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Episode 9 - Eric Johnson, Senior Editor for Technology at the Journal Of Commerce
99 Plays5 years ago
PROFILES
SUPPLY CHAIN CONVERSATIONS
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EPISODE 9 - ERIC JOHNSON, SENIOR EDITOR FOR TECHNOLOGY AT THE JOURNAL OF COMMERCE
'Navigating the Supply Chain Network'
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Welcome to Episode 9 of Profiles, a podcast centred around supply chain conversations, hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.
Our guest this week is ERIC JOHNSON. With a background in journalism and business, Eric studied for his BA in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and also has an MSc from Leeds University.
Eric started his career at Orange County’s largest daily newspaper, where he worked for 4 years before leaving to study business in more depth. He then took a position as a business reporter with Long Beach Press Telegram in California. Eric currently sits as head of technology for the Journal Of Commerce.
Eric reports upon the most cutting edge concepts within the Supply Chain network. His passion in the process was ignited when he first realised the massive amounts of infrastructure involved in moving products from A to B. Once the light bulb went on Eric found himself immersed within the whole industry.
He recently helped organise the JOC Logistics Technology Conference (LOGTech) in Las Vegas and will be involved with the upcoming Spring TPM20 Conference in Long Beach.
“….The biggest hurdle right now is sort of cultural, and it’s not even necessarily like ‘Oh people are resistant to change’. I think a lot of it is a cultural resistance to buy capacity on a dynamic basis.”
Listen in as Brian and John discuss:
- How did Eric originally end up reporting on the Supply Chain Network
- What is it about the industry that keeps Eric interested. Is there space within the industry for external perspectives, can the industry be improved from the outside?
- What Eric finds exciting within the Supply Chain network currently?
- The trough of disillusionment discussed and how it affects perspective.
- Eric discusses his involvement with the LOG Tech conference in Las Vegas and the upcoming TPM (and El Dorado) conferences.
- Can technology integration help the Supply Chain to function better and how can these changes be implemented?
- The importance of not judging your business too harshly by comparing it to other companies. Focus on the strong points and work on the rest.
“…. You really need to make a decision. What are you really good at internally, what are you not so good at. What in the market is plentiful in terms of numbers and solutions, and prevalent, and where is investment going…. ”
Resources mentioned in the show:
Eric's LinkedIn Page https://www.joc.com/ https://www.joc-tpm.com/
https://blog.chain.io/for-forwarders-aligning-your-digital-and-business-strategies
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
chain.io
Recommended
Transcript
Deciding on Transformative vs. Trendy Investments
00:00:01
Speaker
VC and private equity people are there, so they know, okay, are they actually funneling money to the things that are actually transforming things? Or are they just kind of jumping on a hot idea and hoping that it catches on? So just refining that whole process of development and traction into companies that are actually profitable and meaningful for the industry.
Introduction of Eric Johnson
00:00:25
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to Profiles. I'm Brian Glick, chain IO's founder and CEO.
00:00:29
Speaker
On this episode, we're going to be talking to Eric Johnson. Eric is the senior editor for technology for the Journal of Commerce. I hope most of you have heard of him as he is one of the shining stars of the thought processes and discussions around technology in our industry. And this is a pretty special episode. He and I had planned to get through a whole list of questions and we really never got past the first one on our list, so I'm sure this will be the first in a series.
00:00:59
Speaker
And we hope that you enjoy it.
Eric's Journey into Logistics
00:01:04
Speaker
Hi, Eric. Thanks so much for joining us on the show. Oh, thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Yeah. So why don't we start with at the beginning? How did you get into supply chain and logistics? Like everyone else, when I was a young boy, I dreamed of being in logistics. Me too. No firefighting for me, no astronauting for me. It was all about logistics.
00:01:27
Speaker
Obviously, that's not how it happened. I worked in a newspaper in Southern California for about four years, decided that I really, on a few occasions that I was writing about business, that I really liked business, reporting about business. I had absolutely zero fundamental understanding of how business worked.
