Narrator [00:00:04]:

Welcome to Supply Chain Now. The voice of global supply chain. Supply Chain Now focuses on the best in the business for our worldwide audience, the people, the technologies, the best practices, and today's critical issues, the challenges and opportunities. Stay tuned to hear from those making global business happen right here on Supply Chain Now.

Scott W. Luton [00:00:32]:

Hey, hey.

Scott W. Luton [00:00:33]:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be. Scott Luton and Tandreia Bellamy here with you on Supply Chain Now. Tandreia, how you doing today?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:00:41]:

I'm great, Scott. How are you doing today?

Scott W. Luton [00:00:43]:

We're doing wonderful. Wonderful. And I love that shade of green. It's gorgeous.

Tandreia Bellamy [00:00:49]:

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Scott W. Luton [00:00:51]:

You bet. In summary, too, and we got plenty of summary going on here with the heat in the Atlanta area, huh?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:00:58]:

Absolutely.

Scott W. Luton [00:01:07]:

Me and Tandreia have a question for you. Are you feeling overwhelmed with your high volume shipping? Are you losing sleep at night, maybe even losing a few of your nine lives? Well, hey, stay tuned because we're gonna be sharing five game changing strategies, not just to conduct and execute in your high volume shipping, Tandria, but to dominate your high volume shipping. We've got a been there, done that business leader that will be telling us all about it. Now, Tandria, you have just about seen it all in global supply chain, given all of your experience, right? Should be an outstanding show here today, huh?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:01:56]:

Looking forward to it, Scott. And it's perfect timing.

Scott W. Luton [00:01:59]:

All right, it is time to get to work. I want to welcome in our featured guests here today Justin Cramer, co founder with ProShip. All right, Justin, how you doing today?

Justin Cramer [00:02:10]:

Great, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Scott W. Luton [00:02:11]:

Tandreia, we've got our hands full today, huh?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:02:19]:

Let's go get it.

Scott W. Luton [00:02:21]:

Let's go get it. All right, so, Justin, our tab. Been doing some homework on you, right? And I want to share a couple things. First off, today is not only culinarians day, right, where we show appreciation to all those culinary professionals out there. That's a bunch of folks. But it's also National Chili Dog Day, so I got to give a shout out to the home of the infamous spicy chili half smoke Ben's chili bowl up in Washington, DC. That's no joke. It's good stuff.

Scott W. Luton [00:02:50]:

So, Justin, as I mentioned, doing homework on you, right. We hadn't been stalking yet, but it's been close. We hear that you are a culinary dynamo when it comes to smoking meats, which is where you spend a lot of your free time when you're not doing big things. Industry. So what's one of your favorite dishes, Justin?

Justin Cramer [00:03:08]:

Well, I've got two. Nothing ever beats making a great brisket, right? It takes 15 to 19 hours, slow and slow. But I do have to say that routinely, as in every other week or so, I smoke about six pounds worth of cured pork belly that I cure myself. And I have to say that you add that to just about anything, and it makes it awesome.

Scott W. Luton [00:03:28]:

Hey, so you had me sold it with brisket and then pork belly. Of course, you're talking my language, growing up in South Carolina, where that was barbecue growing up. And it was, gosh, it was a lot cheaper back then, I'll tell you that much. But Tandreia, when you hear brisket and you hear pork belly and you think of grilled or smoked anything, what dish comes to your mind?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:03:47]:

It's a place. It's been in business over 70 years, and it's Ted Peters famous smoked fish. And it's in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Scott W. Luton [00:03:58]:

Oh, I love it. We're going to take a trip down to Ted's Tandreia. Maybe we can get that in before the end of summer. What you think?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:04:03]:

Sounds great to me.

Scott W. Luton [00:04:06]:

All right, good stuff here. All right, so Justin and I, Tandreia, now that we have made everybody starving, that's how these things go. Okay, so, Justin and Tandreia, let's get to work. And we want to start not talking barbecue. We want to talk about. Offer up some context for folks. And, Justin, in particular, I want to start with your professional background. Some folks may not know, and this is one of my favorite parts of your journeys.

