POPULARITY
2 episodes with 4pl
2 episodes with 4pl
3 episodes with 4pl
2 episodes with 4pl
2 episodes with 4pl
3 episodes with 4pl
2 episodes with 4pl
2 episodes with 4pl
Send us a textIn this episode of The New Warehouse Podcast, Kevin chats with Nick Bartlett, Director at CBIP Logistics, a leading fourth-party logistics (4PL) provider based in Hong Kong. Nick shares insights into CBIP's innovative approach to bridging the gap between brands and global logistics solutions, particularly in Asia-Pacific. The conversation covers CBIP's journey towards carbon neutrality, its in-house tech platform launch, and the evolving direct-to-consumer (DTC) market in Asia. Get your free demo of CartonCloud's WMS right here. Sign up for Warehouse Wisdom Wednesdays right here. Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.Support the show
Building an enterprise-ready SaaS app? WorkOS has got you covered with easy-to-integrate APIs for SAML, SCIM, and more. Start now at https://bit.ly/WorkOS-Turpentine-Network. Aaron Rubin is the Founder and CEO of ShipHero, a warehouse management system for brands and 3PL providers. We talk through Aaron's journey building ShipHero, starting with what is now the largest Jiu Jitsu apparel brand in the US, which he almost went bankrupt running during the financial crisis. He shares how that business led to ShipHero, takes us inside the early days, explains why warehouse robotics and 4PL's are overhyped, and discuss the rapid rise of TikTok Shop, Temu, and Shein. Timestamps (00:00) Intro (02:01) The USPS shipping label scam (07:10) Starting the largest Jiu-Jitsu apparel brand (09:46) Narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in 2008 (17:08) Why ecommerce is so hard (21:16) Starting ShipHero to manage their own warehouse (28:00) Powering Shopify's early fulfillment network (30:59) How 3PL's are still solving basic problems (34:02) Why warehouse robotics is overhyped (41:48) Where drones fit into logistics (44:55) Aaron argues why the 4PL model doesn't work (55:40) TikTok Shop is the fastest growing US ecommerce channel ever (58:42) How Temu and Shein leverage the 321 program to avoid tariffs (1:02:49) Why Temu and Shein are slowing US ecom growth (1:04:17) Topgrading: The most boring, most valuable hiring strategy (1:11:29) Business lessons from playing poker Referenced ShipHero: https://shiphero.com/ Topgrading: https://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Hire-Coach-Keep-Players/dp/094400234X Where to find Aaron Twitter: https://x.com/AaronandML LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronandml Where to find Turner Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it
Are you scaling your food, drink or pet treat brand and have taken time to think about how to get stocked into all the stores you've successfully landed? What about how much it's costing you to store inventory rather than landing it on the retail shelf? Or how much each carton is costing you to deliver so you can work out what your precise CLOGS are?You quite possibly haven't!!! Supply chain is not the first thing Foodpreneurs think about as they're making amazing products. Well… that is until they're scaling and got to get product into many, many different locations and make sure there's enough to fulfil orders but not too much that it ties up cash. These and other supply chain by design processes are the expertise of my guests in this episode, Cameron Aboud and Joost Bekker from sc3sixty logistics management. They're the supply chain masterminds behind the global expansion of the hangover-busting dream team that created Bae Juice, and countless other brands!If you want to get stock to stores without it costing a tonne of money, listen to what Cameron and Joost have to say about:
Our guest on this week's episode is Breanna Herbert, senior product manager at Orbis Corp. One way that companies can meet their sustainability goals is to transform the way they package goods. That's where reusable packaging can help to create greener supply chains. Our guest offers some insights and also shares about packaging products that are made from recycled materials gathered from shorelines of the world's oceans.We have all seen those Amazon or UPS trucks pull right up outside our driveways and watch a delivery driver carry a single box to our doorstep to make a delivery. But that type of delivery is not practical in urban areas where the trucks cannot easily navigate. Instead, they often use e-bikes in cities, but that can also present some problems. We discuss some ways that New York City is utilizing technology to make bike-based deliveries more practical.Shippers are turning to logistics services providers more and more in the wake of the pandemic economy to get a better handle on costs and improve their supply chain operations. One company that is working with a 4PL is Core Health & Fitness, which makes commercial fitness equipment and related digital solutions. We talk about the benefits they have gained with this logistics partnership.Supply Chain Xchange also offers a podcast series called Supply Chain in the Fast Lane. It is co-produced with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. Go to your favorite podcast platform to subscribe and to listen to past and future episodes.Articles and resources mentioned in this episode:Orbis, Corp.NYC launches battery swapping plan for e-biles used in last mile deliveryLogistics service provider to the rescueGet episode transcriptsVisit Supply Chain XchangeListen to CSCMP and Supply Chain Xchange's Supply Chain in the Fast Lane podcastSend feedback about this podcast to podcast@agilebme.comPodcast is sponsored by: ApteanOther linksAbout DC VELOCITYSubscribe to DC VELOCITYSign up for our FREE newslettersAdvertise with DC VELOCITYTop 10 Supply Chain Management Podcasts
https://youtu.be/BUwmNXNZAtEIn this conversation, Kathleen Sullivan Garman shares her expertise in operations and optimization in the e-commerce industry. She discusses her passion for operations and the importance of efficiency in driving profitability. Kathleen explains her typical engagements, which involve analyzing and optimizing various aspects of a company's operations.Kathleen emphasizes the need for a structured implementation process and the challenges of change management. Kathleen also discusses the importance of sales and operations planning (S&OP) in aligning departments and improving overall company performance. She highlights the evolving e-commerce landscape and the adoption of technology and data analytics.Kathleen concludes by discussing the importance of product line analysis and the benefits of selling on Amazon. In this conversation, Kathleen Sullivan Garman shares insights and advice on various aspects of brand growth and operations. She discusses the process of launching and protecting a brand on Amazon, the rise of social shopping platforms like TikTok, and the importance of meeting customers where they are.Kathleen also explains the difference between multi-channel and omni-channel strategies, provides tips for selecting and working with 3PL partners, and discusses the pros and cons of 3PL vs. 4PL. Additionally, she shares her personal journey of overcoming fear and embracing adventure, and offers resources and tools for brands to succeed.Takeaways:Efficiency in operations is crucial for driving profitability in e-commerce.Implementing change and optimizing operations require a structured process and overcoming resistance to change.Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is essential for aligning departments and improving overall company performance.The e-commerce industry is evolving, and brands need to adopt technology and data analytics to stay competitive.Analyzing product lines and reducing less profitable skews can improve overall business performance.Selling on Amazon can provide credibility and reach a wider customer base.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background01:05 Passion for Operations03:02 Engagements and Typical Projects07:32 Implementation Process08:32 Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)16:23 Challenges of S&OP20:16 E-commerce Trends and Technology Adoption23:21 Product Line Analysis and Skew Reduction26:01 Go-to-Market Strategies29:07 Launching on Amazon29:40 Launching and Protecting Your Brand on Amazon31:10 The Rise of Social Shopping32:30 Meeting Customers Where They Are33:30 Multi-Channel vs. Omni-Channel35:22 Selecting and Working with 3PL Partners38:34 3PL vs. 4PL41:57 Overcoming Fear and Embracing Adventure45:20 Be Brave and Make Changes45:56 Resources and Tools for BrandsKathleen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sullygarman/Looking to elevate your e-commerce game with shoppable videos and social commerce? visit Vimmi at www.vimmi.net
Nick Bartlett is the Co-founder and the Director of Marketing and Sales at CBIP Logistics. Using its global network of partners, CBIP provides supply chain strategies and logistics services to create an easier and more adaptable way for any sized business to streamline the process. With a central office in Hong Kong, CBIP has expanded its network from the Asia Pacific region to North America to the UK to secure the most optimized and efficient logistics and fulfillment options available. Nick has over 12 years of experience in logistics, e-commerce, marketing, supply chain management, and the traditional retail space across multiple regions. At CBIP, Nick closely monitors new markets and believes successful business operations come through value-based relationships. Before CBIP Logistics, he was the Owner and Head of Sales at InXpress and served as a Sales and Marketing Management Consultant for Royal Dutch Shell. In this episode… Running a successful e-commerce brand requires more than a good product and an attractive website — you must be able to handle the logistics process efficiently. In the wake of rising e-commerce and global manufacturing, logistics has become a complicated industry with supply chains spread across multiple regions and countries. Is your business equipped to source logistics partners at a moment's notice? From managing inventory to shipping products and handling returns, logistics can be challenging for e-commerce entrepreneurs. Fortunately, there is a solution that can help streamline your logistics operations while complying with global regulations so you can take your business to the next level. Nick Bartlett recommends hiring a fourth-party logistics service provider to help you navigate this complex landscape, including dealing with unexpected shipping delays, managing your inventory more efficiently, and handling returns and customer service issues. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with Nick Bartlett, Co-founder and the Director of Marketing and Sales at CBIP Logistics, to discuss logistics solutions for your business. Nick talks about logistic options, CBIP's business model and success stories, its 4PL approach, and how it solves the logistics challenges entrepreneurs face.
As a serial entrepreneur, he has had 3 successful exits and a history of building great organizations. Prior to joining Ware2Go, Stephen was the President and CRO of Collective[i], a pioneer in AI and market leading platform for enterprise sales organizations. Previously he was GM and Vice President of Marketing Solutions at Ebay and was responsible for all of eBay Enterprise digital and agency business units and integrated 9 acquired companies into one global marketing solutions leader.He founded and is active with Goodness Now, a charitable organization that provides weekend meals to nutrition challenged elementary school children in Monmouth County, NJ.SHOW SUMMARYIn this episode of eCom Logistics Podcast, Dan Coll and Ninaad Acharya are joined by Steve Denton, CEO of Ware2Go, a UPS company with a focus on supply chain innovation. Together, they explore the rapidly changing landscape of e-commerce logistics and the emergence of 4PL and 5PL models. Steve shares insights from his extensive career, highlighting the importance of adapting to the evolving needs of merchants and consumers. The discussion delves into topics like personalization, technology, and inventory placement in the modern supply chain. Discover how the logistics industry is transforming to meet the demands of today's connected consumers and what it means for businesses of all sizes.Steve also discusses the evolving landscape of peak demand and consumer expectations in 2023. Steve highlights the importance of flexible and resilient supply chains and shares valuable insights on how retailers and merchants can prepare for the upcoming holiday season. From the impact of Prime Days to the significance of sustainability, Steve provides expert perspectives on what to expect during this year's peak and how to stay competitive in a rapidly changing commerce environment.HIGHLIGHTS[00:00:00] Logistics Evolution: Explore logistics' transformation from 3PL to 4PL and 5PL due to rapid commerce shifts.00:10:33] Personalization's Significance: Personalization is vital in meeting connected consumer demands, backed by technology and flexible warehousing.[00:17:16] Headless Commerce Platforms: 5PLs act as headless commerce hubs, connecting merchants with optimized supply from various sources.[00:21:47] Strategic Inventory Placement: Strategic inventory placement across locations becomes crucial for efficient customer service.[00:23:08] API Integration: Emphasize API integration instead of building new WMS systems for adaptability and flexibility.[00:23:52] Accurate demand forecasting is essential; even the best inventory planning relies on it.[00:24:24] AI and machine learning greatly enhance demand forecasting, benefiting retailers of all sizes.[00:24:44] Integrating promotion schedules is critical for precise demand forecasting impacted by marketing activities.[00:25:16] Diversifying marketing channels, beyond Google and Amazon, can boost demand forecasting for mid-tier merchants[00:25:38] Effective, non-condescending communication with merchants is vital for successful demand forecasting.[00:26:06] Tools like network view guide optimal inventory placement and replenishment strategies based on sales and regional demand.[00:27:29] Offering options and flexibility to accommodate individual merchant preferences improves business relationships.[00:32:17] E-commerce demands meeting consumer expectations for consistent, speedy, stable, and sustainable delivery times.QUOTES[00:13:07] Steve Denton: "We are not in the supply chain and logistics business. We are in the commerce business." [00:18:03] Steve Denton: "The days of taking the low hanging fruit of the slappers or the pick and stick are over. You better be able to do those things, and if you can do it with technology versus people, then you're going to be able to scale more."[00:17:16] Steve Denton: "A 5PL is really about meeting merchants and consumers where they want to be met with the right type of supply in the right locations for the right type of capabilities."[00:23:52] "You've got to start with demand planning, and like, look, not as a where-to-go plug, but we've been spending a ton of time with AI machine learning to help our clients do demand forecasting."[00:32:03] "Stability is required, sustainable. You've got to put that in there too. Absolutely. And then certainty."[00:48:44] "It's flexible resiliency that's required to meet today's commerce landscape." Find out more about Stephen in the link below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdenton/
Mary O'Connell- 3PL Expert - FW - St. Louis, MO What role do 4PLs play in improving a shipper's sustainability metrics, and how can they help shippers achieve their sustainability goals? What specific sustainability metrics do 4PLs track and report on, and how do these metrics help shippers to improve their environmental impact? For those who currently don't have metrics set up where should they start? What are some of the key benefits of using a 4PL as a solution for sustainability metric tracking, and how do these benefits compare to other solutions? How do 4PLs leverage technology and data analytics to improve sustainability metric tracking, and what role do these tools play in driving sustainable supply chain practices? Redwood launched a new sustainability tool for shippers, Redwood Hyperion, can you touch on how it adds to the 4PL value prop?