00:01:47
Speaker
I didn't study it at all in college or had no interest in high school. And so went back, got a graduate degree in business, came back and got a job at another newspaper in Southern California that was actually in Long Beach. And the opening on the business desk at the time was to cover the ports of LA and Long Beach. And it was basically from the perspective of understanding how big an economic engine
00:02:17
Speaker
those two ports were for the local economy and the broader Southern California area. It was definitely through that lens that I was looking at it, but you're in and around the ports and now if you talk to
00:02:33
Speaker
people in drayage, you talk to people at the container lines, forwarders, the cargo owners, before you know it, you're indoctrinated into the industry. And then, yeah, I got a call about two years later from a trade publication asking if I wanted to go really deep into the subject. And yeah, it was a great opportunity. So totally backed into it. And I think, like with a lot of people,
00:03:02
Speaker
It just kind of tickled some bone that it's hard to get rid of the kind of zest that you have for this industry once you started in it and around it. Dig a little bit deeper there. What is it for somebody who doesn't operate?
00:03:20
Speaker
achievements on a daily basis, what is it about the industry that you find so interesting? Well, first of all, I mean, that's a good question. But I'll also clarify, I've actually, aside from moving some household goods around the world a couple of times, I've actually never moved any freight myself. So I don't have any operational experience in it. I just, you know, I talked to
00:03:42
Speaker
dozens of people every week who are involved in that. But to your point about what's interesting about
Complexity and Impact of Global Logistics
00:03:49
Speaker
it? Well, I think, first of all, when the light bulb goes off that everything around us, is there some movement that's related to it? It doesn't just magically appear on shelves. I think that's kind of an interesting
00:04:01
Speaker
wait moment of awakening it's kind of like that scene in fight club when ever norton is looking around his apartment and all the prices and the descriptions from the ikea catalog just like super it's kind of like that but you're like oh it cost that much and they moved on mares you know for me i think just the international aspect of the business is also really fascinating you know you get to go see some really interesting places around the world
00:04:25
Speaker
depending on what your role is. You get to learn about different ways that business is done and how culture intersects with that in different countries and even different parts of big countries or trading blocs like the European Union.
00:04:43
Speaker
how different things are from place to place. And then you start to understand why the industry has evolved the way it has and why it looks really fragmented from a really high level. But actually, it's because despite how common a lot of things are around the world, there's just huge variances in each place that you go and how afraid has moved in those places.
00:05:06
Speaker
I think the inner relatedness of it to everything that we do in our daily lives and then just the international mystique of dealing with commerce in different countries are probably the two things that I find most interesting. You mentioned now that you've been in the industry seeing how all that variance exists, different modes, different geographies, all that.
00:05:29
Speaker
One of the conversations I've had on this show before with other people is the question when it comes to technology and disruption of, is this an industry that has to be disrupted from within?
Need for Disruption in Logistics
00:05:43
Speaker
Because people who come from the outside, they oversimplify because they don't understand that. Or is there space for people to sort of come from outside the industry and sort of wash away or absorb that complexity and still be a meaningful force?
00:05:59
Speaker
I think, as with everything, extremes on either side are probably not ideal. I think a good blend of taking industry knowledge but also fresh perspectives from the outside is probably the best recipe. Really, it's the execution of any of these ideas more than anything else.
00:06:17
Speaker
I mean, for me, I think about, you know, my job obviously is writing about technology and helping people understand what's interesting out there, what's actually got traction, what's, you know, real in their day to day and what will be real in the coming years. And so I have to kind of
00:06:33
Speaker
be excited about things but also keep my feet on the ground about things. I think the people who come in without any industry experience probably initially think it's an easier problem to solve than it actually is and they get lured by the size of the market without realizing that the market is so big because they're inherent.