Scott W. Luton [00:04:28]:

You worked on nuclear power plants in the US Navy. I can only imagine how difficult that might be and complex, and that would help, I think, eventually get you started in the technology industry. Tell us more, Justin.

Justin Cramer [00:04:41]:

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I met one of my co founders of ProShip in the Navy on the USS Enterprise, which is probably the single most complicated nuclear power system that the United States government could create. And what we found is that after learning how to deal with all the unit syncrasies of eight reactors, 32 steam generators, all of these appropriated things that go with that. Trying to understand enterprise software stacks seemed a lot easier. There was significantly more separation of concern. It was just a very almost natural thing to move from how electricity affected pumps, which affected fluid systems, which affected this XYZ, the list of things and how things would change. Well, this isn't too much different than executing shipping. Where you start maybe from the catalog through the cart into the e commerce suite through the LMS, maybe there's an ERP in there, WMS.

Justin Cramer [00:05:39]:

And then, of course, the shipment execution piece. Understanding how all that flows down to shipment execution is very similar to understanding how somebody pulling a rod makes the screws go faster, makes the ship go forward, launches planes off the front.

Scott W. Luton [00:05:54]:

Oh, I love it. We're going to have to have you back. Just dive into that nuclear power plant part portion of your career. But, Tandreia, I'm out of my league here. I think a big chunk of Justin's response, you know exactly what he's talking about. As you're a hall of fame engineering pro, what do you find most fascinating about his background that helped get him where he is today?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:06:14]:

Well, first of all, thank you for your service and the fact that you could draw a connection between the two. It was absolutely amazing, and it made complete sense. So thank you.

Scott W. Luton [00:06:25]:

All right, so as we continue kind of setting the table a bit right before we get into our five game changing strategies to dominate high volume shipping. Looking forward to that. But when it comes to ProShip, right, your co founder of the organization, y'all been on the move, doing a lot of business, a lot of big success out there, a lot of growth. Just in a nutshell, what does a company do?

Justin Cramer [00:06:44]:

Well, if you want to get really simple, we make labels that people put on boxes, and then we also communicate the appropriate information to the carriers accordingly. Now, if you want to make it significantly more complex, we take all the data from the enterprise software stack necessary to appropriately gather that information and present it to various rating engines such that we can determine based upon cost, time, and transit. Maybe there's dangerous goods, any of these other things that might affect your shipment, such that we can find the lowest cost combination to meet your customers expectation.

Scott W. Luton [00:07:21]:

Tandreia, the way he explained that, I think anyone could follow along, even me. And I like how simple he said labels are, but it's critical, all that information, data he was talking about. Tindra, what'd you hear there?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:07:32]:

Because I was with ups for so long, being able to go from everything being done manually to almost, it's impossible to do it manually in today's world, making that connection and him understanding exactly all of the bells and whistles and the connections is something that I think is underrated because there is a lot involved.

Scott W. Luton [00:07:55]:

Supply chain is the details that Justin was kind of laying out in his response there for sure. You were talking about complexity a few minutes ago, Justin, especially with your background, some of the things you did, nuclear power plants and technology and all points in between. It is a very complex environment, has been right. Some old challenges have been around since the beginning of time and then some new disruption, more unique challenges. So when you survey the high volume shipping market right now, Justin, what trends or pain points really stick out in your mind?

Justin Cramer [00:08:26]:

Well, if we're really talking about pain points, there's one pain point that kind of existed 20 years ago when we started, but now everybody feels every day that is the volatility, the rate of change. And if you're unable to keep up with the rate of change on the details, the decisions that are executed by your software suite or by your people are going to be incorrect. So as we see new carriers getting added, as we see carriers, especially some of the tenured carriers, come up with new features that they want to entice customers with and they want them to get the greatest value out of that. Being able to have a software stack and specifically the shipping software, be able to keep up with that, not just in the sheer volume of shipments, but with the actual accuracy, with the technical accuracy of where the carrier is today, where they were three months ago. That is probably the single most difficult thing that we're seeing in the industry right now. Where we are seeing that there are still a few companies out there that try to do it themselves. They try to gather all the APIs together, but those are changing rapidly due to security needs. We're seeing carriers switch from an old XML based solution to new restful JSON.