Hey everyone, in today's episode (episode 300!!!) of the Digital Supply Chain podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Bartlett, the CEO of CBIP Logistics. Nick and I talked about everything from logistics to e-commerce, and I learned so much from our conversation.Nick is a real expert in the field of supply chain management, and he shared some incredible insights about how CBIP Logistics is helping businesses like Deliveroo streamline their operations and reach new heights of success.One of the key takeaways from our conversation was how CBIP Logistics is offering a unique operating model that sets it apart from other logistics companies. With a focus on digitalization and sustainability, they're providing their clients with a one-stop-shop for all their logistics needs.Nick also talked about how CBIP Logistics has worked with Deliveroo over the past five years, and how they've helped them grow from a few hundred delivery points to over 5,000 today. It was amazing to hear about all the different facets of Deliveroo's business, from restaurant fulfillment to inventory management, and how CBIP Logistics has helped support them every step of the way.If you're interested in learning more about CBIP Logistics or Nick, be sure to check out their website at CBIPLogistics.com. There's a wealth of information there about their digital products, sustainability policies, and more. You can also connect with Nick on LinkedIn or Twitter.Thanks again to Nick for taking the time to speak with me today. I hope you all enjoyed this episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast as much as I did. Until next time, stay safe and keep on innovating! Don't forget this podcast is also now available on YouTube, so feel free to check it out there too.Podcast supportersI'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters: Lorcan Sheehan Krishna Kumar Christophe Kottelat Olivier Brusle Robert Conway Alexandra Katopodis Alicia Farag Joël VANDI And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!FinallyIf you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks for listening.
In this episode, Dave Broering, President of Integrated Logistics at NFI, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss: Creating good relationships between shippers and carriers The difference between non-asset solutions and integrated logistics Dave's passion for the tech and startup scene What freight forwarding customers actually want Advice to the next generation of logistics leadersDave Broering has over two decades of experience within the non-asset based logistics space. Through that time, he has developed an expertise in creating fast-growing and efficient operations focused on customer service and execution. As President of Integrated Logistics Solutions, Dave leads the Brokerage, Intermodal, Global Freight Forwarding, and 4PL services at NFI, one of the largest privately held 3PL's in the US. By combining his upbringing at both American Backhaulers and CH Robinson with his blend of technological focus and operational execution, Dave's Non-Asset division continues to be one of the fastest growing divisions within NFI.Follow Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-broering-98299b5/Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansglick/Chain.io Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chain.ioChain.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/chain_io
== Drukhari (Kabal of the Obsidian Rose) Arks of Omen == [-3 CP, 1345pts, 80PL]HQ1: Drahzar , Warlord - Trait - Hatred Eternal [145 pts, 8PL -1 CP]HQ2: Archon, Splintered Mind, Tolerated Ambition - Ancient Evil, Husk Blade Prizes from the Dark City - Djin Blade [85pts, 4PL, -2CP]EL1: 4 Incubi, w/klaives, Klaivex w/Demiklaives [90 pts, 4PL]EL2; 4 Incubi, w/klaives, Klaivex w/Demiklaives [90 pts, 4PL]EL3: 5 Incubi, w/klaives, Klaivex w/Demiklaives [108 pts, 8PL]No Slot EL4: 4 Slyth, 4 urghul, 1 lhamean [152 pts, 15PL]Troops 1: 4 Kabalite Trueborn, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite Trueborn w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [70pts, 4PL]Troops 2: 4 Kabalite Warriors, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [55pts, 3PL]Troops 3: 4 Kabalite Warriors, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [55pts,3 PL]Troops 4: 4 Kabalite Warriors, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [55pts,3 PL]Troops 5: 4 Kabalite Warriors, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [55pts,3 PL]Troops 6: 4 Kabalite Warriors, 4 splinter rifles, 1 blaster, Sybarite w/splinter rifle, phantasm grenade launcher [55pts,3 PL]Dedicated1 - Raider, Dark Lance, Phantasm Grenade Launcer [110pts, 6PL]Dedicated 2- Raider, Dark Lance, Phantasm Grenade Launcer [110pts, 6PL]Dedicated 3- Raider, Dark Lance, Phantasm Grenade Launcer [110pts, 6PL]== Drukhari (Coven Dark Creed) Battle Brothers == [-2 CP, 655pts, 38PL]HQ3; Succubus, Showstealer, Tolerated Ambition - Precision Blows - Prizes from the Dark City - Triptych Whip [95pts, 4PL, -2CP]Troops7: 4 Wracks, 1 Acothyst, 5xwrack tools [45pts 3PL]Troops8: 4 Wracks, 1 Acothyst, 5xwrack tools [45pts 3PL]Troops9: 4 Wracks, 1 Acothyst, 5xwrack tools [45pts3 PL]Elites4: 5 Grotesques w, flesh gauntlet/cleaver [175pts, 10PL]Dedicated 4: Venom, Twin Linked Splinter Rifle, Splinter Cannon, Chain Snares, Grisly Trophies [85pts, 5PL]Dedicated 5: Venom, Twin Linked Splinter Rifle, Splinter Cannon, Chain Snares, Grisly Trophies [85pts,5 PL]Dedicated 6:Venom, Twin Linked Splinter Rifle, Splinter Cannon, Grisly Trophies [80pts,5 PL]
Real leadership starts from within. Are you leading based on someone else's playbook? A lot of people believe that leadership is something that you learn from books or just pick up from other people. While these can be helpful, you may be leaving your best, authentic leadership potential on the sidelines.It's vitally important to realize that leadership comes from within and must be unleashed.I host Dave Broering, President of Integrated Logistics Solutions at NFI. He leads the Freight Brokerage, Intermodal, Global Freight Forwarding, and 4PL services. He shares a strategy you can use to immediately unlock your authentic leadership.With his team, he has fostered rapid growth across all four business units via both organic growth and acquisition. NFI is one of the largest privately held 3PL's in the US, focusing on warehousing services, dedicated trucking, drayage and transloading services along with the Integrated Logistics services to the market.He's spent his entire professional career of 25 years in the logistics industry. He's developed an expertise in creating fast-growing and efficient operations focused on world class account management and execution of services.Dave began his career in logistics with American Backhaulers, a privately held 3PL that was subsequently acquired by CH Robinson just two years into his career. In staying on with CH Robinson for 12 more years, Dave found a blend of technological focus and operational execution as a key to success inside this large publicly held 3PL. LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-broering-98299b5/Company Link: https://www.nfiindustries.com/What You'll Discover in this Episode:Dave's unlikely career path to the logistics industry.Dave's favorite dog breed.How to be at the right place at the right time.Three things that are the core of Dave's leadership. A parable he lives by.How he prioritizes.The “apprenticeship model” for learning leadership.Why a golf scorecard is the perfect leadership metaphor.Why he started a mentorship program for his company.The rules for mentoring within his company.Why your authentic leadership style matters.Why he journals.-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter
Richard Palarea is the Co-founder and CEO of Kermit, a Baltimore-based healthcare cost reduction and spend management company that brings automation and insight to the high-spend category of implantable medical devices within hospitals and health systems. Since its founding in 2011, the company has saved hospitals more than $200 million. Prior to co-founding Kermit, Richard was the Co-founder and CEO of PA & Associates, the originator of the logistics 4PL category in parcel package cost reduction and spend management (acquired by Prostar Logistics). In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran sits down with Richard Palarea, the Co-founder and CEO of Kermit, to talk about how Richard started a real estate appraisal company after college and how he transitioned to building a cost reduction company. They also discuss how Richard managed his company remotely 20 years ago, how he has been helping companies reduce costs, and what he learned from working with his father. Stay tuned.