00:06:57
Speaker
variances that are hard to scale across. The people who are in the industry are necessary because they have that tactical exposure to what the real problems are. But they also sometimes struggle to think beyond what they've done. Even their solutions to things are based on
00:07:21
Speaker
their experiences or some kind of tweaking of their experiences. It's sort of like, I'm going to throw another weird analogy at you, but every single science fiction movie...
00:07:34
Speaker
Every alien in a science fiction movie, for the most part, sort of resembles a mammalian form. It's got two eyes and two ears and a mouth and legs and arms and stuff. Because it's hard for us to picture what a being that doesn't look like something like us is. I think that's the problem that people who are in the industry who are trying to even change things technologically, it's hard to get out of your own head in terms of experience.
00:08:04
Speaker
So I think a blend is probably the best solution. I personally think I write about technology, but I don't have any sort of technology training or background. I personally think that part is a lot harder to come by than the industry knowledge. The industry knowledge is not
00:08:23
Speaker
rocket science. It's just repetitions, I think. Over time, you accumulate a lot of experience doing things and you understand better how everything fits together. You don't need a mathematical brain or a scientific brain to figure that stuff out. You just do it enough times to figure it out. The programmatic coding, algorithmic
00:08:48
Speaker
side of things. That's way harder for people to learn. I think people could go to school for that for five years and not really understand it. It's interesting. I actually disagree with you a little bit. As someone who does a little of both, or a lot of both, given the day, I've been doing technology in one way or another for 32 years. I've been doing logistics for 20. I
00:09:15
Speaker
feel like I know more of the technology domain as a, like if you said, this is the whole domain of technology, right? Everything from, you know, how a transistor works up to like artificial intelligence and, you know, why, why Tesla's the window broke on the Tesla the other day and everything in between. Um, I know more about that. I feel like from a coverage standpoint that I do about our industry that I've been in for 20 years.
00:09:42
Speaker
That's how vast, like every day I hear about some little niche of the industry that I just, you know, they never even occurred to me existed. Like the software providers who focus exclusively on rating drage moves, right? That's a whole person's life for 20 years, right? It's just rating algorithms for drage moves in and out of the ports, right? And it's just, it's so massive.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, okay. That's a great point. I don't disagree with you. As long as I've been doing this and I'm lucky, I get to talk to a wide range of people, probably wider than a lot of people who are involved in some operational aspect of the industry do. But even then, I still will have a conversation where someone will bring something up to me that I've literally never heard before.
00:10:33
Speaker
You're right. I guess it's maybe more accurate to say there are sort of a numerable amount of dynamics to account for. It's almost impossible to know them all.
00:10:46
Speaker
The harder part for me to understand is how you get to the point where you become someone who is excellent at building a machine learning model. From point A to point Z of that experience seems infinitely harder than understanding how
00:11:09
Speaker
You know to put together a bill of lady, right? So I do agree with you I agree that the individual things are absolutely harder on the tech side Yeah, right. But and then the breadth might actually be harder um on the on the other on the uh logistic side almost because you can like You know if you're logically compose it you can take a tech stack really from the electrical Like from this is how electricity gets made and it's like just building layer on layer on the way up
00:11:39
Speaker
Whereas logistics is like, especially once you start getting into compliance and trade finance and things that are not the physical movement, you're just like, you don't even know what to ask, right? Like it's just, you know, like try, try explaining income terms to somebody who's never done it, but never moved to shipment. Right.
00:11:56
Speaker
It's like you have to start with the concept of finance and work your way from there. Right. Good point. The amount of industrial knowledge you need to know is really amazing. That's for sure. So with all this stuff going on, Tino, what are you excited about? What's out there amongst all this noise that you're particularly up on right now?
Innovations in Process Automation and Quoting
00:12:21
Speaker
I think it's probably natural for someone in my position to go through these cycles of being really hyped up about some concept. It's rare that it's a certain company necessarily that excites me. It's more about a concept or a trend or a category of software.
