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Episode 8 - Rob Garrison, CEO of Mercado Labs on Taking the ‘Complicated’ Out of Logistics.
99 Plays5 years ago
PROFILES
SUPPLY CHAIN CONVERSATIONS
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EPISODE 8 - ROB GARRISON, CEO OF MERCADO LABS. Taking the ‘Complicated’ Out of Logistics.—————————————————
Welcome to Episode 8 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.
Our guest this week is ROB GARRISON. With a background in logistics and import. He has a BA from Marketing from Baker University.
He was previously the Vice President of Supply Chain Design at UPS and has 20 years of experience in the field of transport and distribution. He built his current firm Mercado Labs to remove the challenges and frustrations that arise during the complex import process for people. Bringing import into the 21st century.
“….The broader definition of the supply chain: The four main activities are plan, buy, move, and sell. The supply chain is all 4 of those activities. Logistics is the ‘move’, and it’s incredibly important and it’s also incredibly complex. But it’s one of 4 steps that needs to occur in the supply chain”
Listen in as Brian and Rob discuss:
- Rob discusses his early days in the industry and what influenced him the most.
- The colourful characters of business and how personal relationships shaped Rob’s journey.
- What tools are available today to help with logistics and build international relationships?
- What Mercado offers as a business, and the reason Rob started it in the early days.
- What is the difference between the supply chain and logistics?
- Advice on expanding horizons within logistics and import. Keeping up with the world of e-commerce.
- What were some of the challenges Mercado faced in it’s early days?
- The importance of understanding customers needs through beta testing.
- Working hard to adapt to the market and it’s ever changing landscape.
- What is next for Mercado?
“….. If you are going to start a technology company one of your key considerations is to make sure you are either partnered with, or that you have, great technical skills, it’s such a huge part of it and I don’t underestimate that.”
Resources and Links:
Subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, 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
Recommended
Transcript
The Complexity of the First Mile
00:00:01
Speaker
There's a big black hole in the first mile of the supply chain, and that first mile is from the time a customer places a purchase order to the time it's booked with a freight forwarder. And that first mile is incredibly complex, and it lasts, on average, about 90 days, and it involves all kinds of parties, and currently it's 100% analog.
Introduction to Profiles by Chanayo
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Profiles by Chanayo. I'm Brian Glick, Chanayo's founder and CEO. Over the coming weeks and years, we'll feature the partners and customers who make up the Chanayo network. We'll focus on learning about the individuals within these companies 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.
Mercado Labs and Enterprise Order Management
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm Brian Glick, Chaneo's founder and CEO. On this episode, we're talking to Rob Garrison, the founder of Mercado Labs. Mercado's suite of products has made the tools and expertise available in large enterprise order management platforms accessible to a much wider audience. You'll really want to listen closely when Rob breaks down the difference between supply chain and logistics and talks about how he's helping companies handle that first mile of their supply chains.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hey, Rob, and welcome to the show. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. Cool. So let's just dive
Rob Garrison's Journey into Supply Chain
00:01:31
Speaker
right in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got into supply chain and logistics?
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think I probably have the same story as every other person in supply chain, which is I didn't grow up wishing that I could be a supply chain guy. I actually was a construction worker in Chicago and sort of needing year round stability. And I had a friend who worked for a steamship line called OCL. And so that was my introduction to the international shipping industry. And I was completely hooked and have been hooked ever since.
00:02:05
Speaker
What was it that sort of influenced you to stay? What got you hooked?
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, the really big hook was three months into my stay there, they sent me out to New York for training. And I was a small town Chicago guy, not city Chicago guy. So going to New York and visiting their offices, which were in the then World Trade Towers, and all of a sudden meeting and seeing people from all over the world almost made my head explode.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I just couldn't get that out of my system. And then fortunately for me, six months later, they actually sent me on a trip to London, which cemented the hook firmly. Once I saw this great big world and all these different cultures and all these interesting people with interesting stories, I just thought this is exactly where I want to be.
Influential Figures in Rob's Career
00:02:54
Speaker
Of all those people and all that travel, sort of, who are some of the big influences for you?