Scott W. Luton [00:09:44]:

With OAuth security, you don't need to know what all these are. Just understand that these changes are necessary in order to ensure that as we go forward, not only do you get great functional features, but you get great security at the same time.

Scott W. Luton [00:09:59]:

Tandreia, I'll tell you some of the things I captured from what Justin was laying out there, and I want to call one out. If you're not losing a little bit of sleep, at least a little bit from a cybersecurity concern standpoint, you need to check your pulse because I tell you, it's an incredible environment, dangerous environment. But the velocity, the pace of business where Justin started, of course how that plays into the need for real time visibility and information and even more challenging real time decision making. Fast, confident, accurate, successful decision making. Of course, more apropos to this conversation, active, effective, successful carrier management. But Tandreia, what'd you hear there in terms of how complex the environment is?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:10:39]:

Again, just thinking about my background, the pace of change, whether it's retail compliance, whether it's compliance with different dangerous goods regulations, whether it's understanding the carrier constraints and we're getting ready to move into peak season, and how all of the various peak season rate changes just happen. Being able to have a system and a partner that understands all of those things, that can simplify it for your business so that the business can just then focus on their clients is extremely important.

Scott W. Luton [00:11:21]:

Well said. Simplicity, it can never be overrated in my book, at least. And being able to find that simplicity and ingrain as much of it as possible into an organization, into your day to day, hour to hour operations, and then finding partners like Justin, the ProShip team that equally value that and can add and help your team handle this pace that you're talking about Tandreia more successfully, right? With Rigor and I dare say resilience. Justin.

Justin Cramer [00:11:51]:

Yeah, I want to add to that because you just said a key word for me, simple. Right? And every time I hear that word, that's our end goal. When you make a product, your end goal is to make it simple. But simple is not easy. In order to make something simple, to make it truly simple yet effective, you actually have to understand all of the details in every step of the way. You have to understand how a change upstream will affect downstream. Once you've done that, though, once you truly understand the details, idiosyncrasies going back to nuclear power, once you understand how the average neutron decay precursor affects, you know, so on and so forth. When you understand that, all of a sudden you understand why things work.

Scott W. Luton [00:12:32]:

And you can make it into a very simple model because you understand what that model leaves out and what it contains.

Scott W. Luton [00:12:40]:

Love that. Simple is not easy, but it's so important. The challenge continues. Well, I want to call one more thing out that Tandreia mentioned. You know, compliance. You know, folks, especially in some of your larger organizations, hey, compliance is your friend. Bring them into conversations, they'll help you not just avoid sticky situations, but will help facilitate growth and success across the ecosystem. Good call out there, Tandreia.

Scott W. Luton [00:13:03]:

So now that Justin on Tandreia have scared us to death through all the things we got to manage as platinum leaders, business leaders, you name it. Folks, there's good news because there's a better way of doing things to find a whole bunch more success, especially one of my favorite parts for your teams, right. The folks that come in every day, they want to be successful, right. Be able to empower them to find more success more easily. That's a big part of the game here. So Justin, want to walk through these five game changing strategies to dominate high volume shipping. What are we starting with? With the first of the strategies? Whats that one?

Justin Cramer [00:13:39]:

I think one of the big strategies you always want to look at is success. If youre part of an industry, theres probably industry groups associated with it. You want to reach out and you want to actually talk to those industry groups. You want to go ahead and find out what theyve had great success with, what they have, not just only slightly adjacent to that is the carriers themselves. Sadly, last week I noticed that there was a scam. One of the guys from Shiphero actually posted out to let everybody know. And of course, we reposted it to let everybody know because United states post office is dealing with a lot of fraud at this point in time. What I will say is that, look, as soon as you are in an industry group and you start sharing information, as soon as you start talking to your carriers and you say, hey, have you ever heard of ProShip? Have you ever heard of World Link, two of our product lines there.

Justin Cramer [00:14:30]:

And if they look at you weird, like, I don't know, let me ask, on the other hand, if they look at you're like, yeah, I've got five customers using them, where is your confidence level at this point in time? That's not the only thing you should do, but it's a great way to look at it. It's a great way to understand, for example, if you're in your industry group and you say, what about ProShip? And they say you need more volume for that, they've got other products that will work for you. Right? Again, this starts to help set your mind as to what your expectations should be as you go forward.