00:12:39
Speaker
And then it's sort of like, I forget what Gardner calls it, the trough of disillusionment. For me, it's like the cynical back of that mountain when I realized it's not really going anywhere or it's not as exciting as I initially thought it might be. So I think those kind of peaks and valleys are pretty natural for someone who's being confronted with people that are hyping up.
00:12:59
Speaker
a lot of different things all the time. So I guess my latest area of fancy is just going to transform the business down the road is process automation or RPA. I think that seems like something to me that is more easily understandable for the layperson, is more digestible from an investment perspective.
00:13:26
Speaker
and so might actually get a little bit more traction than some of the things that are a little harder for people to get their heads around. In terms of processes, I think the thing I've probably written about the most over the last year and a half is dynamic quoting and just the general
00:13:47
Speaker
migration of that customer-stellar interface from what it's been to a more online environment. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be an Expedia-like experience, but just creating some structure around that that's electronic. It can be
00:14:10
Speaker
captured and put alongside all the other transactions, I think is probably the more exciting part than just being able to get a rate instantly that is $3 cheaper than you were getting on the phone. That is probably the thing that is most interesting to me from a, is this really going to catch on?
00:14:30
Speaker
and change really fundamental part of the business. And then RPA is probably kind of like the concept that I'm most interested in exploring in the months ahead. A slight interjection here, and then I do want to get back to that quoting topic, but I just have to tell you that yesterday, and this is 100% a true story, I got an email from my mother who's retired and living in Florida. And there was something about blockchain and she said,
00:14:57
Speaker
You know, aren't you involved in this? And this article says nothing in blockchain is ever going to work. And I actually had to call my mother and explain the Gartner hype cycle and the trough of disillusionment yesterday on my walk home from work to my mother, because it's that real that it even, it even gets to retiree communities in Florida. It's awesome that she's still worried about whether you're going to do well too, based on an article. Back to the, the quoting and the RPA, like, where do you think those are in their life cycle?
00:15:27
Speaker
I think RPA is probably a little earlier, but is co-leading mature? Is it really early? Where do you see it? I don't know. I think we're past really early. I still think we're very early. I don't know what the difference between variant really is. We're somewhat early. I think there's a couple of components, as I understand it, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts too.
00:15:51
Speaker
I think the biggest hurdle right now is cultural. And it's not even necessarily the famous cultural, oh, people are resistant to change. I think a lot of it is the cultural reticence to go to this environment where you're just buying capacity on a dynamic basis, all ad hoc. You're paying the market rate, whatever it is.
00:16:19
Speaker
Shippers especially big shippers want some certainty and it's really not about like a few dollars here and there but it's about you know thinking about ocean freight specifically as like a constant cost so that they can build.
00:16:36
Speaker
a landed cost model and make sure that goods are on shelves or goods are not holding up a production line because that's a bigger issue than just a few extra dollars on the freight rates. So I think there's some fundamental things that are going to keep a dynamic quoting environment from ever capturing even 50% of freight buying out there.