00:02:59
Speaker
The first one of major, major significance was the guy who hired me, a guy by the name of Stanley Shen. Stanley's sort of a famous guy these days. He went on to be the spokesperson for CH Tong when CH Tong became the first governor of Hong Kong after the handover from the British.
00:03:18
Speaker
And Stanley was just the most colorful character you can imagine so the first introduction to Stanley into business generally was the fact that they gave me not a raise from my construction job but a pay cut of ten thousand dollars so that was sort of step number one with Stanley.
00:03:36
Speaker
But over time, learning from him, watching him, how he conducted his business and why he did the things that he did were just really great life lessons for me, both in business and in life. So he was at that time the most significant influence by far. And then when I left there, I went to American President Lines.
00:03:58
Speaker
and I had a regional manager there by the name of John Shupp Kegel and anybody who's ever met John Shupp Kegel would agree with what I'm about to say. He was one of the finest humans that I ever met and his influence on me was just kind of teaching me what it means to be a good human. He always thought first about his people. He was really big on integrity. He thought deeply about
00:04:19
Speaker
what was important in life and and sort of live those values. And so I would say early on in my career, I had really two great influencers, Brian, one one with Stanley Shannon, the next one with John Shub Kegel. And I've been really fortunate in my career to have a lot of people like that in my life. But those two stand out as sort of getting me off on the right path.
Balancing Relationship and Analytics in Sales
00:04:38
Speaker
You and I are both sort of leading tech companies nowadays. And there's this movement
00:04:45
Speaker
in some parts of our business to move sort of away from relationship driven selling and into analytics driven selling or everything's a web transaction and there's no personality to it at all. You just mentioned a big personality and someone who maybe taught you to be a better person. How do you think we have to align those two things going forward as an industry?
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think you can separate the sort of tactical things from the strategic things. And so when I mentioned both those individuals, it wasn't as though they were helping me do my day-to-day job more efficiently or standing at my desk and teach me how to create a bill of lading or any of those kinds of things. It was the conversations that we had when we were talking about the business generally which turned into life conversations or the car drives we would take from Chicago to Peoria or to the northern suburbs of Chicago.
00:05:42
Speaker
where we really built those relationships. And so I don't see those two things. Brian is diametrically opposed. I think every business back to when I started in, which was a million years ago, wants to become more efficient and wants to do things in a more productive way. And I think the workers feel the same. Nobody really wants to feel like their work's not meaningful or significant. So one side of it is how do you make the work more interesting and the work more efficient and the business more efficient?
00:06:10
Speaker
And along the way, you can actually establish more meaningful relationships if you can move your people into a more elevated and value added status versus a transactional status. So I actually see it as a good thing. I don't think relationships will ever go away. The relationships are the most important thing in there.
00:06:28
Speaker
And I think the type of work that we were doing, at least back then, was a detractor from relationships in many cases and not an enhancer. And I think that continues. And all I see now is additional connectivity. And some people would say it's less meaningful relationships, but there's more of them. But it all just depends on how you look at it and how you take advantage of it or not. And in my opinion,
00:06:50
Speaker
I can now create and form many more relationships than i could in the past because of the tools that we have today to help us do that including you for example. So you've built a tool right that fits into that space of sort of maintaining relationships and handling some of that day to day back and forth that can be so painful.
Tools for Supply Chain Collaboration
00:07:13
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about
00:07:15
Speaker
you know, what you've built and why? Yeah, I'll just start where we left off in the last part. So, when I talk about segmenting those relationships, part of what we've been able to take advantage of in our tool is sort of common in our personal lives and that's the ability to
00:07:32
Speaker
build relationships with people that you wouldn't be able to build relationships with otherwise. So we've kind of built tools and therefore company profiles and user profiles and the ability to get to know people that you wouldn't normally meet or even know because you're 8,000 miles apart. So international has got a really unique scenario that way, the historical way that you've been able to communicate with people is via email and that's highly, highly impersonal. So we've been able to build some tools in there to actually increase that collaboration and increase that
00:08:00
Speaker
Awareness of the relationship at the same time those two people that are now able to collaborate together we're doing a lot of non value added work that was detracting from them having the time and the necessity to build a relationship so as an example.