ESPAÑOL:Sanne Manders es el Director de Operaciones de Flexport, con sede en San Francisco, California, Estados Unidos, durante más de 7 años. Anteriormente, se desempeñó como director en Boston Consulting Group durante más de 13 años en el área de Ámsterdam, en Países Bajos, trabajando en diferentes áreas como Logística (4PL, 3PL, express/paquetes, distribución), industrias de procesos (ventas BtoB, canales, go-to -mercado de productos químicos y revestimientos), fabricación de automóviles/camiones, así como ventaja competitiva, ejecución de estrategias, comportamiento de operaciones/desempeño y mejora del desempeño. Sanne comenzó su carrera en DAF Trucks en los Países Bajos.Algunos de los aspectos más destacados del podcast:Presentación de Sanne Manders, COO en Flexport.Cuéntanos sobre tus inicios en tu carrera profesional en DAF como Ingeniero de Proyectos.Su unión al Boston Consulting Group. ¿Cuáles fueron tus mayores lecciones aprendidas?De todos los lugares geográficos donde desarrolló su carrera en BCG, ¿qué lugar tiene un lugar significativo en su vida profesional? más impactante¿Qué habilidades aprendió en BCG que lo ayudan como director de operaciones hoy en Flexport?Su llegada a Flexport.¿Qué servicios ofrece Flexport y cómo mejora la gestión de la cadena de suministro de cualquier negocio?¿Qué habilidades considera que una persona que hace una carrera en Supply Chain debería considerar adquirir?¿Por qué es importante la digitalización de los procesos comerciales y considerar la IA, la mala gestión de datos y otras herramientas?Palabras finalesAdiósENGLISH:Sanne Manders is the COO at Flexport, based in San Francisco, California USA, for over 7 years. Previously, he served as Principal in Boston Consulting Group for more than 13 years in Amsterdam Area, Netherlands, working in different areas like Logistics (4PL, 3PL, express/parcels, distribution), Process industries (BtoB sales, channels, go-to-market in chemicals and coatings), Automotive/ truck manufacturing, as well as competitive advantage, strategy execution, operations/performance behavior and performance improvement. Sanne started his career in DAF Trucks in Netherlands.Some of the highlights from the podcast:Introduction of Sanne Manders, COO in Flexport.Tell us about your starting in your professional career in DAF as a Project Engineer.Your join to the Boston Consulting Group. Which were your biggest lessons learned?Through all geographical places where you developed your career in BCG, which place have a significant place in your professional life? most impactfulWhat skills did you learn at BCG that help you as COO today in Flexport?Your arrival at Flexport.Which services offer Flexport and how does it improve the Supply Chain Management of any business?Which skills do you consider that a person doing a career in Supply Chain should be considering to acquire?Why is it important the digitalization of the business processes at and consider AI, data malmanagement, and other tools?Finals wordsFarewellDiscover more details here.Follow us on:Website: https://bit.ly/32bR2GrInstagram: http://bit.ly/2Wba8v7Twitter: http://bit.ly/2WeulzXLinkedin: http://bit.ly/2w9YSQXFacebook: http://bit.ly/2HtryLd
Why NPS Matters with Ian Aguilar Ian Aguilar and Joe Lynch discuss why NPS matters. Ian is the Founder of UrgencySelling, where he helps logistics and transportation companies to rapidly improve sales while reducing the cost of customer acquisition. About Ian Aguilar Ian Aguilar is the Founder and Managing Director of Urgency Selling. With 18 years dedicated experience in 3PL, 4PL, and Technology, Ian pioneered the adoption of The Challenge Sale, Account Based Marketing, and Demand Generation across supply chain and logistics. Following ten years with UPS, Ian co-founded LinkedIn ABM who earned recognition as a top 20 influencer on LinkedIn. With studies in Communications and Media from Mt. San Antonio College, Ian's passion evolved into broader management consulting to support Executive and Entry-level transformations from Diagnostic into Consultative sales. This approach has helped teams including Schneider, Estes, Oracle, MercuryGate, Kuebix, and MyCarrier to achieve CXO-level leads, single email and single dial closes, 15% margin growth, and reduced enterprise sales cycles over $8MM in GP by up to nine months. About UrgencySelling Urgency Selling was founded in 2016 to craft differentiated go-to-market strategies for Fortune 50, Private Equity, and Start-up teams. Urgency Selling assists Executive and Marketing partners to streamline content and coaching for Sales which rapidly reduce the cost of acquisition, prevent turnover, and expand lifetime value. This is accomplished by integrating Operations' quantifiable insights with Marketing, allowing Sales the tools necessary to engage senior ranks, create consensus between 5-to-8 influencers, prove differentiation from competitors, and justify significantly higher margins with guaranteed upsell expansion based on your solution's initial six-month performance. Key Takeaways: Why NPS Matters Ian Aguilar is the Founder of UrgencySelling, where he helps logistics and transportation companies to rapidly improve sales while reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Ian utilizes a combination of sales strategy, messaging, and content creation to differentiate his clients and build engagement with prospective customers. In the podcast interview, Joe and Ian discuss why NPS matters. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm with a company that's calculated by asking customers one question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” Aggregate NPS scores help businesses improve upon service, customer support, delivery, etc. for increased customer loyalty. NPS can be used as a predictor of business growth. When your company's NPS is high (or, at least, higher than the industry average), you know that you have a healthy relationship with customers who are likely to act as evangelists for the brand, fuel word of mouth, and generate a positive growth cycle. For an excellent explanation of Net Promoter Score (NPS), check out this article on hotjar. Learn More About Why NPS Matters Ian Aguilar's LinkedIn The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube
Marcelo Graça e o LLP (Lead Logistic Provider) com a Penske - Provedor Líder de Logística - O Marcelo é Engenheiro formado em Engenharia Elétrica pela FEI, Especialista em Administração e Marketing pela UNIP, MBA Executivo em finanças pela FGV Além de Especialização em Desenvolvimento Gerencial pela Fundação Dom Cabral. Atua há mais de +30 anos na Indústria e nos setores de serviços em posições de liderança em Manufatura, Cadeia de Suprimentos, Compras, Operações Logísticas etc.Atuou na Penske por quase 6 anos de 2012 a 2017, retornando em 2019 na posição de Head of Transportation sendo Responsável pela Divisão de Transportes.Se você estiver ouvindo esse episódio pelo Spotify não esqueça de clicar no botão “seguir”, se você estiver ouvindo pelo Apple Podcasts deixe 5 estrelas e comentário que eu leio todos. Me adiciona também no
In this China business podcast, Chris Pan, the Director of Supply Chain Management at PTL Group, shares her insights on logistics providers in China. Listen to learn how to choose a logistics supplier, and the difference between third and fourth party logistics companies. Jump to the questions: 00:51 What to be guided by when choosing logistics and transportation supplier in China? 02:39 What is the difference in terms of the logistics support between 3PL (3rd party logistics) or 4PL (4th party logistics) companies and a traditional distributor in China? 04:24 How can you tell if your local agent is a 3PL or a 4PL? Daxue consulting website: https://daxueconsulting.com/ What do you have in mind for your expansion in China? Contact us now: https://daxueconsulting.com/contact-u... PTL Group website: https://www.ptl-group.com/ PTL Group provides international companies with operational and managerial support through the various stages of their China market-entry and growth. The Group's wide range of professional services include financial services, HR management, logistics and supply chain. In the 20+ years since PTL Group's establishment, they have facilitated over 300 market-entry projects for international companies into China. Listen & Subscribe to the Podcast: YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDka8-Z2J…cVGbBVlwVQOOsuuJh Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/user-177979339/tracks Apple Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daxu…ks/id1492896072 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2lfCyDOJJNMeW2W0Ad21QK What is Daxue Talks? Daxue Talks, a China business vlog powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China. Every day, you will learn from china-based experts who share their knowledge about the Chinese market in 2-5 minutes.
Transportation vs Logistics with Marty Wadle Marty Wadle and Joe Lynch discuss transportation vs logistics. Marty is the Chief Commercial Officer of Ruan Transportation, a transportation company providing Dedicated Contract Transportation, Managed Transportation, Value-added Warehousing, and Brokerage Support Services. About Marty Wadle Marty Wadle currently serves as Ruan's Chief Commercial Officer leading the Commercial Solutions team, which includes sales, marketing, and solution engineering. Previously, Marty served as Senior Vice President of Ruan's Supply Chain Solutions division, consisting of Value-Added Warehousing, Brokerage Support Services, and Managed Transportation. Ruan manages $1.35 billion in annual supply chain spend, employs 4,600 drivers, and operates 4,000 power units and 12,000 trailers out of 300 locations across the U.S. In addition, Ruan operates 1.5 million square feet of dedicated warehouse space and $500 million of managed transportation. Marty has held multiple positions at Ruan over his 25-year career that have given him a wide base of experience in sales and operations. Prior to Ruan, Marty worked for LTL carrier Central Transport and institutional food wholesaler Martin Brothers Distribution. Marty is a graduate of Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in transportation and logistics. He currently serves on the Iowa State University Supply Chain Forum. About Ruan Transportation Ruan provides Dedicated Contract Transportation, Managed Transportation, Value-Added Warehousing, and Brokerage Support Services to customers across the U.S. Ruan's Integrated Supply Chain Solutions services encompass all aspects of transportation and logistics, providing our customers the ideal combination of asset- and non-asset-based solutions that get your products from point A to point B safely and efficiently. With more than 89 years of transportation management experience, Ruan is one of the top 10 privately owned transportation companies in the country with 300 operations and 6,000 team members. Key Takeaways: Transportation vs Logistics Marty Wadle is the Chief Commercial Officer at Ruan Transportation Management Systems, a family-owned transportation management company, providing Dedicated Contract Transportation, Managed Transportation, and Value-added Warehousing. In the podcast interview, Joe and Marty discuss transportation vs logistics, even though those words are used interchangeably, they mean different things. According to Council of Supply Chain Professionals, a Third Party Logistics (3PL) Provider is “A firm which provides multiple logistics services for use by customers. Preferably, these services are integrated, or "bundled" together by the provider. These firms facilitate the movement of parts and materials from suppliers to manufacturers, and finished products from manufacturers to distributors and retailers.” There are 5 different categories of 3PL services: Logistics, Transportation, Warehousing, Special Services, and Technology. Logistics services add value through planning, while transportation services add value by executing those plans. Transportation services include: Small Package, Air Cargo, Ocean, Less Than Truckload, Truckload, Fleet Acquisition, Equipment / Drivers, Dedicated Contract Carriage, Intermodal, Final Mile, Rail. Logistics services include: 3rd party logistics, 3PL, 4th party logistics, 4PL, Just-in-Time (JIT), Payment Auditing, Freight Auditing, Payment Processing, Freight brokerage, Freight broker, Digital Freight Brokerage. Warehousing services include: Warehouse Storage, Pick and Pack, Sub-assembly, Site Location, Distribution Center Management, Inbound Shipping, Outbound shipping, Receiving, Putaway, Put-away, Order processing, Replenishment, Pulling, Restocking, Picking, Validation, Sorting, Distribution Center Management System (DCMS), Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), Inventory Management, Cross-docking, Cross-dock, Ecommerce Fulfillment, Packaging. Special services include: Direct to Home, Direct to Store, Sustainability, Green Logistics, Reverse Logistics, Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Security Analysis, Contingency planning, Crisis Planning, Global Expansion, Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ), Logistics Consulting, Transportation Consulting, Import / Export, Customs, Labor Management, Marketing Services, Customer Service Technology services include: Supply Chain Technology, Freight technology, EDI, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Predictive Analytics, Technology Services, Web Services, Global Trade Management (GTM), Transportation Management System (TMS), Warehouse Management System (WMS), Supplier Management, Customer Management, Cloud Based Solutions, Wireless. Learn More About Transportation vs Logistics Marty Wadle's LinkedIn Ruan Transportation Marty Wadle on Des Moines and Ruan Successful Bulk Food Transport with Chris Fish The Basics of Dedicated Contract Carriage with Bob Elkins Technology Alone Won't Integrate Your Supply Chain with Paul Jensen Ruan White Paper: Selecting the Right 3PL Partner The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube
GuiaKast Ricardo Silva – Gerente Sênior de Supply Chain na Kemira – empresa que ajuda a construir sociedades mais sustentáveis. Executivo da área de Supply Chain com +25 anos de experiência em operações voltadas para a Cadeia de Suprimentos. Com experiência em empresas multinacionais dos segmentos químico e eletroeletrônico voltadas para as áreas de Logística, Serviço ao Cliente, Compras, Planejamento de Materiais, além de Importação e Exportação. Graduação em Engenharia Mecânica Industrial pela Escola de Engenharia Industrial, pós-graduação em Comércio Exterior pelo Centro Integrado de Educação do Amazonas, MBA em Cadeia de Suprimentos e Logística pela FGV e Mestrado Profissional para a Competitividade em Supply Chain também pela FGV.Se você estiver ouvindo esse episódio pelo Spotify não esqueça de clicar no botão “seguir”, se você estiver ouvindo pelo Apple Podcasts deixe 5 estrelas e comentário que eu leio todos. Me adiciona também no