00:17:02
Speaker
I think there's some other cultural stuff that can be gotten around. Can you represent someone's leverage? If they're moving 100,000 TDUs, can you adequately represent that leverage in a purely digital environment? It's hard, I think, for people to think about that now, but I think it's possible. I think it's like you can be a big volume customer and still have that represented in an electronic
00:17:30
Speaker
way. So I think that will eventually get overcome. On the sort of supply side, I sort of have been told, and it's clearly not everything, every carrier is kind of in a different position and every freight forwarder who's offering dynamic races in a different position than others. This is not a monolithic situation, but I've been told that carriers still have a really tough time
00:18:01
Speaker
adequately understanding what their available capacity is at any given time. So if you don't know your available inventory, how can you price that remaining inventory effectively on a sort of like a time scale as the clock tick tap, click
00:18:21
Speaker
clicks down takes down sorry until the sailing is right so you have this you know diminishing our personal asset. That is the mission and value the closer it gets to the the time of the sailing goes to how do you kind of balance available capacity against that time aspect and,
00:18:42
Speaker
And so I don't know, I've been told even carriers that are providing dynamic quotes, and there's only like four or five of them right now that are, there's a lot of guesswork that goes into those quotes. And it's really about conditioning people to buy in that way more than it is like representative of the actual dynamic costs that they'd want to charge to a shipper for that space. So, you know, there's some fundamental things on both sides, I think that are,
00:19:10
Speaker
they're keeping us a long way from it being like this pervasive way of buying trade. So I think you actually brought up a couple of really interesting things there. Probably one of the things I heard in there kind of woven in was the difference between dynamic pricing and automated quoting. And I think at this point,
00:19:36
Speaker
just the companies that can get to automated quoting, right, I can hit an API or go to a website and get a price is, is impressive, right today. And then people are jumping to let me dynamically calculate that price and change the dimensions and the shape of the market. There are two things that sort of are being interchanged in conversations, and are
00:20:02
Speaker
foundationally different. I know a lot of shippers and a lot of forwarders and almost everyone in the transaction who would be extremely happy just to get to the first piece. Can I get a quote? I have a container sitting here and I need a price to get it to there and I don't want to wait two days. That's a big step in and of itself.
00:20:24
Speaker
No, I don't disagree. That sort of goes part and parcel with what we were talking about before about the volume of knowledge you need. There's lots of things that get conflated. Forerunners, NVOs, the various LSP business models all get lumped into one basket when actually there's obviously a lot of
00:20:44
Speaker
nuance between those models. This is another example. It's even more prevalent, I would say, when you get with the technology because there's even less known about that.
LogTech Show and its Significance
00:20:56
Speaker
I fall into those habits too of interchangeably using terms that do not actually mean the same thing. One of the great places to unpack all those terms is the event that you started up, the Logistics Technology Show in Las Vegas.
00:21:14
Speaker
OK, tell everybody who maybe hasn't been a little bit about that. Yeah. So we started this event last fall, so the fall of 2018. And as you said, we just had our second version, our second iteration of it in September of this year. We've shortened the name to hopefully make it a little snappier, LogTech now. It is essentially the place where we're hoping that dialogue around all of this stuff that's really
00:21:43
Speaker
difficult for especially for shippers, but you know, even three pls and other parties in the industry that know that technology is something they need to both understand better and invest in. We want this to be the place where they get a little bit sharper understanding of
00:22:00
Speaker
where they need to focus that research and investment into. Whether that's a certain category of software, whether it's a certain type of product that's enabled by technology, and also help them understand where there are some things that they may be hearing a ton about, but they just don't
00:22:20
Speaker
have a lot of traction yet or aren't ready for prime time and you can kind of lay back and not focus too much time on that for the time being mindful of it but really focus on things that are.
00:22:33
Speaker
more important to you. That's an event that fits in with our larger basket of events where we drill a lot more deeply into the nitty-gritty of software than we ever would at any other event. One of the sessions I found really interesting this year was one where it really ended up being
00:22:56
Speaker
free, not free, because people had to pay to attend. But it ended up being advice for startups and companies that were transitioning to different models about how you effectively target buyers in the logistics industry. And that's not something I think that you get at a lot of different events. So hopefully there's appeal to not just the buyers and users of software, but also the people developing software.
00:23:24
Speaker
That's my big hope is that this becomes like an ecosystem where there's this kind of feedback loop where people are on site informing the developers of tools about what's important and they're getting that feedback and they're going and developing and honing their approach. And then that creates better products for those potential users to actually use. And the VC and private equity people are there.