00:08:17
Speaker
Lots of people in our business create documents and it's time consuming and it's error prone and there's lots of chasing and lots of frustration. So if you can eliminate that sort of menial tactical work and free the people up to start thinking about what to do with the data versus just creating manual documents, obviously they've got more time to think about more strategic things and build greater value.
00:08:45
Speaker
for their companies. So, you know, again, just an example of how you can take technology and not make them diametrically opposed, but make them work together.
Experiences Shaping Purchase Order Management Focus
00:08:54
Speaker
So tell me a little bit more about what Mercado does. And really, I know you you've come from sort of a very deep industry side and have then gone into the technology side. How did how did
00:09:13
Speaker
How did you guys come up with the concept and really what finished the connected dots there in that journey for me? Yeah, and it's funny because now I can say looking back on it, it's an idea that I suddenly came up with after thinking about it for 25 years. My first introduction to what I've eventually built
00:09:33
Speaker
I think I can exactly identify to 20 years ago. At that time, I was working for a retailer called Michael Stores here in Dallas, Texas, Arts and Crafts. I was the director of sourcing and logistics, I think, at that point. I had been there approximately three weeks when a buyer came flying into my office. No knock, no appointment, just flying in my office.
00:09:55
Speaker
basically berated me for about 10 minutes on how I was going to ruin Halloween and she was going to have to report Halloween lack of sales to my department, essentially is what it came down to.
00:10:08
Speaker
Of course, I took that very seriously and I was brand new, so I called my team together. And it looked like we were pretty buttoned up. I was new at the time, but I asked all the usual questions from a logistics standpoint. We were fairly buttoned up. That led me in a discovery process. And the long story short is that what I learned was the real problem was that this particular buyer needed 90 days for production, and she was only giving her suppliers 30 and 60 days. She was severely behind an issue in her purchase orders.
00:10:38
Speaker
So everything that shipped in her category was shipping late, and instead of her taking the hit for that, she was blaming it on my department. So that was sort of my first foray into, holy cow, how could it be that somebody wasn't managing the front end of the process in such a manner that it could be 30 or 60 days late? That just seemed inconceivable to me that even such a problem could exist.
00:11:03
Speaker
So I took the time to dig into it, so much so that I hired an outside firm to come and really understand our entire purchase order flow from issuance, who tracked it, who placed it, what the supplier do with it. I traveled to Asia, went and met with the factories and really dug deep into the entire flow.
00:11:22
Speaker
Right after that I went to Kmart up in Troy, Michigan and started digging into their process and realized that they had even bigger problems. And so that got me even deeper into sort of the challenges that it presented. So I knew way back then, 20 years ago, that the purchase order in my mind was the key to success all the way downstream in the supply chain because if something starts right, it's got a better chance of finishing right.
00:11:45
Speaker
And I even took a run at what I'm doing now way back then. However, the technology just hadn't caught up yet. And so we had a project at Kmart called COOL, Kmart Overseas Operations Limited. And we took a serious run at it. We had 80,000 containers. We had the resources. But when we surveyed the vendors back then, not very many had web connectivity and on and on and on. So we eventually shelved that project, but I never stopped thinking about it.
00:12:13
Speaker
And I got involved in purchase order management even before then, continued to get involved with it, but always thought about this opportunity to really start to manage the front end more efficiently. So when it came to sort of this point in my career, I looked at it one more time and said, yeah, I think now's
Digitizing the Analog First Mile
00:12:30
Speaker
the right time. I think the technology's finally caught up. And the tools have finally caught up, like those two examples I gave you earlier with the ability to collaborate, for example, and the ability to chat and the ability to automate things, that we should make a run at it.
00:12:42
Speaker
So that led to Mercado. And the problem that we solved specifically is there's a big black hole in the first mile of the supply chain. And that first mile is from the time a customer places a purchase order to the time it's booked with a freight forwarder. And that first mile is incredibly complex. And it lasts, on average, about 90 days. And it involves all kinds of parties. And currently, it's 100% analog. It's all being done via Excel and email.
