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Transforming Supply Chain Connections: Updates from Chain.io
108 Plays1 year ago
In this very special episode, Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, is joined by Johnny Bilotta, VP of Product, to share about some exciting new features on Chain.io's roadmap including:
- Launch of Open Connect
- New EDI Capabilities with STEDI
- Custom Processors Feature
Follow along on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest Chain.io releases and features.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Connections by Chain.io. I'm Brian Glick, Chain.io's founder and CEO. On this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different. Normally, we spend time interviewing external people outside of Chain.io and discussing career paths and our views on the industry, but
00:00:22
Speaker
We've had a lot of exciting things going on lately, so we're hoping you'll humor us and listen in as we talk about a little bit of where we are in the Chaneo journey and a few really big features that we're releasing this month and sort of over the course of the summer that are going to transform quite a bit of how we engage with the community.
00:00:44
Speaker
I thought this would be a good thing to do because it really will help illustrate where we see the industries going. And I thought that would be a really good thing to share.
Meet Johnny Bellotta
00:00:56
Speaker
I'm going to bring on the line here with me.
00:00:59
Speaker
Johnny Bellotta, who is our head of product and has been with the company for... Johnny, how long have you been with the company? About eight months now, I think. Eight months. I was going to say a year or so. Yeah, I guess. Soon, soon. It'll be a year. So before we dive into everything, why don't you just give everyone a little bit of your background and so on? Sure.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. So hello, everybody. Thank you for welcoming me on the podcast. So my background is primarily in software product development, mainly within software startups. And I've been Brian for several years, we worked in the same co working space and got to see each other at work, you know, several times. And, you know, one of my responsibilities here is to
00:01:40
Speaker
You make our product much more customer enabled get it to be expanded in terms of his features to help our customers build better solutions and my primary responsibility here is making sure that things are always moving there was getting improvements in the product and making sure that we are getting features out on a regular basis.
00:01:58
Speaker
But a lot of my background is in big data, big tech, fine fintech, healthcare technology and such. So Brian said that he was looking to do some really awesome things with chain and the things we're going to discuss today are some of those things that attracted me to it.
What is OpenConnect?
00:02:12
Speaker
Awesome. And it's always been really a breath of fresh air for us to have somebody who comes from outside supply chain come in and give us some critiques along the way. So that's been a lot of fun. Yeah. I think there's three big things that we're going to talk about today. So.
00:02:27
Speaker
We're calling open connect our integration to a platform called steady, which is a EDI processing platform, as well as our custom processors feature, which is just released in beta a day before recording this. Yeah. So.
00:02:45
Speaker
Johnny, one of the things that we're really excited about and one of the new big features that we've talked about a lot is OpenConnect. Can you maybe give us a quick description of what that is? Sure. OpenConnect is our newest feature which allows customers to tap in or build adapters to be used in and on our network. It's a way of
00:03:07
Speaker
Chain already functions as a company that links two adapters together, but we wanted to offer the ability to our customers to build adapters that are specific to their needs and on their timeline. Yeah. So to give everyone a little bit of background on what we're talking about there, the adapters are essentially the plugins to our network. And so the way that Chain.io works is we'll have a plugin to a TMS and a plugin to a rating system or visibility platform.
00:03:35
Speaker
When I started the company six years ago, the vision was that the industry would be able to build these plugins and they would all interact together. But what we learned very, very quickly in our journey as a company was that the industry wasn't quite ready for that six years ago, and that they also weren't ready for building to a network that didn't exist yet. We didn't have any plugins, so it's kind of like being the first person to sign up for Twitter.
00:04:02
Speaker
Who are you tweeting at? So we had to wait. And so six years along in the journey, we really felt like now is the right time to open the network up. And we've had incredible amounts of demand over the last year from many, many software companies saying, Hey, how can we participate in this? And the scaling of chain IO employees building all of these plugins just doesn't work with the explosion of tech. So.
00:04:26
Speaker
Johnny, what are some of the categories that we're attacking first with this Open Connect? We're attacking CO2. We're attacking ASN milestones, visibility, integrations. We're also attacking accounting automation. There are some of the biggest ones that we're starting off with. They seem to be the ones that are the most in demand and the most sought after. Yeah. These are areas where there's been a lot of investment in startup community.