00:23:52
Speaker
Okay, are they actually funneling money to the things that are actually transforming things, or are they just kind of jumping on a hot idea and hoping that it catches on? So just refining that whole process of development and traction into companies that are actually profitable and meaningful for the industry. I go to a lot of events all year, probably 10 or so over the course of the year, and it's the only one that I attend the sessions in.
00:24:21
Speaker
Hopefully anyone who's listening from those other events isn't offended, but I take a lot of meetings at the other ones, but usually when I go to the sessions, I'm just listening to somebody sell something.
00:24:31
Speaker
And you really do get sort of that healthy conflict on the stages and sort of the people telling it like it is, which is certainly different than a lot of the other things that are more pay to play out there. Yeah, thank you. I put a lot of work into making sure that the topics are interesting to me and that they're based on substance rather than
00:24:56
Speaker
sales pitches. I think there's a time and place for people to talk about what they do. But for the most part, I think most people are more interested in understanding the core thing that they need to know rather than who is providing. And they can figure that out on their own. But they sort of need like the rudimentary kind of building blocks. And then maybe I think the interesting thing about that event is you can go to sessions that are
00:25:19
Speaker
relatively basic. Then there's some sessions where we get a little bit deeper into specific product areas. That's where you can really see how tech is transforming things. Thanks. I appreciate that. It's a lot of fun to put together. It's a ton of fun to
00:25:37
Speaker
to when I'm on site and we're having all these cool discussions with what I consider to be the who's who of transformational tech people in the industry. You have something else coming up, first time thing coming up here in the spring. You want to talk about that a little more? Sure. We've taken that idea of what we do at LogTech, which is in the fall in Las Vegas.
Tech Environment at TPM: El Dorado
00:26:01
Speaker
We're trying to bring a little bit of the element of that into TPM, which is
00:26:06
Speaker
I think by any measurable standard, the biggest container shipping event in the world, that's in Long Beach in March. And that will be actually the 20th anniversary of the event this year. So it's going to be pretty momentous. So we're actually we've created a new
00:26:25
Speaker
Instead of programming, and there's going to be a new physical space that we have an area of the convention center in Long Beach that we've never used before, that we're starting this kind of tech environment called El Dorado. And if anyone's curious as to why we're calling it El Dorado, it's because this is sort of the mythical, if you do a Google search of El Dorado,
00:26:47
Speaker
sort of this quixotic place where rumored to be sort of like a city of gold. And so I think a lot of people sort of view technology as this place that's forever out of their grasp. So hopefully we will bring people a little bit closer to the actual El Dorado and make it a little less ethereal for them.
00:27:08
Speaker
But it's really cool. I'm really excited about this. The panels are going to be a little bit more quick hitting and a little bit smaller, more conversational. It's going to be a little different vibe than the main programming at TPM. To give people a little bit of option if they want to immerse themselves into some tech concepts and hear from some really big industry experts and leaders around what they're doing tech-wise. You and I actually have a conversation
00:27:37
Speaker
on the program as well. So we couldn't build a program without you on it, right? Well, I'm honored. Hopefully I'll be able to live up to that. I do want to move back to something you just said, though, that I think is a really interesting concept to dig into, which is, if technology is always this thing up on the hill, right, and you can never reach it, is that
00:28:03
Speaker
Do you still, in your conversations with people who are looking to buy technology or looking to change your businesses, do they still see it as a destination to reach? Like, I have to get there? Or is it becoming more of just this is part of the journey and it's just inside the business now?
Is Technology a Process or Milestone?
00:28:21
Speaker
You know, that's a great question. I think people would like to think that
00:28:29
Speaker
technology is now an ongoing part of their business that needs to be addressed in a more systematic or ongoing basis.
00:28:45
Speaker
I'm not really convinced that most businesses actually treat it that way. I think it's still very much like... And I'd be interested to hear your take since you're actually dealing with a lot of this stuff, but I still think it's a very milestone-driven initiative for the most part is investing in tech. It's like you have, depending on the size of your business, right? It's build a business case, go out and research the potential people you might work with.