00:13:09
Speaker
So we took a run at that and said, what if we build a platform that could connect the buyer directly to the supplier and build the tools into that platform that would help them do things more efficiently? Because we knew what the challenges were. We just, at the time, didn't have the tools to solve them. What would that do? And so eventually, through a lot of hard work and a great tech partner by the name of Lee Grover,
00:13:32
Speaker
we were able to build that platform and we launched in January. So super excited about finally being able to fill a hole that I've seen for a long time and finally have the resources and right partnerships to be able to plug that hole.
Understanding the Supply Chain
00:13:47
Speaker
So you use the term that now is maybe a little bit of a hot button for you. So I'm going to push it. What is in your mind the difference between when we talk about supply chain
00:14:00
Speaker
And we talk about logistics. What's the difference? Yeah, so this is a definition I got from a professor a long, long time ago by the name of Don Bowersox, who was a professor at the University of Michigan and one of the leading supply chain guys at the time. And he sort of chastised the room, which was full of logistics people, for a bunch of different reasons. But he gave us a definition of supply chain that made sense to me, that it still makes sense to me today.
00:14:27
Speaker
I simplify his definition even further because in this case i'm specifically talking about the international supply chain which is different than other kinds of supply chains. The big difference in international supply chain is that the people buying the product are buying it from someone else and they're not making it.
00:14:45
Speaker
And they're not taking possession of it until later on in the process. So it's kind of a unique supply chain. But it's really consisting of four main activities. And that's the broader definition of supply chain. Those four main activities are plan.
00:14:59
Speaker
buy, move, and sell. The supply chain is all four of those activities. Logistics is the move. And it's incredibly important. And it's also incredibly complex. But it's one of four steps in the supply chain that needs to occur properly and correctly for product to get to the market on time. And it's the third step in the process. It's not the first step in the process.
00:15:25
Speaker
And so if you want to go into a little bit more detail on those four buckets, but essentially that's the way I look at the definition of supply chain is all four of those activities coming together to form a supply chain with the move being the third leg of the stool and happening after the planning and the buying has occurred. If you were starting today, right, or if you were giving advice to someone who's sort of getting into this industry in the large today,
00:15:52
Speaker
What would you say would be a good way to either educate yourself on that or how to kind of get your head around that when I know there's a lot of people out there who are just thinking about logistics? How do you expand your horizons over there? Yeah, I think most people's horizons are already expanded. So in other words, there are people in supply chain at most companies that recognize themselves as supply chain that don't do logistics functions. And so if you wanted to go into the broader discipline of supply chain,
00:16:22
Speaker
Which is which is basically how to purchase and then get used to market you can look at a number of areas to do that so there's a whole body of people organizations that work on the plan and so they'll do things like inventory forecasting inventory replenishment and they'll do analysis on markets and products and they'll do all kinds of products prototyping for example.
00:16:44
Speaker
those all get wrapped up into something called SNOP and that's a really fascinating place to be because that's really the beginning of the supply chain and that's how you're figuring out who to buy from, what to buy, how much to buy, what the customers are going to purchase and so forth and so I love the people that are in that area because they tend to have the most strong view of the entire supply chain because there's the tippy tippy beginning of it.
00:17:09
Speaker
Then you've got a whole body of professionals in supply chain that are in the procurement function. And they call themselves all different kinds of things. But they could be planners. They could be analysts. They could be buyers. They could be merchants. There's a whole group of people. And depending on the industry, those people are uber important. They're like the salespeople and logistics. They're the people who make the company money. And most people would call them the princes and princesses of the organization.
00:17:35
Speaker
in a retail organization anyway. And then the move side of it, in my mind, was an area that I probably would have maybe five years ago advised people not to get into because it hadn't changed in such a long time. And now I would say it's probably one of the hottest areas in the supply chain is the move.
00:17:54
Speaker
because of the type of things that we're talking about. Finally, the move part of it is really getting recognized for a variety of reasons. Amazon certainly is having a big impact on that. E-commerce having a big impact on that. And as a consequence of it getting that recognition, it's also getting an upgrade in terms of the talent. It's getting an upgrade in terms of the technology. It's getting an upgrade in terms of its significance. So now it's a great time to join, because it's really at the beginning of that process, not the end, that the move part is getting a lot of good attention.