Cesar Meireles - Managing Director (CEO) na Talent Log – empresa de Consultoria e Planejamento Empresarial. Executivo da área de logística com +34 anos de experiência em operações voltadas para a logística em geral, cadeias de suprimentos e distribuição ocupando posições C-Level como executivo sênior em empresas de grande porte do Brasil.Atuou por cerca de 9 anos como Diretor Presidente | CEO na ABOL (Associação Brasileira de Operadores de Logística), é vice-presidente da ALALOG (Associação Latino-Americana de Logística), é diretor do Deinfra (Departamento de Infraestrutura e Logística) e da FIESP (Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo) e também presidente do Conselho Internacional do Brasil Export. É atualmente CEO da Talent Log onde vem trabalhando junto a operadores logísticos para o planejamento e desenvolvimento de estratégias e inovação para aproximação das empresas com interesse em consolidação, fusões e aquisições.Se você estiver ouvindo esse episódio pelo Spotify não esqueça de clicar no botão “seguir”, se você estiver ouvindo pelo Apple Podcasts deixe 5 estrelas e comentário que eu leio todos. Me adiciona também no
In this episode, we're talking about leveraging data to gain end to end visibility, focusing on Customs and how technology can solve the documentation crisis with regards to Brexit. We also discuss how the high street will have to adapt quickly to the new consumer behaviour to compete with e-commerce. Lastly, we discuss nearshoring and emerging markets in south-east Asia.I am pleased to join Graham Illingworth, a supply chain and logistics professional with over 30 years of experience in our industry, joined me. Graham Initially started in the industry as an officer In the Merchant Navy, who then migrated into a mix of Operational and Business Development roles with a global remit. Over the last 15 years, he has held senior management and Vice President level positions within the top 10 Global 4PL organizations.In the episode, we are going to dive into: Customs, Data & Brexit How the high street needs to learn fast to compete with E-CommNearshoring strategies and emerging markets in south-east AsiaTwo links on CustomsPlus: https://www.customsplus.co.uk/automated-customs-declarationshttps://biteable.com/watch/2927999/2aead477d7500368a21c4905ca5622be
This fireside chat between FreightWaves' John Kingston, Tim Sensenig, CEO for TMSforce and TMSfirst, and Rick Gonzalez, SVP, Global Operation at TMSforce, focuses on how 4PLs are different from 3PLs, and how customers can benefit with a 4PL.Apple PodcastSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
This fireside chat between FreightWaves' John Kingston, Tim Sensenig, CEO for TMSforce and TMSfirst, and Rick Gonzalez, SVP, Global Operation at TMSforce, focuses on how 4PLs are different from 3PLs, and how customers can benefit with a 4PL.Apple PodcastSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
Allen Trevett and Lauren Mayher discuss what a logistics control tower is, when it can be helpful and benefits of this solution. The nervous system in your body controls everything you do. A 4PL control tower is the nervous system of your global supply chain.Apple PodcastSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
Allen Trevett and Lauren Mayher discuss what a logistics control tower is, when it can be helpful and benefits of this solution. The nervous system in your body controls everything you do. A 4PL control tower is the nervous system of your global supply chain.Apple PodcastSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts
Rafael Rosales esta cursando una Maestria en Administracion de Empresas en la Universidad de Harvard. Posee más de 10 años de experiencia en logística internacional en los sectores de Retail, Aviación, 3PL y 4PL. Actualmente dirige el departamento de Logistica de la Embajada de Estados Unidos en El Salvador.La verdadera pasión de Rafael es la educación y el aprendizaje continuo. Para el, la educación es una experiencia que fortalece y construye el carácter de cada individuo. Es el gran ecualizador de nuestro tiempo; da esperanza a los desesperados y crea oportunidades para los que no tienen, ya que otorga a las personas un acceso sin precedentes a recursos y conocimientos que mejorarán no solo la calidad de su vida, sino también la sociedad y las comunidades a las que posteriormente servirán.Sigue a Rafael Rosales en LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-rosales-8b537659/Reparto y EquipoPresentadora y Coproductora: Thalía Noboa Lamar Director creativo y coproductor: Aalok Rathod Editora: Thalía Noboa LamarArte de la portada: Aalok RathodMúsica: Joakim Karud
What if we told you that you may be approaching Amazon in all the wrong ways? Many brands, especially more established ones who started out in brick and mortar, have been playing a game of catch up while trying to quickly figure out how to sell on Amazon and win. But it may feel like a confusing place to win. Especially if a brand is trying to apply a brick and mortar sales approach, like winning a category, to online platforms like Amazon, Target, or Walmart.But we all love a good underdog story, which is why we invited Andrea Leigh to the show to share her secrets. Andrea is the VP of Strategy & Insights at Ideoclick, a full-service ecommerce optimization platform. Before Ideoclick, she spent nearly a decade working for Amazon, so she is coming to the table with a true insider’s view and strategies in her back pocket that she’s seen work on Amazon and other marketplaces.In this interview, which was one of my favorites I’ve ever done so far this year, Andrea and I discuss why brands need to accept the death of the category and start thinking about how to stand out against an entire competitive set. Doing that means repositioning your brand and winning the share of search, it means optimizing for SEO, and it also means going back to the basics of differentiation so that you’re not just another option in a sea of products that look exactly the same. Plus, we talk about selling across multiple ecommerce platforms, and how to think about Amazon releasing “white label” product lines. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did!Main Takeaways:Category Chaos: Brick-and-mortar shopping lends itself to categorization, but in the world of ecommerce, particularly on Amazon, categories are not something brands should focus on. Customers shopping online are fed suggestions based on their entire history of shopping, so when they search for something like peanut butter, they don’t just see Jif and Skippy, they see that and then anything peanut butter adjacent that might resonate with them even a tiny bit. With this in mind, brands need to figure out how to compete in entire segments, rather than specific categories.One Metric To Rule Them All: Share of search is one of the best metrics an ecommerce brand can look at to measure everything from how customers are finding them, to what the customer experience is when they search for something, to who the competition is in their set. Mining For Gold: One of the places that Amazon has excelled is aggregating consumer complaints, and then coming out with an Amazon Basics product that addresses all of them, which then becomes a top-seller. CPG brands large and small should be employing a similar approach. And, they should be highlighting the bells and whistles of their product that separates them from the white-label product that any marketplace offers because that is what differentiates you from the mass amount of search results a consumer will be combing through.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Andrea Leigh, the VP of strategy and insights at Ideoclick. Andrea, welcome.Andrea:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on too. I was looking through your bio and I saw that you were at Amazon for almost a decade, and I'm sure you have some good juicy stories from that those 10 years.Andrea:I do. It was a wild, wild ride. I think when I started, I was employee 4,012 or something like that, and then when I left, 99.9% of the company had started working there after me, so I was literally a dinosaur. Yeah.Stephanie:Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So what were, high level, some of the things that you did at Amazon and are any of those things still relevant today?Andrea:Yeah, I think they're super relevant. I spent my entire career there working on their ecommerce business, and everything from the early days of helping launch their price matching software, the software they use to price-match other retailers. I worked on Harry Potter book launches back when print books were the only way to read books. We also had some things that we did with Oprah's Book Club. I worked on the launch of the grocery category on Amazon.com, and the Fulfilled by Amazon program there, helped launch the baby registry and built the baby category after Amazon severed ties with Babies R Us.Andrea:I was general manager for Amazon Fresh for a little while. At my last three years there, probably the most exciting, I moved onto our Canada business and I launched 15 product categories for Amazon Canada. I ran the Prime program up there, and then I also managed our transportation network. And that was probably my most exciting role because it was certainly cross functional. But I think the common thread is, and probably why I liked Canada so much in the later years was just, I really, really enjoy working with the manufacturer community.Andrea:I think that the process that they go through to really understand the customer, to build products, to address customer needs, and then to figure out how to connect consumers to the values that they've built in their products, I think is just really exciting, and figuring out how to do that online is even more exciting. Certainly, in the early years of Amazon, we spent a lot of time working with brand manufacturers and partnering with them because we weren't very big back then and we were really trying to get these categories built and to get customers shopping online for things besides books.Andrea:And I found that to be really enjoyable because every manufacturer has a unique set of challenges. It's like a puzzle to be and to collaborate on. And that's still what I get a chance to do today at Ideoclick and really, really enjoy that process of helping manufacturers solve those puzzles. And we certainly don't have all the answers, but I think it's a similar process to go through with each manufacturer to identify where they are on their ecommerce journey, and then help them figure out how they're going to build a sustainable business.Stephanie:That's awesome. So tell me a bit about Ideoclick. How did you think about creating Ideoclick? And what is it? What does it do? How does it help companies?Andrea:Yeah. We're an ecommerce optimization platform, and we're a hybrid of a software solution and a services organization. And my husband actually started Ideoclick about 13 years ago. We were both working at Amazon together at the time, he left and started Ideoclick and I stayed at Amazon for 10 more years. And I joined up with him about, it was probably like four or five years ago now, to help him run Ideoclick. And really, it came from the same place that I was talking about earlier, really wanting to work more closely with the manufacturers, help them figure out how to navigate Amazon.Andrea:As Amazon became bigger and bigger, not only did it become more important to the manufacturers' business, but it started to become a little unwieldily in terms of how to be successful, how to make sure your products stand out, and how to negotiate and operate. With such a big player, that's so unique and looks so different from brick and mortar, which is what most manufacturers have been really accustomed to for so many years. And so Ideoclick was really born out of that to help manufacturers navigate these waters. And we are a full service, white glove providers.Andrea:So we do everything from setting up the items in the digital catalog, writing content, running all of the automated advertising on Amazon, Walmart, Target and Instacart, and also going back and assisting with operations, managing the chargebacks and fees that the retailers often slap on the manufacturers and recovering some of those fees. So we're a full service agency, we're in a category called managed services.Stephanie:Got it. So what are some of the biggest maybe missteps that manufacturers or sellers are making on the platform where you're like, "I've got all these secrets from an exec at Amazon that I know how to prevent that or why you shouldn't be doing that." What kind of things are you preventing from happening when you're working with them?Andrea:Yeah. I think my answer would have been really different a couple of years ago, especially COVID impact on ecommerce. Amazon's not the only game in town anymore, and these other platforms, more specifically Walmart and Target, but if you look category by category, they're a becoming a really big player in each space, whether it's Wayfair for furniture, or Sephora and ULTA for beauty, or Chewy for pets, there's a player there that's starting to represent a sizeable portion of the business. So a couple of years ago, I would've said getting these Amazon foundational things right is the most important and it's the biggest misstep.Andrea:But I think now we would say not having a strategy across all of these eCom players is a real big misstep, and shooting from the hip, because I think we're in a world where these retailers are in fierce competition with one another, they're price-matching each other, they're very closely watching what one another is doing. And you don't want the customer to suffer as a result of that. And so having a strategy that does things like differentiating assortment or helps you figure out how you're going to allocate your ad budgets, now that all these platforms have ad platforms associated with them as well.Andrea:I think that shooting from the hip is probably the most common misstep that we see. But I think some of the same things still hold true from several years ago, which is just getting those foundational elements right. There's certainly little tricks you can do and little black hat tactics that will get you some more reviews real quick or help you get to the top of search. We don't focus on that stuff, it's not sustainable, most of it's against Amazon's policies. So it's really about making sure your products are in stock, making sure you have the correct information on your product pages, making sure that you've got resources internally within your organization to support ecommerce and to drive it, making sure that you have good SEO and you're making use of the ad platform in appropriate ways.Stephanie:So now that you just mentioned SEO, I do want to talk a bit about categories. I know that you've been on, maybe a brand or whatever it may be for a while around like, categories aren't the way forward anymore, and that you really need to optimize for search, just like you would anywhere else. So tell me a little bit about how ecommerce owners should think about that going forward. Why is Amazon not as focused on categories anymore? Or maybe the buyer's not focused there?Andrea:Yeah, I think it really starts with the customer, and the customer not being as focused on categories. I