Scott W. Luton [00:15:02]:

So I think we're going to get a bonus strategy here today because gathering market intel, leaning into those initial groups, leaning into your carrier network, right, putting your finger on the pulse, seeing what they're seeing, challenges, solutions, successes, speed bumps, you name it, cannot be overstated. And it may sound old fashioned in many ways, right? But hey, what's old is new again. And there's some powerful ways of this market. Intel gathering, of course, that current digital transformation era that we're in offer up. I'm gonna get Tandreia take on this in just a second. Then I'm gonna circle back and we're gonna talk automation and business rule management. But Tandreia, when it comes to gathering that market intel from across your ecosystem, really big opportunities for that, right? It's important.

Tandreia Bellamy [00:15:46]:

It's extremely important. We've had multiple discussions about the importance of having holistic solutions. When we talk about ProShip, we automatically think the warehouse and getting the packages out, getting the orders out, whether it's going to an end consumer or to a retail establishment. But we need to have everybody engaged to ensure that the end product is going to satisfy sales, satisfy marketing, satisfy finance. So having those holistic discussions so that you create an environment that the company succeeds as a whole is extremely important. And when Justin was mentioning the different stacks, each of those different stacks really does touch a different part of the organization.

Scott W. Luton [00:16:37]:

That's right. Excellent point there, Tandreia. Been there, done that perspective. Okay. As I mentioned, we're getting a bonus one. We're going to offer six strategies that's going to help you be much more successful and dominate high volume shipping. And that in market intel, gathering inside the proverbial four walls and outside the proverbial four walls is extremely important. This next step, Justin, I'm going to talk more about, is of course, leveraging automation.

Scott W. Luton [00:17:04]:

Right. And business rule management in particular. Tell us more about that, Justin.

Justin Cramer [00:17:09]:

Now that to me, as somebody who's helped design and put together a product, is very important. Okay. And I'm going to throw out a technical term, isolation of concerns. I might have mentioned that a little bit earlier.

Scott W. Luton [00:17:21]:

Yep.

Justin Cramer [00:17:22]:

It's really important. Even inside a product, that product is already separating. So that you're only doing the small parcel and the LTL or maybe some air freight only doing shipment execution in that product, but inside that product itself, you should have separation between your uniqueness. Right. And the carriers. Okay. If you do not have that separation, when your business rules go into play, they may unfortunately affect the carriers themselves. Right.

Justin Cramer [00:17:50]:

So whether your business rule is some very advanced date shopping, some time in transit calculations, all these other things, those are your business rules and should be kept completely separate from the carrier engines themselves. Reason being, is, over my 20 some odd years of doing this, everything has changed with the exception of the basics. Right. We still need where's the shipment coming from, where is it going to, what is in it? Which usually we just get the weight for that, how you want to ship it. And then usually the number five is metadata and that tells us if we're going to do any restrictions on that. That hasn't changed. Everything else has. And so by keeping your business rules separate, that means when everything else changes around you and you're still just sending those five pieces of information or manipulating those five pieces of information in an isolated area, that means the carriers can change.

Justin Cramer [00:18:47]:

That means you can add new features. That means things such as dynamic rating that we're starting to see come out in the market is something that won't affect you. It is something you can take advantage of rather than something that you have to emergency react to. So this is why business rules are great if they're in the right spot.

Scott W. Luton [00:19:06]:

Ah, so Tandreia circling back to you on what he shared there, everything's changed, but the important things are still the important things. Your thoughts Tandreia, about automation or business rule management, as Justin was pointing out.

Tandreia Bellamy [00:19:20]:

You know, sometimes, at least in my world, when I think automation, I think, okay, I've got to have conveyors and robots or agvs or amrs or, you know, it's something physical, very infrequently for me. Do I think about the back ends that actually really control everything that's going on. And to have an expert, to have a partner that can come in and make sure that the information that I'm pushing out has been handled properly so that those end activities are done properly is hugely important.