00:04:54
Speaker
While we have the existing plugins to some of the really big systems, there's huge amounts of investment and visibility and carbon and all of those companies need to interact with each other and interact with these large transportation systems and ERPs and what have you that's on our network. Again, very, very excited about this. For me personally, it's the culmination of a big phase in our journey, which was getting a network built out that people would be interested in building
00:05:25
Speaker
You know, it's pretty excited. I think we're having our first one go live next week as we're recording this at the end of June and many, many, many more to come.
Enhancing EDI Transactions
00:05:34
Speaker
So I think the next one is our EDI integration to study. And maybe if you could give a.
00:05:40
Speaker
Quick breakdown of why that's important and what that does for our customers. Certainly, the integration of Steady, which is a third-party partner that we have, they have given us the ability, integrating Steady into our system has given us the ability to have EDI transactions processed and executed directly within flow executions inside of Chain.io, which means that you don't no longer have to
00:06:06
Speaker
use an outside system and then log into one system and log into another system into another to get your EDI information into chain, which is a big improvement to our workflows. It means that all those EDI transactions, guides, mappings, and all can seamlessly be worked on within the chain IO flow executions. Yeah. The way we worked in the past was that if a customer came to us for a traditional EDI transaction,
00:06:36
Speaker
We had plugins in our system that would facilitate that, but then we had a professional services team. Should we still have and who we still love? And they would use a internal tool that we had to build the actual mechanical mapping to the EDI platform. So it was not a hundred percent self-service. It was, we take the generic capabilities of chain IO and the ability to connect to all of these different systems and then have a PS person go and map that to your customer's EDI specification.
00:07:05
Speaker
With this new tool, it's now visual, it's inside the application, and our PS team will help many of our customers who maybe don't have EDI expertise to use that same tool, but where it gets really powerful, even if you don't have EDI staff, as many of the requests that we get are. I've had this EDI running forever, and the customer just asked me to move this one field around.
00:07:28
Speaker
They get this purchase order number in there and we key it here and operations wants to key it here because of an upgrade in our system. You'll be able to go in and just sort of drag and drop and fix those little things without having to go reopen a PS project.
Improving Customer Experience
00:07:42
Speaker
And it also creates a lot more transparency. Yeah. So.
00:07:46
Speaker
You know, again, we're really, and then our customers who have EDI people, they can just go in and do it. Right. And don't have to wait on PS at all. That's a really powerful feature is that putting that control in the hands of the customers, more of that control makes it a really powerful feature. How does that line up with kind of some of the big themes that we've been working on this year as far as.
00:08:07
Speaker
Control and self-service and all that. Yeah. Well, we've been, I mean, we've really been trying to transform the product into being a much more customer enabled product, meaning giving more control to the customer, giving better support to the customer step by step. This is what you will encounter when you set up a flow. We've also improved a lot of the ergonomics within the application to allow
00:08:27
Speaker
users to navigate through it and get to the tasks that they want to get through. So things such as the new landing page for workspaces which now gives you insight into your integrations and the flows that are within those that directly allows you to set them. That was something that you had to hunt for before and now we're trying to give you a little bit the customers a lot more control over how they use chain and the less of need of a chain professional to be able to step them through all the things they need to do.
00:08:55
Speaker
One of the things I've learned again over the time since we started the company was when we initially kind of went to market, and so this is before the pandemic and before the real explosion of startup investment in the space that our customers very much needed end-to-end support. And there was
00:09:18
Speaker
especially for what I call our mid-market customers, which would be shippers and freight forwarders who maybe have, let's say, between 100 and 1,000 employees. They're not the biggest comp brands in the world that they really didn't want to log into our product and they were sometimes a little intimidated by all of this data moving around and this and that and the other. Our focus was on building a product that
00:09:47
Speaker
our team could help our customers with. Whereas in the last two years, especially, there's been that change in the tone in the industry that people have caught up to some of these concepts and, you know, really do want to just kind of get in there and play around and move. So, you know, that focus, in fact, this morning I recorded someone else's podcast and
00:10:07
Speaker
I mentioned on that podcast how in 2017, 2018 I was speaking at conferences and the first question on every panel was, can you explain what an API is? And the, uh, the host of the podcast, who's not technical just started laughing. Like, how could that be a question? And it's amazing how far we've come out so fast that people are surprised that five or six years ago.
00:10:31
Speaker
In this industry, that was a legitimate thing that we had to explain, even just a basic concept of, I can take data from one computer and send it to another computer in an organized way that doesn't involve a massive IT project.
Customization Capabilities
00:10:47
Speaker
very exciting stuff. Yeah, indeed. Well, that should lead us to the next thing, right? We're talking about enablement and customer disability. So have at it. Yeah. So we've thanks. I've kind of still a little Brian's thunder here. You know, we now have in beta and we should be at our next release on the 5th of July.