00:18:23
Speaker
And then there's great value in being on the sales side of things as well, and figuring out how to get stuff to customers and sell it to them more effectively. And that's changed so rapidly. It's only been the last, say, three or four years that I could reasonably expect something to show up at my door the same night that I ordered it within a two-hour window. It's fascinating to me.
00:18:47
Speaker
So part of that's logistics, but part of that is also selling. And what channels do I sell to? And do I deliver to people's stores or sell through my store? Do I drop ship? All of those kind of things go into the sales side. So everywhere in the supply chain, there's opportunity. And part of your decision on what you want to go into is what you find most interesting, but also what your skill sets are. So I think it's a great industry. So I will say that coming from the compliance side of the house, which
00:19:16
Speaker
It's usually somewhere between buy and move. We had words for the people on the buy side. They were not Prince and Princess, though. Yeah, there you go. Especially in retail. So we'll just leave it at that. Yeah, that's true. OK, we're on a podcast. We'll talk later about some of the other words we used to.
Crucial Decisions for Business Traction
00:19:37
Speaker
So what if some of your challenge has been getting Mercado off the ground and getting some traction here?
00:19:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think I could write a book on that actually at this point with two years worth of hindsight. So instead of talking about all the challenges, I think I can maybe turn it a little bit and say what were some of the good decisions that I made that helped me get to the point where we are now where we actually do have traction because getting the traction is sort of the first phase in a successful business is actually having somebody willing to pay you for your services.
00:20:09
Speaker
And the first decision that we had to make in a technology company is who is going to build the platform.
00:20:17
Speaker
One of the smartest decisions I made was to partner with a great CTO. And the decision to partner him with him was twofold. One is kind of with everybody I'm going to partner with or be in a relationship that's so intimate, I want to make sure that they're good humans. And Lee is an amazing human, full of integrity, thinks about all the right things, and just a really great human. So that was sort of stage one of doing things right. And then stage two was, did he have the technology chops to build something that I knew was going to be
00:20:45
Speaker
rather complex and interviewing him, albeit he's humble, it became pretty clear to me that he had the chops. He's done work for Tesla and Nassau and Coca-Cola and he's done several startups himself. So I knew he had the technical skills and I knew he had a good human and that's a good star-tending relationship.
00:21:03
Speaker
And I would say if you're going to start a technology company, one of your key considerations is to make sure that your partner or that you have great technical skills. It's such a huge part of it. And I don't underestimate that. Then the second big challenge after you find the right tech partner is what most companies call product market fit. And so are you building something that customers are going to want to buy?
00:21:28
Speaker
And you don't know that as you're building it. So the way that you validate it is you, or at least what we did, I'll say what we did. I'm not saying that we were right, but I'll just tell you what we did. So we did validation in two ways. One, we hired, hired is the wrong word, but we created a customer advisory board. So we had five prominent name customers on our customer advisory board. And the specific people that we had were very talented and very experienced individuals. And so they gave us,
00:21:58
Speaker
all kinds of great guidance as we're building this thing on, yeah, not so much or that looks really good or do more of this, do more or less of that. And then the second product market fit validation is you try to do as many surveys as you can and just reach out to people with questions either through your network or formally to make sure that you're building the right thing. Even then you're not 100% sure. So the next stage in that process is doing what they call beta.
00:22:26
Speaker
And so we hired three customers to be our beta customers. And it wasn't until we actually took it to those beta customers and they were using it that we could ascertain whether or not what we had planned for months and built for months worked. So that's the next stage in the journey. And we passed that round. So by January of this year, we felt like we had a really great product and we were ready to take it to the market.
00:22:52
Speaker
And that's sort of a scary point because you're now telling the world that you're ready and you sort of hope somebody shows up. And in our case, we got really, really lucky in that one of our first sales calls was a customer who had a really clear need for the product and signed up
00:23:13
Speaker
almost right away within a week of seeing it type of thing. So that was great. And then since then we've gotten more and more validation either from customers choosing us and or starting to work with us in trial modes as well as just the general feedback we get when we show it to prospective customers.