Scott W. Luton [00:19:55]:

And the whole team is pulling on the rope together. There's alignment, right? That powerful alignment driven in part by business rules and many other things like we put in place so that we're all pulling a rope together. Then that tug of war between all the things that the market throws at us. Justin, on this next step here, this next strategy here, I want to talk about, of course, user experience, right? Any technology platform, a lot of folks will lead in their design with that user experience in mind. When you think of a modern user interface for a truly enhanced and optimized user experience, tell us more about that, how important that strategy is.

Justin Cramer [00:20:35]:

I'm going to go back to what tender is just talking about with all the different physical things that are in a warehouse. And I want to ask you, do you need a user interface for your shipping software? Oddly enough, sometimes the best user interface is the one that doesn't exist. Okay? If you have full automation, do you need a user interface? If you have pickpack stations where you already have people handling that package, is it best to put that piece of software behind that WMs or WCs or whatever is actually controlling that at that point in time. Now, of course, I've just taken the top, you know, thousand companies out there and basically isolated them. But then as you go down, yes, we do have more use for user interface and we want something that's flexible, most importantly in shipping software. And this is different than your WMS, is different than your OMS, is different than your e commerce suites. When we think about all those other pieces of software, those pieces of software generally don't have to interact with hardware. And when we look at our modern user interfaces, they're probably going to be browser based.

Justin Cramer [00:21:42]:

Does your provider know how to properly, securely enable you to leverage the local hardware you have right there at that workstation while still having a proper browser based interface? Okay, browser interfaces could be a little bit slow. Have they taken the time to optimize the process so that we can get our operators for the day in, day out shipments? Scanning, applying labels. Scanning, applying labels, pop up information as necessary. Maybe we're doing marketing while we're doing that. Put in Pamphlet A, put in Pamphlet C. Is that user interface going to be fast enough to allow that to occur and work at the speed of that operator, rather than a speed which is slower than the operator, which is going to keep their numbers down, frustrate them? I've even seen some operators actually set up two workstations simultaneously just in order to keep up with their own workflow. So a couple of different things that I talked about there, but I really do want to point out the number one thing about a user interface is, do you need it or do you already have a place where it should be placed plugged in, such as your wms?

Scott W. Luton [00:22:55]:

Excellent point. Excellent question for folks to ask out there. And I would also add, as I heard you describing, and we were talking about velocity earlier, Justin, you could tell you've been in an operation or a million. All this expertise kind of floats through your brain at night, I tell you, but taking friction out, kidding us out, taking friction out of your associates, right? Give them exactly what they need and move anything else that's extraneous and, and may pose obstacles or frustration or friction, get it out of there, right? Technology.

Justin Cramer [00:23:26]:

Otherwise, I got lucky enough to help design a system that was intended to ship peak at a million packages a day. It actually ended up peaking at greater than 3 million packages a day. So obviously we overbuilt it. The thing about it was that was some of the lessons learned that we, as we went through that. How do we use a dedicated user interface? I should say only when you need to and how do we leverage all of the other pieces of software that users are already interacting with in order to actually execute things as efficiently as possible? Maximizing the use of people for what they're good for, which is quality control. All these other things that give it that human touch and doesn't seem like it was just poured in by a bagging machine. Right?

Scott W. Luton [00:24:12]:

Creativity, customer service, so many things that human factor is excellent at Tandreia, before we move to the next strategy, where we're going to be focused on optimizing for enterprise level complexity, which I think is going to be one, I'm looking forward to Justin's perspective. We covered a lot of ground on the second strategy. This user experience, frontline user experience in many ways. What'd you hear there, Tandra?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:24:33]:

That the best user interface has no need for a user interface. I love that. That's as simple as it gets.

Scott W. Luton [00:24:42]:

Excellent point and volumes he was talking about earlier. You've seen that and more. 3 million packages a day. I can only imagine a scale in your background. Tandreia, you've seen. Let's move on to the third strategy here, right? We're going back to something we've touched on a couple of times, and that's complexity, right? We've touched on simplicity and complexity. And, folks, the battle wages on since, you know, beginning of time. So, Justin, we talk about really powerfully optimizing for that enterprise level complexity, right? Walk us through that strategy.