can tell a little story that might help illustrate it. We had a manufacturer come to us and say, "I'm like the number two or three bottled water brand in the world, and so I should be number two in my category on Amazon." And there are a number of reasons why that thinking is a little bit out of date or flawed. When a customer goes to Amazon and searches for bottled water, they don't just see bottled water, they see tea and electrolyte water and powdered electrolytes for water and ice, flavored water, and all kinds of things that are category adjacent. But they may also see things that are out of category.Andrea:Peanut butter is another great example. If you search peanut butter on Amazon, you're going to get some peanut butter, you're going to get peanut butter crackers, you're going to get peanut butter bars. And it's not because like Amazon is not thoughtful about deciding what to return in those search results, for example, they're returning those products because those are the products customers are buying. Their algorithms are very, very smart. And even from an advertising perspective, you can't win those ad slots unless there's a history of customers making that search and buying your product.Andrea:And so the concept of a brick and mortar category totally makes sense if a customer is going to a store, they're going down an aisle, they're presented with bottled water, they choose from what's available to them, and then they move on to shop at a different category. But eCom customers don't shop that way, the category is dynamic, it's continually evolving, shaped around that customer. And what they've specifically looked at when retailers are using automation and personalization. And so you can't really apply that same mental model to ecommerce. You have to really think about that entire competitive set.Andrea:And so that manufacturer who thought he should be number two or number three bottled water brand his competitors on Amazon, aren't just bottled water, as we stated, they're tea and they're electrolyte water and all kinds of other things. So his competitive set is different, but also because ecommerce platforms and more specifically, Amazon, has frictionless entry, so any manufacturer can sell on Amazon, the competitive set is going to look a lot different than in a brick and mortar store where you have like a buyer making assortment decisions.Andrea:So, whereas there might be five or 10 nationally recognized brands in a brick and mortar store and maybe a couple of local players and private label, on Amazon, there is a huge long tail of brands that are not nationally distributed, maybe only sell on Amazon so that competitive set looks entirely different. And I think that's a big misstep that manufacturers make, is applying that same mental model, trying to look at like market share and category and ranking category, versus moving their thinking to the ecommerce world where there's really no such thing as a category.Stephanie:Yeah. The only time I can see categories being helpful is if you're in the browsing mood where you're like, I'm going to be having a baby, and I just want to see, what do you buy for babies? So like if you're in that browsing mood, which maybe isn't always high intent to buy, more just kind of looking around and maybe you buy, or if it's a curated category, like here's the guest for Father's Day. I have found those helpful where I'm like, I don't know what to get my dad, and on the homepage, it's like, "Here's a whole... " Maybe it's not a category, but the whole curated collection, pick one and go.Andrea:And that's where I think some of these category specific players win over Amazon. They do encourage more browsing because they are curated assortment, because their browse and data are really clean, and it's a more enjoyable experience. But if yo did try to shop by category on Amazon, the data shows that more than 90% of customers just go and start searching, you would maybe not like what you found. It's an overwhelming experience, it's not curated in any way. And then the categorization data is bad because Amazon doesn't use it. They're building a search platform more than they are building a browse platform. And I do think these other eCom players, this is where they can win over Amazon, is they make the shopping experience more enjoyable, they encourage browse, and they curate the assortment.Stephanie:Yeah. We just had on a company called The Fascination. It was about discovering new D2C companies and being able to browse around. But once again, that's highly curated versus just going to a category and being like, "Whoa, let's see what's here today. Oh, there's like 1,000 things. No, thanks." So if we're in a search world now, where you need to optimize for that instead of just worrying about being the number two water bottle, showing up in the category, how should a brand be thinking about that? How do you optimize for search? Are you bidding on keywords? Do you have to use just Amazon platform? Or is it more of like a holistic approach of like, you got to have a good product, you have to have good reviews, and all encompassing?Andrea:Well, certainly it's a whole package deal. There's not like one thing that drives all of the success. But I do think that really understanding that customer and the process we go through at Ideoclick and manufacturers could go through a similar process on their own is we identify these customer search groups. Identify the customer that you're going after and the product that meets their needs. And then from there, what are all of the search terms that customer might search when they're looking for that product? And then bouncing that against if there's any search philosophy. Amazon publishes that data, so it's knowable to know if a search actually has any volume associated with it. And then that's your customer search group. And then we're able to measure progress on achieving placement in search on that customer search group relative to the competition. So the way that we're doing that is, in a brick and mortar world, this would be like market share.Andrea:Like you'd say, "What are my sales over the entire category sales?" And in ecommerce what we do is share of search search. So we say, "What are all of my positions within those first 20, 30 search results relative to the entire set?" And obviously, there's some weighting associated with that, because like if you're up on top, that's more valuable, drives more sales than if you're like down at the bottom or the customer has to scroll a lot on their phones. So measuring that share of search for your customer search group relative to the competition.Andrea:And it does a couple of things that I think are a lot better than a brick and mortar market share model. The first is it very quickly identifies who your competitors are. So if you didn't know which... Most manufacturers don't know who their Amazon competitors are, and that's because manufacturers, when they're checking on their products on Amazon, tend to search for their brand name. So of course you're going to get your products. But if you take a step back and instead of searching for your branded facial moisturizer, you search for face moisturizer, you're going to see an entirely different picture of who's turning up.Andrea:And so this allows you to really measure your percentage of that customer experience, essentially, going back to the customer. And in addition, it gives you more of an upstream look at what's about to happen. So market share is, it already happened, your sales occurred and now you're measuring as a percentage of a total. This allows you to affect what's going to happen in the future, so it's an upstream, maybe an input metric versus an output metric. And then lastly, the share of search is measuring like a finite amount of the first or second page, which is really, as far as the customer is typically going on like a basic search...Andrea:And that looks a lot different in terms of number of brands than what you might see in like a finite category on a brick and mortar shelf. So there may be more brands, more types of categories represented, and measuring that as the percentage of a customer experience really allows you to develop some advanced strategies against those competitors.Stephanie:Is Amazon providing the tools so you can see your share of search, or are you doing this for your customers? Or if I was by myself trying to be like, "Who are my competitors?" Would I be going through the first three pages and being like, "Here they are? How do I figure out that share of search?Andrea:Yeah, it's really tricky. So we have software that does it for us, and share a search is our proprietary offering that we provide to our clients. But it wouldn't be hard to do a very simplistic view of this, which is identify like five terms that you think matter for your product, run a search and count how many of the first page you have. It's not a difficult activity. To get more nuanced about it and track it over time and track all the competitors and all of that, obviously you need some software, but you can do a really simplistic look. And this is often what we do for a manufacturer who is considering working with us, we'll take a look, we'll do a quick share of search audit and do exactly that exercise.Andrea:What are the five terms that we think matter? How much of the page they have, and who else is showing up? And you can really quickly see how you fair relative to those competitors, not just in the position of search, but like how many reviews do you have versus the competition? What's your star rating? What's your price point look like? What is your packaging look like? It's a very fast view of how you compare in this marketplace. And there are some really aggressive brands out there. We have clients that come to us and they say, "I'm private equity backed, I am a new go-to-market brand," no one has ever heard of them, "I have no distribution, and I want to get distribution in Costco next year, in a year. What is your plan for me?"Andrea:And we have a program for that. It involves a really, really large marketing investment. But but that's what these traditional manufacturers are up against, are these really upstart brands that are doing pure play Amazon and really trying to make a presence for themselves. And while they feel like ankle biters when you're just looking at the Amazon search results, next year when they are in Costco, they're no longer ankle biters.Stephanie:Yeah. Which is what's great about it. How do you think about when someone comes to you and says they want to be in Costco... I mean, I've read amazing articles about how Costco will make sure that your product... Like their product always has to be slightly better, but they'll also still work with you to make sure that your yours is selling as well. So one example was like Starbucks. They made sure that their coffee, Costco brand, Kirkland brand was a little bit better than Starbucks based off whatever criteria, but then they also made sure that Starbucks was also being sold, or whatever the brand name was, in a way that it wasn't cannibalizing.Stephanie:But Amazon feels a little bit different when they come out with white label versions of things. You see that, and you're like, "Oh crap. There goes my products."Andrea:Look out.Stephanie:Yeah. That's the one thing that I think sellers are scared of now, is Amazon just copying you? How do you deal with them?Andrea:Well, I think you touched on a couple of things. The first is the beauty of a value-added retailer like Costco for a manufacturer. In that model, in the value-added retailer model, the retailer takes responsibility for the inventory, for the promotion, for making sure it sells, for the profitability, for curation, deciding what the product should be. All of that happens on the retailer side. And that's true across traditional retail, whether you're talking about an ULTA or a Nordstrom or whomever, they own that responsibility. In marketplaces, the responsibility is all shifted back to the manufacturer, so they decide what assortment they're going to carry, they decide how they're going to price it, they have to promote it and market it. And it's a really different model.Andrea:So I think that's one interesting thing about what you were talking about, is that Costco does that. And when retailers complain about Amazon or say how much of their business Amazon's stealing, I think it's important to remember they're there to lean into their strengths, which is providing this value add for these manufacturers and reducing a lot of that burden, and usually, producing a higher profit margin for that manufacturer because they don't have to take on all of that work themselves. On the private label front, it's really interesting what Amazon's doing there. Some of the categories like consumables are getting up to about 10% of the sales being Amazon private label, which is really... And fashion, I think, was maybe even higher than that.Andrea:As a part of Amazon's antitrust hearings, they had to release that data and you have to dig around to find it, but it shares the percentage of each category sales that are driven by Amazon private label. It's really interesting. And manufacturers will often come to us and they'll say, "Oh my gosh, my life is over. Amazon just launched a private label in my category." But I think really, it's an opportunity for the manufacturer to really be more on their toes. And a great example of that is, if you take a look at Amazon Basics, they have a luggage spinner. And if you search luggage spinner, suitcase, or whatever, you see Amazon Basics and you see Samsonite and a bunch of others.Andrea:And the Basics, it's like a third of the price and it looks just the same. And I think what's really interesting here is that Samsonite has an opportunity. If you actually click through to the product pages, you still can't really see a difference. But as a part of an article I was writing, I then went to the Samsonite manufacturer site and actually specked out what's really different about it, and there were enormous differences. It was like a TSA compatible lock, it had all of these extra features that weren't even coming through on the product page, that certainly weren't coming through in the title and the search results and the hero image.Andrea:And so I think Amazon is going to usually come in at this lower price point and this more value driven offering. And for these manufacturers who have better bells and whistles on their products, talk about them. I mean, it's classic differentiation stuff, just the way you differentiate looks a lot different in an ecommerce marketplace. Like you have to do it through the images and you have to make sure that the bullet points really display that, you have to have a title that calls out something about the feature that's really unique. I do think Amazon's seeing a lot of success with their private label because they are able to leverage their own platform and they know it best.Andrea:But through share of search, we've also identified enormous holes in their strategy from a marketing perspective, like entire categories of keywords they aren't bidding on, and then