00:23:32
Speaker
So it's a long process. It's a very, very difficult process. But there's some logical steps to follow that you would do in any
E-commerce and Partnerships in Growth
00:23:40
Speaker
business, really. But in technology, even more important is kind of start making sure you've got a good technical platform, that you've got really good people to give you advice and make sure that you're not sort of delusional in terms of what you're building and then test it and then launch it and then pray. And a lot of that last step, I'm sure.
00:24:00
Speaker
As a part of our network, the Chain.io network with your product, our sales team is also out there talking about it quite a bit as we're explaining the different companies that are part of our network to our prospective clients. I have to say that one of the things we pick up very quickly when we're talking about Mercado is that customers really intuitively understand the business value. There's a lot of software out there
00:24:28
Speaker
If you're selling an audit tool, you really have to explain why an audit tool is valuable. With what you guys do, you just ask them, have you ever bought anything ever and was it painful? That pretty much smells it right there. It's not a hard pitch.
00:24:50
Speaker
I'm going to steal that actually, Brian, that's good. And I also just use the analogy that if you've ever written checks before and then switched online banking, you understand immediately the value of switching from a manual process of purchasing or procurement to an online one. And so that seems to resonate with people at least of a certain age. I don't know if people write checks anymore, but they used to.
00:25:14
Speaker
The other thing I would say, Brian, is that you just reminded me of something. We've been super fortunate. Sometimes a lot of this has to do with luck. And we've been super fortunate that we found companies like yours, particularly yours, but yours and others,
00:25:29
Speaker
that came along right at the right time. I mean the ecosystem has developed to the point where we can do things like this. So I had a lot of fears about market adoption, one of which was how easy it would be for us to integrate with our customers because I've lived that my whole career and it's painful and it's lengthy.
00:25:45
Speaker
And I didn't really have the resources to be able to manage that and go through the lengthy process. So companies like yours have come along. We've been able to partner with them. And from my perspective, this is what's going to propel our business going forward, is partnering with some of the other tech companies to propel this thing going forward. And also some of the service companies, frankly. So we've been fortunate in that sense. And the other thing that's been lucky for us, not necessarily lucky for our customers,
00:26:12
Speaker
But the market has changed. And so even five years ago, you could make pretty good margins on imports. And so there was a willingness to either accept status quo or throw bodies at it. And today, it's much tougher. There's a lot of demand side challenges with e-commerce and Amazon. But there's also a lot of supply side challenges with tariffs and shifting supply chains and labor costs rising and raw materials cost rising. So we're lucky in the sense that we're launching at a time when
00:26:43
Speaker
there's always a need for the product. Now there's an even greater need because market forces have shifted. So as we're recording this, we're getting to the last week of August here. And I know we're both headed out at the beginning of September, which is probably right around when this will publish for the Logistics Technology Conference that the Journal of Commerce puts on. And I was one of the panelists pre-discussions that I was on yesterday. We were talking a little bit about
00:27:12
Speaker
sort of how you have to think about IT in supply chain and logistics differently now than before. And I think you touched on this a little, that it is a combination of tools put together as opposed to the tool that you buy that solves all your problem.
Specialized Applications for Complex Supply Chains
00:27:31
Speaker
Do you kind of agree or disagree that it's, you know, that what people are looking at now is more of a landscape of tech than a go drop in SAP approach?
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, there are no free lunches. There are no silver bullets. So the bigger ERPs like SAP will certainly tell you that they are the silver bullet, that they can be all things tall people. But if you ask anybody who's ever gone through what SAP would describe as a panacea, their customers wouldn't describe it the same way. And the reason for that is simple. This supply chain is incredibly complex. Each of those four components I talked about has immense complexity to them.
