let you know that beforehand, right? They wait until the supplier number one made a mistake or doesn't have the freight ready to let you know that the freight is ready now as supplier B. But if you are
00:20:21
Speaker
in that planning phase with them and you understand that they have option A, B, and C, you can also save them time and help them coordinate when the emergency is about to happen, right?
00:20:35
Speaker
You organize your teams differently for different freight forwarders. So how do you go about thinking about the structure of the teams? Well, we organize our teams into two segments of customers, right? The automotive and aerospace, where the most important factor is speed, the speed and response.
00:20:53
Speaker
and speed of the services. So these are teams that normally have rotations 24 seven service. And then we have another team for general manufacturing, which is more focused on coordination, purchase or the management more detail oriented, right? Not that the automotive and aerospace are not detail oriented will help me say that, but the fact is we have specialized people for those teams. And then we try to keep the customer
00:21:23
Speaker
having one dedicated person of contact, regardless of the mode of transportation. So if the customer, the decision maker has air oceans and over-the-ground shipments, we have someone in operations that can give them the whereabouts of their freight, doesn't matter the mode of transportation, right? So that way we have the full picture in one team can follow up on the customer's needs.
00:21:52
Speaker
I would suppose that gives you that ability to find those alternatives, if you can see the whole picture for the customer. Exactly. What are you excited
European Expansion and Global Integration
00:22:01
Speaker
about? What's coming up next? What are you seeing out in the world that you're like, hey, this is the next thing for us? Well, we're continuing our expansion. We just unveiled the next space for European countries that we're opening. We know Israel, France,
00:22:19
Speaker
Italy are coming in the next couple of months, and that's really exciting. Then the integrations of the systems that we have, as we have several brands, some of them have different systems. So the visibility of the achievement for the customer perspective has to come from different files.
00:22:40
Speaker
So now we're trying to consolidate everything. So one, our team can have visibility of global operations of their customers. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in the United States, right? If your customers have plans in Germany or if your customers have plans in China, you know what they're doing, even though you're not touching that freight, but you are aware, right? And you have awareness of the full scope of your customer operations.
00:23:08
Speaker
And I guess that's a challenge from having had those separate brands was that they sort of grew differently, right? And you have to bring that data together. Exactly. I happen to know of a company that focuses on supply chain data integration that could probably be pretty helpful for you there. So I'll see if I can find a salesperson from that company to give you a call at some point.
00:23:31
Speaker
Cool. So, you know, where can people learn more? Tell us how to find the new brand and everything and where people can get in touch. So you can learn more about our company, xpdglobal.com. That will be x, p, d, and then the world global altogether. And we'll have a link in the show notes for everybody as well.
00:23:52
Speaker
It's awesome. That's amazing. I'm always here to talk about logistics with new people. So if you want to add me on LinkedIn, I'll be there to answer as many questions that you have. Awesome. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and thank you for so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity, Ryan. Thanks so much to Roger for sharing so much about this transition that XPD is going through. I hope everyone got a lot out of that.
00:24:21
Speaker
As always, make sure to check out the links in the show notes as well as the Chain.io blog and all the great content on XPD's website. Again, I can't recommend more the video that they have on their About Us page that really takes you through their thought process behind this rebranding and that it's not just a surface level transition for them. So until next time, I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io.