you can get really granular and really go after those holes that Amazon's left wide open. And I think it's because I think the reason Amazon has those holes is they're using an algorithm to drive their private label. It's not people back there saying, "Okay, we got to bid on these five keywords. These are the ones that matter, and here are the features that everyone cares about." And then I think if you don't have a point of differentiation against Amazon's private label, it's time to take a real hard look at your product, because if it's that copyable, it's not just Amazon private label that can copy it.Andrea:But also, if you often look at the differences between the top selling product in the category... Soup's a great example, you can search chicken noodle soup on Amazon, and Amazon has totally innovated the packaging and the format of the product to address all of the customer complaints. Canned soup is terrible online, it dents. No one really likes to eat anything out of a can anyway. So Campbell Soup showing the can traditional format, you look at Amazon's chicken noodle soup, it comes in a reclosable box, which is one of the top complaints in the reviews about the Campbell Soup, which is like, "I can only eat half of it. And then what do I do with it?"Andrea:It ships in its own container, so they're all nicely tightly packaged into a box so it doesn't dent or get damaged in the shipping. It's way more profitable for both the retailer and the manufacturer. So I think there are some areas where Amazon's really innovated on the behalf of the customer and it should be keeping manufacturers on their toes.Stephanie:Yeah. That's such a great point. So many things to unravel there, thinking about, you need to be different and leaning into your differences. And the whole point of having a product is to have a great story and showcase your features and don't get complacent. I love that. I could see even being able to look through the data and find opportunities, just like Amazon is, of like going through reviews and seeing what is someone complaining about? Oh, so many people keep talking about this, creating a whole spin off product, I guess Amazon could do the same, but it seems like there's a lot of opportunity in the data that's already there too.Andrea:There is. And I think this is one area that large established CPGs really struggle, and it's because they have so many brands and they carry so many products. If you're a nutrition bar and you only have 20 items on Amazon and you're growing really fast, it's really easy for you to look through the reviews on your 20 items and come to develop some insights and say, "Okay five people are complaining that they think it's a little bit too sweet, or 10 don't like the sugar content," or whatever. And you can re adjust your product in your next product development cycle. But if you're a large established CPG working across so many brands, so many different categories, I did my air quotes there.Andrea:But if you're a large established consumer brand, maybe you've got 1,500, 2,500, 5,000 items, there's no scalable way to do that right now. And I think that's an excellent business opportunity for someone to get into, which is like really analyzing some of that consumer feedback. I actually just had an MBA student from Northwestern reach out to me through a connection wanting to talk about like that very business idea. She's like, "What about all the customer reviews? Who's got data, that's mining that?" And I'm like, "No one." There are some players out there like Reviewbox and I think Profitero, and maybe even Salsify to some degree that allow you to access them, because Amazon doesn't even provide them, you have to just look at them, and develop some basic insights and maybe some word clouds and things like that.Andrea:But there's so much more to be gained from those reviews that would really help inform product development.Stephanie:We've even heard from so many of our guests talking about the long tail reviews or where the insights are. I think we had someone from HP and then Stitch Fix, of course, talking about like, that's the ones that you need to dive into to see... If someone's providing paragraphs of data to tell you how to make your product better, you better be looking at that and seeing, are enough people saying that? To pivot whatever product you're working on.Andrea:Yeah. You really need some natural language processing technology to really make the most of those reviews. But either Amazon has it or they're just really good at it, because if you look at... I could give so many examples of this, but if you search short-sleeve wrap dress, they have an Amazon Basics, it's a top seller, I even have it. It's a great dress.Stephanie:How did they stick that one up?Andrea:And relative to like the top three other results, I mean, you go through the negatives on the other top three results, and it's like, "It's too short, so it's not work appropriate. It doesn't wrap enough to be able to sit down in it well enough at work. It doesn't come and extended sizes." Those were the top three complaints. And Amazons comes out with an offering that's more conservative, slightly longer, comes in extended size. It immediately just addressed all of the things, all of the negative reviews about the other top three sellers. They've either got something that's helping them do that, or they're just really good at it.Stephanie:Yeah. But I think that also just plays to the point of needing to be diversified and beyond all the platforms. I look at Walmart right now and so many influencers are showing me stuff from Walmart, I'm just even thinking... I've bought rugs in the past month, I bought an egg chair from Walmart, all because these influencers are talking about stuff at Walmart, which also I think has increased quality a lot, and they are becoming a larger player. Maybe their tech and backend still needs a little bit of work and out of stock issues and all that, but I do see them coming up strong. Target also. How do you advise the companies you work with to think about all the platforms and be on all of them and optimize for each one in a unique way?Andrea:Yeah. And I think that's really the million-dollar question, because up until a couple of years ago, those other eCom platforms didn't really matter as much, up until last year, they didn't even have ad platforms. The world is moving and changing so quickly. I actually was just giving an internal speech right before this to our employee base and I was like, "Retail, if you really go back, is meant to be a really simple business. It's, a manufacturer has a product, they sell it to the retailer, and the retailer resells it." And the people who grew up with that model, it's relatively uncomplex or simple process. But if you just look at what's happened over the last five years, even five years ago, you had to be advertising on Amazon and search engines like Google and maybe even Facebook at that time.Andrea:Now, there's social live streaming, there's social media networks, and you have retailer ad platforms. The level of complexity that these manufacturers are faced with right now, and if you think about the ones who lived through all of this, they weren't attracted to this field because it was a technology field, they were attracted to this field because it was really based in sales and product. And so the level of complexity that they are faced with is an enormous. And I was in a share group the other day where a manufacturer called the...Andrea:In our space, we're like the service providers, it's super fragmented, it's a ton of point solutions that help these manufacturers be successful across all these different platforms. He called it a Frankenstein, and this company that was presenting at the share group was working with 35 different service providers from data and analytics to execution, to strategy and execution and strategies, where we set to operations and EDI and inventory management, and how do you allocate inventory across all these platforms. So there's certainly no perfect answer to how do you think across the different eCom platforms, but I do think it's important to really think about, where's your customer?Andrea:Is your customer shopping on Walmart, Target and Amazon? And most of them are because most of them are cross shopping. Where else is your customer shopping? What category specific players should be really important to you? And then where are you most profitable? And where can you get a good ROI? And what platform do you use for what? For Target, it's a little bit more about that curated assortment being on trend with merchandise and being associated with, Target gives your brand a little bit of a boost.Andrea:Walmart stands more for value, Amazon is about assortment, and obviously, price and all of that, but I think really aligning yourself with the marketplaces that are core to your brand's identity feels really important. So the customer, what's consistent with your brand, and then in terms of the investments to make across them. A lot of the fundamentals are pretty similar, so that's good, you have to have those, you have to be retail ready. And the ad platforms are similar, but different in very important ways. And so I think when you think about how to allocate those investments, then it really comes down to profit and what you're trying to accomplish, if it's awareness, if it's maintaining your position in the market, whatever it is.Stephanie:Yeah. I always think about the opportunity that exists for manufacturers of creating a piece of tech that allows them to plug in all the inputs that they have to deal with, even when I'm having companies come on and say, "Oh, we feature D2C companies on our website and they have a backend place to log on." And like, okay, that's one place. Then they're on Amazon and then they're on Walmart, and they're trying to figure out their own inventory stuff. There's so much stuff for them to keep track of that it feels like there's no unifying source right now for them to be able to get a holistic picture of their company as a whole.Andrea:In fact, I got this urgent call yesterday from this guy, this colleague of mine that I've worked with in the past, and he's teaching a course at Harvard right now called The Future Of Work in one of the courses. And he called me yesterday, he's like, "Okay, I'm preparing for this thing, I'm making a deck, I'm showing this crazy environment that we're in with all these providers and all these different things that these manufacturers have to keep track of." He's like, "Who are the service providers who can help them unify it?" And I was like, "There aren't any. It's not because you didn't look hard enough, it doesn't exist."Stephanie:I always think like, "Who is out there?" I even asked an exec, I'm like, "What do you do?" And they're like, "Oh, it's just hard." I'm like, "Someone needs to solve this."Andrea:Someone needs to solve it. It would be a really big job, but even just take like logistics like 3PLs. So you can outsource your warehousing and your purchase order fulfillment either direct to customer or to retailers to a three PL. I just did this as a part of an industry trends report. There are tons of 3PLs 70 some percent of them have fewer than five customers each. So it is a super fragmented industry. It's so fragmented in fact that the new trend is a 4PL. And a 4PL is a broker that helps you manage all your 3PLs.Stephanie:I have not heard about that yet.Andrea:Isn't that crazy? That's like a new cottage industry, is 4PLs, and that's the broker that helps you manage across the other PLs, I guess the other 3PLs. And that's just in logistics. So it's a really challenging space and I think what ends up happening, the ones that end up suffering... Right now, I think the manufacturers are suffering because all of this complexity deteriorates their profit margins. And then they also have to advertise on the reseller platforms now too, which is new, and pay and pay for that. But I think in the future, eventually, if no one figures this out, the customer's going to have to pay for it because the prices are going to go up.Andrea:The manufacturers can't shift from 5% of their business online to 50% of their business online, which is a much lower margin business for them and not raise their product costs. I just don't see how that happens. So hopefully, someone will figure it out.Stephanie:Yeah. Do you see any manufacturers doing it well right now where you're like, "Oh, I just talk with someone and they are doing it this way," that seems like it's streamlining at least a piece of the process. It might not be all of it, but any stories there that highlight someone doing something really good?Andrea:I think there are a few folks who are doing a really nice job designing for online. So that's first and foremost, make the packaging and products such that it's low weight and it ships economically, because that's number one. If you can't do that, if you're trying to still try to sell dry bags of conventional dog food or cat litter online, you have no future in that. And so we've certainly seen like Clorox do some really interesting things in the litter space, Purina36:10 they're doing lightweight litter. There's some great examples of companies designing for online.Andrea:So, how do you build a sustainably ecommerce business? Well, make sure that it can ship well or the retailers aren't going to want it, and you don't have a future in it. So I think there's some good examples of that. Clorox is also doing, they did a green works product a while back that instead of selling three bottles of spray cleaner, there's one bottle with two tiny concentrate refills, so it's less water, it's less waste, it's more sustainable packaging. I'm certainly seeing some really cool stuff from some upstart brands. There's one called Ethique, which does shampoo and conditioner bars.Andrea:That's, again, less weight, ships really well, online store as well, it doesn't leak. And then we're certainly seeing a lot with Liquid I.V. and all of the electrolyte powder drinks. So moving from selling it as a bottle that has water in it that you can't ship to powder. So some interesting stuff on designing for online. I think there are some companies who do a really nice job like aligning their org structures to support ecommerce. I think some good examples of that would probably be, L'Oreal does a really nice job there, P&G has a pretty solid and smart eCom department.Andrea:There are a few CPGs who do a really good job there. And then I think the one that everyone seems to struggle with those logistics, especially the larger CPGs, they're built to scale products and ship truckloads and not necessarily fill direct customer orders or ship like super small quantities to all these little Amazon warehouses. So I think logistics is really been hard on the CPG industry, ecommerce logistics.Stephanie:Yeah. I only see it getting harder and worse. I'm thinking about my interview with Domm from Fast, and him talking about one click checkout where they'll batch the orders on the backend for you buy, buy, buy all in separate transactions, but that's still also encouraging one-off orders that maybe