00:28:10
Speaker
and immense skill required and they're highly dispersed. And so to think that one system could come in and manage things both at the strategic and detailed level that's required to manage them effectively is a bridge way, way, way too far. And so what's happening now is you're getting applications that are coming in for more discrete functions
00:28:32
Speaker
that are critical parts of this thing and so I just always look at building analogies and I've got a whole toolbox full of tools and I use them for different things. So you know I'm not going to take a hammer to try to unscrew a screw no different than I'm not going to take a screwdriver to try to hammer it a nail and I think that's the way people have to look at it is sort of
00:28:54
Speaker
you know, who, why, and what. So who in the supply chain are you trying to serve? What are you trying to solve? And why are you trying to solve it? And then find the right tool for that. And so some people will settle and say, I've got a tool that kind of does that, and it's wrapped up in this SAP wrapper somewhere. And other people will say, look, I want to get super granular, so I want this very specific application.
00:29:18
Speaker
But I think that the best of breed is to have all those tools in your toolkit and then figure out when to use them and how to use them and why to use them. So you'll have some core systems that you're going to have to use to manage your overall business, like planning systems or ERP systems or WMS systems. But now you've got this whole array of choices of tools that you can select to solve specific problems.
00:29:40
Speaker
And when I first started doing building and construction, I quickly realized that having the right tool was the absolute difference between my project turning out looking like a 10 year old did it versus looking like a professional did it. And I think it's the same thing with supply chain. And the good news is there's lots of great tools out there to select. And I know some people find that confusing, but it's also liberating that you finally have the options to solve problems that are intractable and have been occurring for a long time.
00:30:10
Speaker
So I'm sure you and I could, and have in the past, gone on for hours on these topics. But we are coming a little bit up on time here. So what do you guys have coming up in the future?
Optimizing Networks with Data and AI
00:30:21
Speaker
What's the next stage for Mercado?
00:30:23
Speaker
The problem we're solving is big, and so this is going to keep us busy for a while, so I don't get too far ahead of my skis, Brian. But there's just some statistics that I think the audience hopefully will find interesting, is that there's a trillion dollars worth of purchases made between Asia and the US annually, and another trillion dollars made between Asia and Europe. So there's two trillion dollars worth of goods flowing across
00:30:44
Speaker
The problem that we're solving is interesting in that it helps an importer connect their direct supply chain, and that's going to keep us busy for a while. There's 300,000 importers in the United States alone, and probably the same in Europe, so that's a big market. We'll be busy with that for a while. But what we see as an even more interesting challenge is to then leverage the data we'll collect on the platform to solve some even broader problems, which is how do you connect to your extended supply chain?
00:31:09
Speaker
people that you don't directly control for example packaging company or tier two supplier. And we also think there's a big opportunity optimization meaning leveraging that data to do some predictive analytics so that you can try to anticipate problems before they occur versus reacting to them were very reactionary business and. I think machine learning and predictive analytics are are really big opportunity for this entire industry so that's sort of the next two products that will go after after we get this one managed is.
00:31:38
Speaker
the interoperability of your net your supply chain network with the broader supply chain and then the opportunity to optimize your network through machine learning and predictive analytics. One of the things I noticed when I first saw your product having had built one 20 years ago that also sort of, you know, was not as successful because the world wasn't ready for it was the you guys have managed to sort of
00:32:02
Speaker
simplify down what you can buy in a multi-million dollar tool nowadays, you know, if you are a multi-billion dollar company into something that's more accessible. I think that what you just mentioned about that tier two supplier problem, right? And that idea that your supplier is only as good as their suppliers. And that if you can start getting visibility, you know, from not just a planning standpoint, but also a compliance and social compliance,
00:32:30
Speaker
standpoint and all of those other things. If you guys can crack that for the market that you're aimed at, that would be really incredible. That's something that would get me excited. I'm going to say when we crack it. When you crack it, there you go. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to do this today. People will get a lot of value out of this and really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Take care.
00:33:10
Speaker
Thanks again to Rob for sharing so much great knowledge with us. If you are listening to this around release date, be sure to head out to Las Vegas September 8th through 10th to see both Rob and I on panels at the Logistics Technology Conference put on by the Journal of Commerce should be a really good time. And stay tuned for our next episode when we're going to have a very special guest from outside the logistics industry talking to us about
00:33:37
Speaker
all of the things we can learn about inbound marketing and the wonderful world of actually going out and finding new customers online.