00:29:14
Speaker
Narrow it down. Maybe do a trial or some sort of proof or you have some sort of probationary period. There's an ROI attached or there's some metric that's attached. You achieve that metric. If it's wildly successful, maybe you look to that partner to say, hey, let's build something bigger and do some other stuff and make you a bigger part of our success story.
00:29:44
Speaker
you know, mildly successful and you achieve the metrics, but not, you know, like vastly succeed, exceed them. I feel like it becomes kind of a one and done thing until the next time you sort of get the budget or feel a need to do something.
00:29:59
Speaker
And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on it, but I think part of it is just human nature. It's hard to do these things no matter how easy software is to implement these days. It's hard to go through this whole cycle. You go through it. You've gotten some benefit out of it. You can show that benefit.
00:30:17
Speaker
Then it's like move on to the next thing. It's like that problem has been solved. Then you don't really see the trouble ahead through the trees because you've gotten to this point. From my experience working with companies across multiple implementations of different software and being an integration partner, you see a lot of the different things. The first thing is everyone's a mess from the inside.
00:30:46
Speaker
Right. There's, there's no company, you know, my, my own company included that if all of our customers were in our office all day, every day, there'd be things that we'd be embarrassed about. Right. The way we do X, Y, or Z is a little more manual or, or whatever the case may be. Right. And, you know, forwarders certainly, uh, and, and shippers, the illusion of safety and organization is nice, but there's a little bit of chaos in there. And, and I think with tech.
00:31:15
Speaker
there's this sort of, you read an article about another, a competitor doing this cool thing, and you think they have it all sorted out. And what you don't know is that behind that cool thing, they hired 60 people halfway around the world to sit there and do a key between four legacy systems so that they could give the illusion that that web portal is working properly, right? And so when I think people create a lot of stress on themselves in the business,
00:31:45
Speaker
saying we have to be as good as company X when company X isn't even actually as good as company X, right? And so there's sort of this, you know, like, oh, we're never, we're never getting there, right? We're on this treadmill and there's always, and if you look at all the companies in the industry, there's always somebody doing something new, right? And, you know, without getting a little too hippie-ish about this, you know, you gotta, you gotta learn to, to sort of appreciate yourself.
00:32:12
Speaker
and what your strengths are, you're a little less comparative to everyone else. I think that's part of it. But as far as the buying process, it is an event-driven thing. So you do have to make a purchase order. You do have to operate in the world of money, which means there is a moment when money transfers hands. And I think what companies
00:32:34
Speaker
Could probably serve to get a little better at outside of the technical side of integrating a new packaging is sort of appreciating that you will always be buying something so don't make get good at it right don't make it this one time event and then the next time you go to buy
00:32:53
Speaker
the software to solve this other problem over here, you know, kind of feeling like either you haven't done it before or it's a whole new thing, right? There's more consistency in that process than I think a lot of, especially smaller companies appreciate, right? Even small to mid, right? Very large companies have procurement departments and people to support that, but I think up to $50 million companies even, you see where that process is just chaos. And if they can get better at that, then the rest of it gets easier down the road.
Evolving Software Purchase Perspectives
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, very interesting. I do think there is a sense that you can't... I would imagine things have changed a lot since... I'm just throwing a random number since the early 90s where it was, you're going to buy this piece of software and it's going to be your software for 20 years.
00:33:40
Speaker
and your internal team is just going to upgrade this. I think one thing our app-based lives have taught us is that there's always something else around the corner. I think that people are more mindful of
00:33:56
Speaker
buying what's on the horizon, but you can get really to your point, you can get really distracted if you're just constantly thinking that you are underperforming or under investing. When in reality, most people aren't even fully using the systems they've already invested in. So yeah, and there's there's also sort of an impression that getting rid of things is bad.