you wouldn't have had otherwise that maybe brands aren't used to, someone just coming in and buying one shampoo or something because normally they have limits. So I only see it getting more difficult as technology gets better and they figure out how to make things easier to buy, it just makes it harder logistically.Andrea:Yeah. And I'm starting to see, I just feel like ecommerce retailers have gone I've really come a long way on this in the last couple of years probably to compete with Amazon, but I can't remember which retailer said, he was Wayfair, I was shopping on the other day. And they suggest that, they're like, "Batch my orders, you can select it. It's like defaults to batch my orders, so they all show up on one day or you can check the other boxes, no ship them each as they become available. And Amazon has been also doing that because in ecommerce, at least on the Amazon, the average order's one.Stephanie:Yeah. And I think that's what Domm said that Amazon's been doing this for a long time, it's that most ecommerce companies aren't doing that. So that's why on Amazon, you can always go and hit, buy now, buy now, buy now, and you don't even think.Andrea:And they'll try and batch it.Stephanie:They'll try and figure it out, but you don't even have to worry about a cart anymore. And that seems to be the way of the future, but I'm just thinking about these smaller brands who are trying to, up and coming, trying to get their foothold and then be like, "Oh my gosh, customers are expecting to be able to just hit, click buy for one thing, and I wasn't prepared for that."Andrea:I think we're going to continue to see... We'll certainly continue to see Amazon grow, they had an amazing quarter, but also I think we'll continue to see customers really being less loyal. And I think that because these other retailers are really upping their game. And if you look at, there was a study that came out that showed the top reseller app downloads in 2020, Walmart was right there under Amazon. And granted Amazon is a huge in-store base, so we need to take it with a grain of salt. Wayfair was on there, Wish, all these other retailers.Andrea:And so I think the pandemic has forced us all to shop more online, but also due to product availability, shop more across retailers. And as a result, we have discovered that the shopping experiences on some of these other retailers sites are more favorable to the types of products we're looking for. Maybe even more fun or more curated or whatever it is that you're looking for, and I think the retailers are starting to figure out how to be more efficient with batching orders or, remember when you used to have to go get your credit card every time you placed an order online?Andrea:They're all saving it now, I mean, stuff that we take for granted because Amazon set a really high bar. Stephanie:Yep. I love that. I know we don't have a ton of time, so I want a quick touch on Bezos. I know he just recently stepped down as CEO from Amazon, so I want to hear your hot take on what does that look like for Amazon of the future? How do you see that changing things?Andrea:Yeah. Well, first I should probably say, I don't know, Jeff personally, and I don't have any inside information. I've been gone from Amazon for five or six years now, but I do think if I were him and knowing what I know about him as the fearless leader, he's an inventor, that's what he's really good at, he's really good at inventing and disrupting industries and inventing on behalf of the customer experience. And when I look at what he has really had to focus his energy on the last couple of years, even pre-COVID, you had the antitrust investigation, they were under intense scrutiny for their treatment of their warehouse workers, counterfeits on the site and fake reviews, labor unionization efforts, here in Seattle, they've been under just a ton of intense pressure for contributing significantly to local elections.Andrea:Our local government put in place a headcount tax just to stick it to Amazon. And it's been really intense here, and also a lot of discussion about their role in increasing housing prices and driving the Seattle's homelessness epidemic. The stuff that he's had to deal with, a super public divorce, all of that stuff. And then you layer in COVID and all of the operational complexity of that that he had to deal with, nothing in there is inventing. And if I were him, I would not only be exhausted because I think the best way to exhaust an inventor is to tax them with a bunch of drama.Andrea:And so if I were him, I would be exhausted, and I'd be really bored, there's no inventing in there anywhere. They've made some really interesting inventions, I guess, disruptions more, I think of them less as inventions, more of disruptions as it relates to transportation. And in the earnings call yesterday, they said half of their packages now are being delivered by their own fleet. Incredible. They are a huge transportation company now, and they'll probably license that out and just walk out, but there's not a lot of inventing happening now, it's all about scaling, managing under scrutiny and really going head to head against some super fierce competition for ad dollars and for customers.Andrea:And so if I were Jeff, I'd be looking at the future and I would just be like, "Not interested, if I were an inventor and I was Jeff. So I think that speaks to why he would step down, I think timing it with going out on the high note with the Q4 earnings being just astoundingly positive probably makes sense. It's interesting, I don't know a lot about Jassy, but I think he was the CEO of AWS for a very long time and he's really good at scaling a business and scaling a business against adversity or fierce competition. If you look at what they are up against with Microsoft, and I think they even like filed a lawsuit against for an RFP that they didn't feel like was handled correctly, he really has gone head to head.Andrea:And I think that that's maybe signaling that Amazon's going to be a bit more about scaling and more about competing and a little bit less about inventing going forward, which maybe that's the stage that they're in.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, with a couple of minutes left, we have a quick lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question, but this time, you only have 30 seconds or less. Usually I get people a minute, but you're so quick, I'm like, you can't have a minute. You get 30 seconds.Andrea:I'll do my best.Stephanie:All right. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Andrea:I'm going to go logistics. I think the ability for other retailers and D2C to prevail against Amazon or compete effectively with Amazon, is going to be their ability to ship fast and for us to see some consolidation and maturity in that industry.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. If you were to have a podcast, which you're about to, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Andrea:Our podcast that we're going to have is Melissa Burdick of Pacvue, who is a competing agency for us in the ecommerce advertising space, and myself. And we're going to be doing a hot take on ecommerce current events. And my job as VP of strategy is all about staying current on ecommerce trends and news. And it's even hard for me to keep up, there's so much happening right now. And so we wanted to really try to provide a value to the manufacturer community of helping keep them current and tell them what they need to know. And then more importantly, tell them what we think it means for them.Stephanie:I love that. I can't wait to listen. What's up next on your reading list?Andrea:On my reading list, oh gosh. Well, I guess on my reading list is a lot of research because I'm trying to write a book about eCom.Stephanie:You're a busy lady.Andrea:I'm a busy lady. I'm trying to write a book about ecommerce and really transitioning our thinking beyond that physical aisle, kind of some of the things that we talked about today. So a lot of my research right now is reading some other pieces of thought leadership around that. And in fact, on my immediate reading list is I need to read a case about Unilever for my class with Harvard on Friday morning, and it's all about Unilever and how they have successfully transitioned to an ecommerce framework and mindset.Stephanie:Oh, I could come to your class too, that sounds good. Awesome. And then the last one, one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Andrea:I don't understand, well, I think a couple of areas, one is that as a manufacturer thinking about when is the right time to invest in the most forward-thinking ecommerce technology, which in my mind right now is live streaming. And I don't know a lot about live streaming, I'm learning more about it, I'm certainly watching some of it and trying to participate in it. So nascent here in the United States, but in China, it is incredibly powerful. And in this Harvard class, they had a woman who's a super influencer in China comes to the class and she live-streamed in the class and she was selling Harvard t-shirts, and I think she sold, I don't want to say like hundreds or thousands in a minute.Andrea:It was insane. And then they projected what was on her phone to the screen and we got to see it. And it really blew my mind that we're in such a different place as it relates to ecommerce. So I don't understand it super well, and I want to understand more of it so we can do a better job of helping our brands transition.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really good one. Definitely one I don't fully understand either, but I know it's very different market there, so maybe people shop differently, but any insights, bring in my way, because I don't get it either. Cool. Well, Andrea, it's been a blast having you on, I hope we can bring you back for round two in the future because I feel like I could probably keep going on for an extra hour if I didn't have a meeting in a couple of minutes, but where can people find out more about you and Ideoclick?Andrea:You can follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter, you can visit my website at Andreakleighconsulting.com. I write and speak and post very frequently about ecommerce. And you can find Ideoclick at Ideoclick.com.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much for joining us. It was a blast.Andrea:Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Brian Reed of Geodis discusses supply chain management solutions.Planning and forecasting 4:47. Goal of building a platform 23:48. Blue Yonder, i2 25:01. SAP, Oracle 24:43. ROI: 25:03. 3PL, 4PL 31:56. Blockchain 36:45. ML, AI 40:06. Importance of service (Geodis, Ernst & Young) with tools 55:12.
Nuestra plática con Carlos Plasencia, experto en el 4PL de KN, comenzó cuando nos dijo que hay que pensar fuera de la caja así que nos deja 3 tips para empezar a hacerlo. ¿Te imaginas estar en un salón de clases con antojo de helado y a los 45 minutos recibirlo? Esas son las maravillas que se logran combinando tecnología y logística, no te despegues porque hablaremos de e-commerce, almacenes airbnb y el uber cargo. Para cerrar el episodio tenemos una historia de terror muy divertida que nos comparte Carlos de sus aventuras en la logística.
Wow llegamos al episodio 20!! Nuestro invitado de esta semana es Carlos Plasencia, quien es el experto en 4PL en KN, lleva 20 años en logística buscando la mejora continúa y eso lo aplica en su vida diaria a la par de su trabajo. Con un ejemplo bastante sencillo nos explica que es un 4PL, los diferenciales y la tecnología que se puede aplicar, ¿te imaginas que la inteligencia artificial te ayude a prevenir un paro de planta? Carlos nos cuenta todo al respecto y nos dejará con la boca abierta!
Brian Reed of GEODIS discusses supply chain management solutions.Episode Notes:Planning and forecasting 4:47.Goal of building a platform 23:48.Blue Yonder, i2 25:01. SAP, Oracle 24:43. ROI: 25:03. 3PL, 4PL 31:56. Blockchain 36:45. ML, AI 40:06. Importance of service (GEODIS, Ernst & Young) with tools 55:12.
On Call with Insignia Ventures with Yinglan Tan and Paulo Joquino
"It's very important that you shouldn't be putting your eggs into one basket...It's very important [to] diversify your source of manufacturing, but more importantly work with a strong, robust, flexible logistics provider, such as Janio..." - Ali Madihid, COO & co-founder of Janio Asia" About the episode In the second part of our series on cross-border logistics in Southeast Asia, supply chain experts Ali Madihid and George Oliver take a deeper look into the opportunities for medium-sized businesses and SMEs amidst supply chain diversification. They also give their take on what cross-border logistics will be like in the next few months as economies reopen, markers for recovery, and maintaining agile operations in the midst of crisis. Both Ali and George have had extensive careers in logistics, and are now working with Janio, a 4PL solutions platform for Southeast Asia. This call was recorded May 12th. Timestamps 00:17 Introduction; 1:14 Goods impacted by supply chain diversification; 2:53 Impact of supply chain diversification on manufacturing and exports in Southeast Asia; 4:19 How to manage supply chains moving forward for mid-size companies and SMEs; 7:09 Thoughts on COVID19 impact on Ramadan; 9:20 Markers and indicators for recovery; 11:55 Keeping operations agile in a state of constant flux; 13:30 Recommendations on great content picked up over the lockdown; About our guests Ali Madihid Ali has over a decade of management experience in areas of business development, corporate strategy, global supply chain and operations management. He has held senior management roles in Expeditors International, SATS, Reebonz and Zalora. Currently, he serves as Janio's COO, developing the company's networks and capabilities. George Oliver George was brought on to manage the B2B business at Janio. This comprises of furthering Janio's already strong Air offering while building out our new Sea and Land capabilities across Janio's ASEAN and wider global network. Prior to Janio George was CBO of Kargo, the first technology-enabled full-service trucking fleet in Myanmar. As CBO George was in charge of driver and customer acquisition, successfully building a fleet of 2,800 fully trackable trucks and winning long term contracts with MNC's which included Coca Cola, Adidas, Mitsubishi, Nestle and K+N. Before this, George co-founded the first EU focused rice exporter in Myanmar trading at the peak of 2,500 tons per month, and in an earlier life worked as a financial technology consultant in London. About Janio Janio is a cross-border logistics service provider that simplifies e-commerce deliveries in Southeast Asia. Combining technology with market knowledge, Janio provides an effective end-to-end logistics solution, including international cash-on-delivery and customs clearance, where shippers can manage international shipments on a single platform. For more information, please visit https://www.janio.asia Music Podcast Intro by Tim Beek (2019) Broken Purpose by Jukedeck (2019) The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.