00:11:05
Speaker
You will see pre and post processor areas within our flow executions, which allows customers to put in custom code to the flow that allows them a little bit more control over how that flow executes and gives them a gateway into editing certain things that happened before and after the flow processes to give them the ability to edit any code or processes that happened during that execution, whether it's pre-processor or post-process.
00:11:34
Speaker
This is really powerful because it doesn't require our users to download code or to get into our source code or anything but allows them to customize their executions in a way that they never have been able to before. Yes, I think of this as sort of the Swiss Army knife. As soon as we started building this, our solutions and client success team, it's like every day in our internal Slack.
00:11:59
Speaker
Oh man, I wish we had that pre-processor or post-processor because, you know, the customer just needs this one little tweak and it's always, and this is the thing that, you know, those of us who have processed freight know, you know, that SOP with the customer is always full of
00:12:15
Speaker
that one little tweak, right? You know, the example you and I were talking about before recording was, you know, let's say you have a customer sending you, you know, bookings for your shipment and they send you the purchase order numbers. And because of the legacy system they use all the purchase order numbers are 20 digits, but the first 15 are always all zeros. And so you take that data in and you put it in and you send it to them on a report and it's got all these zeros and they complain.
00:12:42
Speaker
about all the leading zeros that are coming from their system because internally, they don't talk about those zeros, right? They just talk about those last five numbers. It's order 45812, not 0000 so on 45812. Well, you know, to come back to a professional services team at chain and say, Hey, I need you to put a checkbox that says, take off all the leading zeros is a lot. That's very heavy, you know, and with this new thing, which we able to do is whether it's you or somebody from our client success team, depending on
00:13:10
Speaker
You know, the team is really just upload like literally four or five lines of code that just say, find the purchase order number, take off those five zeros, and then run it through all the power of the, of the chain IO engine and these data flows that we built. So, you know, we found so many use cases over the last, you know, it's probably been a couple months we've been working on this and you know, there's another one the other day where, where somebody said, Hey, we have one customer who the file name that we put when we send the customer the file.
00:13:40
Speaker
has to be like it has to start with the origin location code and then an underscore and then the destination location code and then an underscore and then the house bill. Well, that's not going to ever be a generic chain of feature because it's an infinite number of things that customers want with this with this because of what we call post processors is after all the things have done and we've taken the data out of the TMS and we've taken it from that format and put it in the customer's format and done all of this lifting.
00:14:10
Speaker
then the last little bit is you can just put in a couple lines of code that say, rename the file to this. And that's just going to be super powerful. Yeah. I mean, even the simplest post of pre-process can be powerful there, right? I mean, it just seems like such a great addition to the flow process that I'm really upset that we didn't do it before.
00:14:30
Speaker
I know it's so fun when you're building software and you get something out and everyone's like, well, why didn't it just work this way all along? And you go, oh my God, well, we've been building a million lines of code worth of infrastructure to get us to where you get those little things. So that is probably one of the great frustrations when you're doing product management, right? Is everyone's like, oh, why didn't you just have all of this on the first day?
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, we're constantly getting great ideas from our employees. We're getting great ideas from our customers We really encourage that and some of those ideas I want to get started on right away But like you said you have to put the car or the horse before the cart, right? So, you know one of the things I promised in the introduction that we should probably take them in talk about is why now is the right time and why we see all three of these features as sort of one feature and I think we touched on a little bit but there is a
00:15:20
Speaker
newfound technical maturity in the industry that I'm seeing every day. And when I go to visit our customers, and I just got back from five country and eight day trip of visiting customers and prospects and, you know, at our smallest customers, their ability to go, Hey, I opened up this air table or smart sheet online sheet, and we're doing that as our TMS.
00:15:46
Speaker
And we've already put a couple little scripts in it that automate this, that, and the other. That stuff is so much more mature than even five years ago, where it was still, you know, I'm emailing a cell file around every day. And then at the kind of mid and high end, the access that operations has to
00:16:08
Speaker
I'll call them IT resources, but that line is really blurring of these. Analysts who know a little bit of code or developers who are sequestered in with a business unit to go get at these problems and either build a full
00:16:24
Speaker
you know, plug into a legacy ERP that works with our open connect or just add that five lines of code to fix the problem with the preprocessor or, you know, just get an EDI mapping to get an invoice out to a customer without having to go, you know, make a whole thing out of it.