00:34:20
Speaker
Right. And what I mean by that is, look, sometimes you buy software and with SAS and with hosted software, this is plausible. It was a lot harder to do this when you had to build out servers and infrastructure and say, I need this software for the next two years. Right. I have a, a, there's a situation in my business or a thing we want to do. And in two years, we're not going to need that software anymore. And that's okay. Right. That not everything has to be a 10 year purchase.
00:34:49
Speaker
I'm sure all of my customers who are software providers are very upset with me right now for saying that, but it's realistic that some of these things don't have to be that dramatic. You can make a shorter buying decision knowing you're making a smaller commitment and that not everything is the same scale.
00:35:06
Speaker
Maybe what I need right now is an automation process just for the back office so that I can quote faster. Because I know in two years, I'm going to feel like the market for dynamic quoting is mature and I'm going to want to throw that other thing away. That's not a bad
00:35:27
Speaker
It's a continuum, and it's sort of you're in this stream of technology evolution, and seeing it more as a continuum than a series of distinct events can be helpful. One last thing on this, because you brought it back in. That's another interesting dividing line. I think it's probably instructive to think whether you're an LSP or a shipper, or even a container line now. It seems like container lines are more open
00:35:56
Speaker
more open than ever to kind of experimenting with outside technology at least more than ever before but you need to have separate strategies for how you invest systematically in your kind of operational software versus how you present yourself to customers and i think.
00:36:14
Speaker
The customer presentation piece is that there's more providers in that space now than ever before, and I think there will be more providers in that space. Tell me if I'm wrong on this from your perspective, but I think that's a little bit of the easier piece.
00:36:32
Speaker
to architect than the operational side of things. You need to make a decision. What are you really good at internally? What are you not so good at? What in the market is plentiful in terms of numbers of solutions and prevalent? Where is investment going?
00:36:54
Speaker
to third party solutions and where is investment not going and strategize around that, so that you're not thinking, I need to be upgrading my user interface or quoting engine every six months or every two years or what have you, when really, you don't need to be thinking as hard about that as you do about your ability to generate a quote that's effective for you. I definitely agree that they're distinct things and that the
00:37:24
Speaker
front end is always sexier, right? So if you're in new technology, you tend to hear about a lot of the front end stuff. But at the end of the day, the the back end stuff has just massive potential, right to make your business, you know, if you can operate more efficiently and provide a higher level of customer service, and you don't have quite as pretty a website, you're going to be okay.
00:37:51
Speaker
Right. I agree. I very much agree with that.
Diverse Solutions for Varied Customer Needs
00:37:55
Speaker
I also think that I did a blog post on this that we'll put in the show notes, that there isn't necessarily a world where every company is going to end up with one front-end solution. That you have different customers
00:38:11
Speaker
with different profiles, right? And some of them need a very robust PO management based visibility tool. And some of them need a portal to book a container, right? And those are not, those customers have very, very different demands and, you know, just try to service them with the same tool. You know, it was sort of the only option we had way back. But I think we're getting to the point where maybe, you know, a company says, I have a,
00:38:40
Speaker
suite of products that are all web-based or app-based and are appropriate to different segments of my community. It makes it much harder on the sales team and you have to educate your sales team a lot better so that they're presenting the right solution to the right customer profile. But I do think this idea of one system to roll them all is a little bit of a fool's errand on the front end.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. This gets back to the dispersed nature of the industry. What makes it interesting is also it makes it hard.
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:39:15
Speaker
So that's probably a good place for us to wrap up. We're definitely going to have to have you back because I don't think we got through half of what we intended to talk about.
00:39:25
Speaker
But yeah, really appreciate you coming on the show and we're definitely going to, maybe we'll pick up another one after El Dorado in the spring and maybe do a little bit of a recap of the stuff that came out of that. Yeah, that would be great. We'd love to do that. And thanks for having me on, Brian. This has been great. Always good to chat with you. Awesome. Well, we'll talk to you again soon and thanks to everyone else for listening.