On Call with Insignia Ventures with Yinglan Tan and Paulo Joquino
"Airfreight for the foreseeable future is going to be more expensive, and we should look at that as the new norm...we have to look at the more multimodal solutions, sea freight, and speeding up the different supply routes across Southeast Asia." About the episode In the first of a two-part series on cross-border logistics in Southeast Asia, supply chain experts Ali Madihid and George Oliver share how they've responded to the supply chain disruptions created by the global response to COVID19. Both Ali and George have had extensive careers in logistics, and are now working with Janio, a 4PL solutions platform for Southeast Asia. This call was recorded May 12th. Timestamps 00:32 Introduction of Ali and George; 1:22 How Janio started and how their scope has evolved to include more B2B upstream offerings (Ali then George); 4:56 How COVID19 has impacted supply chains (Ali then George); 9:07 How cross-border transportation (airfreight in particular) is adapting (Ali then George); 12:04 Dealing with new standards of quality and safety across countries (George then Ali); 14:46 Impact of COVID19 on supply chain diversification (George then Ali); About our guests Ali Madihid Ali has over a decade of management experience in areas of business development, corporate strategy, global supply chain and operations management. He has held senior management roles in Expeditors International, SATS, Reebonz and Zalora. Currently, he serves as Janio's COO, developing the company's networks and capabilities. George Oliver George was brought on to manage the B2B business at Janio. This comprises of furthering Janio's already strong Air offering while building out our new Sea and Land capabilities across Janio's ASEAN and wider global network. Prior to Janio George was CBO of Kargo, the first technology-enabled full-service trucking fleet in Myanmar. As CBO George was in charge of driver and customer acquisition, successfully building a fleet of 2,800 fully trackable trucks and winning long term contracts with MNC's which included Coca Cola, Adidas, Mitsubishi, Nestle and K+N. Before this, George co-founded the first EU focused rice exporter in Myanmar trading at the peak of 2,500 tons per month, and in an earlier life worked as a financial technology consultant in London. About Janio Janio is a cross-border logistics service provider that simplifies e-commerce deliveries in Southeast Asia. Combining technology with market knowledge, Janio provides an effective end-to-end logistics solution, including international cash-on-delivery and customs clearance, where shippers can manage international shipments on a single platform. For more information, please visit https://www.janio.asia Music Podcast Intro by Tim Beek (2019) Broken Purpose by Jukedeck (2019) The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.
Sarah from Let's Talk Supply Chain and Shipz joined me for a great chat about how digital trends are shaping the wider supply chain industry, and how procurement fits neatly into that. We both agree that increased collaboration and the developing trend of both functions reporting into the same line can only be a good thing when it comes to better alignment of business objectives and delivering value to organisations. Supply Chain Digitisation - Sarah Barnes-Humphrey from Let's Talk Supply Chain 2:01 Sarah's story of how she went from the family business to Let's Talk Supply Chain as a stand alone full-time business and how this has spawned various spin-offs and sub-niches. 6:00 Is Supply Chain ahead of the curve with digitalisation versus Procurement? 10:10 We talk about the concept of a Chief Value Officer as Head of both SC and Procurement, and how continuity of supply and cost savings could be meshed into one overarching objective for both functions to deliver. This joined up thinking could drive benefits across the business through better alignment of objectives. 12:01 Procurement's lack of involvement in managing the spend of the Supply Chain function and how this total cost of operation is still quite siloed in many organisations, with often minimal procurement involvement in the supplier relationship management of logistics vendors. 13:56 How can technology help to propel Supply Chain out of the Covid-19 crisis? What types of innovations could be key? 16:05 Sarah touches on issues with legacy 3PL IT systems, and we talk about how a lot of 3PL and 4PL vendors don't have fully integrated systems across all functions and how this can lead to a data deficit when evaluating optimisation opportunities. 18:00 We talk about 2 possible scenarios to deal with increased supply chain volatility in future, and the different potential consequences depending on which of these approaches an organisation decides to take. 19:50 Will more statistical modelling become popular when it comes to considering total LIFETIME cost, considering aspects such as TCO, risk management, capex investment and impact on inventory held? What other technology is out there already which will be adopted much faster by organisations when we emerge from the crisis? 23:23 We discuss how innovation is driving the trend for larger companies to partner with and get to know innovative startups. The future will likely see more collaboration in this space between medium-sized companies and startups, rather than just large corporates, in order to ensure they don't get left behind. 25:20 How being forced into remote work is actually proving to be popular and is likely to become mainstream post Covid-19. 26:08 We touch on the remote work and geo-arbitrage opportunities that this could drive and how this could be of benefit to both employer and employee from a cost perspective. 27:37 Sarah talks about her new startup which helps to match SME shippers with ocean and airfreight forwarders, her goal and vision for the business and how it plugs a gap in the current market. How to connect with Sarah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbarnescitp (Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn) https://www.letstalksupplychain.com (Let's Talk Supply Chain website) (includes links to podcast and YouTube channel) https://shipz.com (Shipz website) How to connect with James: https://jamesmeadsconsulting.com/ (James Meads Consulting website) https://linkedin.com/in/james-meads/ (James' LinkedIn profile) https://bookme.name/jamesmeads/lite/initial-consultation (Book a Call with James) https://linkedin.com/showcase/procuretechpodcast (Follow The Procuretech Podcast on LinkedIn)
Supply Chain Now Radio, Episode 116 “Live from the eft Media Zone: Matt O’Mara and Rodney Alston” Broadcast from eft’s 3PL & Supply Chain Summit Featuring: Matt O’Mara is founder and CEO of Whimsy Intermodal. Starting in 1994, Matt was an owner operator for a trucking company that shortly got bought out. All the company’s drivers were let go, and O’Mara brought them with him in his journey in opening Whimsy starting with 11 trucks in 1996. Now in 2019, Whimsy is just shy of 150 total trucks as they are in the heart of the logistics operations in Chicago and Kansas City, with plans of expansion. O’Mara has already claimed properties near Chicago’s busiest rail hubs to keep operations cost- and time-efficient, with plans to become a 4PL digital logistics broker in the coming years. Connect with Whimsy Intermodal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/whimsy-trucking/ Rodney Alston is CEO of Eminent Medical Supplies, based in Charleston, South Carolina. After earning a BacheIors Degree in Economics at the University of South Carolina, Rodney created the Bed Caddy, a disposable organizer for hospital patients. This invention & passion came about because of a loved one that had gotten tangled in the remote cord and oxygen tube while in the hospital. Working with healthcare professionals and gaining their insights, Rodney perfected the design and function concepts. The Bed Caddy organizes and streamlines the patient's experience. Thus, relieving stress on nurses and easing the hospital's reimbursement commitment on lost belongings. Rodney attended the 3PL & Supply Chain Summit to learn more about how to streamline his company’s own supply chain, as well network with fellow executives. Connect with Eminent Medical Supplies on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eminent-medical-supplies/ This episode was hosted by Scott Luton, Will Haraway, and Lance Roberts of Becker Logistics. For more information on this episode please visit our episode page at www.supplychainnowradio.com/episode-116
Matt Lewis, VP of Business Development at GEODIS discusses the following questions and more in this timely and important episode: What defines and differentiates 4PL from other outsourcing models? Is the 4PL approach a one-size-fits-all model where a manufacturer or retailer hands over their entire logistics operations to a third-party to plan and manage? How ... Read more[Video] Realities and Misconceptions of 4PL Relationships The post [Video] Realities and Misconceptions of 4PL Relationships appeared first on Talking Logistics with Adrian Gonzalez.
David Skibinski owns a company called Live More Adventures. Live more Adventures is all about bringing people together to experience the great outdoors in the best ways possible. Our trips revolve around the activities you're already passionate about - and the new things you've always wanted try. Check it out at https://www.livemoreadventures.com/ Tim Rodriguez, Relationship Manager with Jaguar Freight a 4PL logistics and transportation company specializing in helping companies manage their shipping and streamline their supply chain. When he’s not helping manufacturers get their stuff together you can find him in the great outdoors doing anything and everything possible. Website: https://www.brutallyhonestpodcast.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brutallyhonestpodcast/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Brutallyhonestpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Harrison_Baron Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brutallyhonestpodcast
In this episode, George Muha interviews Chris Baumann, a lifelong expert in the area of 3rd party logistics outsourcing of warehouse operations. He gives real-world insights on the benefits of outsourcing part or all of the warehouse operations to an outside provider, what kinds of things to look for an in a 3PL, the difference between a 3PL and a 4PL and what a company can do to make sure a 3PL partnership is successful. Chris grew up providing outsourced operations services by doing big stints with USCO Logistics and Kuehne + Nagel and ultimately owning his own 4PL called Transport Systems, Inc.
Billy Alvaro is a serial entrepreneur who has been serving fellow Americans as far back as he can remember. In his young adult years, Billy served in the United States Airforce and then as a Police Office in Long Island NY where he realized his passion was real estate. In 1999 Billy started a Mortgage company which eventually employed over 950 associates. During this time, he was recognized as the Top 40 A business person under the age of 40 by long Island Business News. The Columbia Association awarded Billy Businessman of the year and Inc 500 Magazine named his company the 136th fastest growing privately held company in America. Today Billy Owns and Operates Easy Sell Property Solutions and Max Returns Real Estate Investments the most successful Real Estate Investment Companies In NY. Even though Billy is dedicated to nurturing and growing his business and the teammates that support it he believes in balance in life. He practices daily meditation and is seriously into health and fitness. Billy is a believer and practitioner of the Law of Increase, an acronym that means: Inspire all you come in contact with to do, be, or have whatever they desire Never quit lie or cheat Constant and never ending improvement Respect You have given to get Excellence in all we do Attitude will make or break you Systems Rule Exponential growth Billy has a love for people and life. He lives as if each day were his last and encourages everyone to do the same . Expect success and Live with Passion Tim Rodriguez, Relationship Manager with Jaguar Freight a 4PL logistics and transportation company specializing in helping companies manage their shipping and streamline their supply chain. When he’s not helping manufacturers get their stuff together you can find him in the great outdoors doing anything and everything possible.
Tim Rodriguez, Relationship Manager with Jaguar Freight a 4PL logistics and transportation company specializing in helping companies manage their shipping and streamline their supply chain. When he’s not helping manufacturers get their stuff together you can find him in the great outdoors doing anything and everything possible.
Welcome to 2 Babes Talk Supply Chain! We are very excited to bring you Episode 6 all about how to outsource effectively! We continue to put the sexy into Supply Chain! In this episode we are talking to Julie Thompson of ICECORP USA all about 3PL vs 4PL and how to outsource effectively! Since returning to the US from living in Japan, Julie has seen the explosion of international trade, with all levels of companies outsourcing their supply chain. Working on both the provider side and private sector has given Julie a lot of insight into the subject and shares some great information and tips. You can contact Julie with any questions: Linkedin Company Website Be sure to follow us: Twitter/Instagram: @2babestalksc Linkedin Wanna be a guest or a sponsor, check out Our Website
Lena Dyfverman har en lång karriär inom transport och logistik bakom sig. På företag som Fraktmäklarna, 4PL, Hogia, Consafe Logistics och Proxio har hon arbetat med många aspekter av transporter. Idag driver hon eget företag, Myadventure, och ska inom kort lansera sin första egna produkt. Vårt samtal handlade bland annat om hur logistikbranschens parter kommer överens och var makten egentligen ligger. Länkar: Myadventure Fix candle
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