Industry's Technical Maturity
00:16:39
Speaker
That didn't exist five years ago in the same way that it does today. And it's really, it's exciting to me personally as somebody who's been 25 years in the industry, you know, to finally see that happening.
00:16:51
Speaker
I don't know what your thoughts coming from other industries where you think we are in that spectrum are to be honest with you, Brian. I'm excited about this time in this industry because there's an outsider coming in. It seemed like one of the few industries that was not yet disrupted by tech in a way that, you know, made a big boom. Right. And.
00:17:09
Speaker
the opportunity to be a part of that with chain is exciting and i'm starting to see it a lot more now but when i first researched the company and came in even in the last few months i've seen a rise in different technologies different requests different attitudes towards tech startups software apis even you know and then being used a lot more than i had
00:17:31
Speaker
thought before. So I think it's a wonderful time to be in this industry. And I'm glad to see that the industry is starting to, all the ships are rising, right? Not the pun totally intended, but you know, about everybody rising on the success of the software driving it. One of the things that actually concerns me a little bit as we look at these new features, and I think it's a good kind of warning for everyone in the industry is, you know, there's a lot of low code tools out there and low code is, you know, this term for sort of
00:18:01
Speaker
applications where you can very quickly drag things together or stitch them together and they look sometimes a lot like chain. But one of the things that programmers are really good at or should be really good at hopefully is thinking through the edge cases, right? The exceptions, the, you know, what happens when for some reason I get shipment instructions before I get a bill of lading or before I get a booking, right? Like that things are out of order or there's fields missing. And that's a lot of discipline.
00:18:28
Speaker
that comes into that, you know, one of the things we've had to be really thoughtful about and, you know, that everyone in the industry should be is appropriate uses of these tools, right? And, you know, knowing that anyone can kind of write little scripts outside of chain IO and just drop them in places and make things happen. But, you know, we're very conservative and cautious about making sure that all of this is built on a really strong foundational infrastructure, right?
Generative AI's Role
00:18:56
Speaker
And that these are not just
00:18:58
Speaker
kind of flippant little things that you do, but they are very powerful, you know, kind of fine tuning knobs around this much, much bigger core. And, you know, I do get nervous sometimes that people may, you know, I see this all the time and, you know, but like people build things that they go, Oh, you know, I'll just buy this, you know, account with Microsoft or Amazon or whoever.
00:19:23
Speaker
And we'll just write this little script and we'll just throw it up in the cloud. And then they don't realize that has to be maintained and it has to be do error checking and it has to do alerting and it has to do all these things. So, you know, I guess it's my kind of caution to everyone who's is excited about all this boom is that you make sure you're doing it in a very disciplined way, which we're hoping to really facilitate. So.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And I will just wrap that thought up with this and that every industry has that same problem, like the low code problem, especially when people get excited about the technology coming in and it's very easy to get seduced by it. But I agree with you that although things may look like chain or look like they can do the same things, this is built a very stable core, a thing that it's a foundation that we can keep building upon for years to come. And others with that low code stuff can't really say that.
00:20:15
Speaker
That's awesome. And I know we're kind of running up on, you know, we try to our self imposed half hour limit here. So I know you and I could literally actually do talk about this all day every day. But I'm going to throw you a curveball here that we didn't prep for just because it's Friday afternoon when we're recording this. And I feel like screwing it a little bit. So what do you think a generative AI
00:20:36
Speaker
Generative AI. Let's hit you with the buzzword just to throw you off. So cool. So I've been talking a lot about this with peers, both in design community, the digital product community. And I believe that generative AI is a great assistant and should be used as such and can be used as such. Good for prototyping, good for getting quick concepts out there, both on the visual side and the coding side, but cannot be relied upon to give foundational and sound
00:21:04
Speaker
structure for anything to me that would be used as in a professional setting by anybody who wants to be reputable. So you're not going to let it give you legal advice yet? No, but I have used it. Brian, it's for stuff for us to build a prototype for a component that I was unsure on how to do, but it was just the beginning, right? It just gave me the start, which I thought was great. It also has helped me lay out some things for personal projects, but gives me like, hey, I just need a quick layout for an idea.
00:21:32
Speaker
don't want you to do the whole thing. So as an assistant, I think it's great. I'm not going to have it watch my dog or do anything like that for a while. Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking the time and getting this out there. I think we're both really excited about
Conclusion
00:21:48
Speaker
this stuff. So we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming with the next episode and thanks to everyone for listening. Thank you all.