Justin Cramer [00:25:12]:

All right, so here one I'm going to hearken back to simple. Simple is not easy. I'm also going to kick over to my brother and sister and either are or we're in the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps statement of slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Okay? The only reason both of those work is when you actually dig down and understand not only where things need to occur, but what your actual goals are, such that you can segment out what's necessary. Usually, if you are an enterprise shipper, you already have a separation of concerns. As I mentioned before, you have a separation of concerns between your ERP, your wms, maybe an OMS is in there, your e commerce suite. Each of them is expected to do a very specific task.

Justin Cramer [00:26:01]:

Ensuring that you have that separation of concerns and you keep it is the number one most important thing to a enterprise class shipping setup and ensuring that the data can flow fast enough. Look, it doesn't matter if you've got a piece of software that's old, okay? That's very old. As a matter of fact, I have a customer who is using software from unhoney. Well, Bullae, okay, the honeywell that we know now, that makes the scanners, right, they used to make computers, okay? Now, they stopped making hardware for those computers in 1973, the year I was born. And yet still I have a customer that is actively functioning with it. By intelligently pulling information from that, we are not slowed down by that process, and we are able to actually meet the needs of the throughput for that customer. Okay? So it's not about age. Sometimes it's not even about the technology.

Scott W. Luton [00:26:56]:

We can still, if needed, use flat files. But if you're going to get to 10,000 shipments a day, 100,000 shipments a day and up, let's face it, the majority of customers aren't shipping a million packages a day, right? Majority of customers that are looking for a piece of shipping software are shipping between 100 packages a day, and they may average out between the 5010 thousand package a day. All of these lessons associated with how to build an enterprise solution work all the way down at the lower level. That separation of concerns, your shipping software is not an accounting software, it's not an inventory software, right? Same thing for your wms. That's the inventory software, not the accounting software, all of these things. And so separation concerns is the number one thing I always talk to my customers about, because by using something for what's intended, we get the best use out of it. Okay? But also, you need to have all your contracts in order. You need to have communication with your carriers.

Justin Cramer [00:28:00]:

They will provide you, whether it's rate files for carriers who still don't provide automated rate uploads, or they will set up your rates on the back end such they can be pulled by a system like ours.

Scott W. Luton [00:28:11]:

So hold that thought, Justin, because we're going to dive more into unlocking exclusive carrier features and integration expertise and the communication cycles that you're kind of talking about on the next strategy. Tandrea going back to optimizing for enterprise level complexity, which Justin shared a lot of thought perspective around. What'd you hear there? Getting complexity out of there. What'd you hear?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:28:32]:

You know, I had a colleague when I was at UPS, when someone would intrude on somebody else's territory, would be quick to say, stay in your lane. Justin basically explained, staying in your lane for each of the systems, allow the systems to do exactly what they were intended to do and stop the bleed over to reduce the complexity and the conflict.

Scott W. Luton [00:29:01]:

Stay in your lane. Universal advice, supply chain advice, shipping advice, really important, especially as it applies to technology. Okay, we got two more strategies to go. And I want to pick back up where Justin was talking about the end of his last response. Talking about the carriers. Right. So Justin, key strategy here, how we can unlock really important and exclusive carrier features and lean into that integration expertise that will help us move faster and be more successful. Justin, your thoughts here on this fourth strategy.

Justin Cramer [00:29:33]:

So really a lot of that comes around and it's odd you'd think I'd start with separation concerns here again, because it's important, but no, it starts with relationships. Honestly, the carriers are moving things so quickly. Their representatives are going out to various customers pitching these things, and it's not uncommon for us to get a call from a customer or from carrier who's got a potential customer for us that says, hey, can you implement this new feature? And having a partner in your multi carrier shipping software who can do that is extremely important. Having carriers that are willing to work with your multi carrier shipping provider is extremely important, whether it is traveling out to New Jersey to meet with a particular team from that carrier down to Atlanta, down to Memphis. And if you're familiar with why I would go to those places, you will understand why we would be getting great information from the carriers. But no, it's actually really important that there be a relationship. And sometimes those relationships are quantified, right. UPS has a UPS ready program.

Scott W. Luton [00:30:43]:

They have their ready partner of the year. FedEx has their compatible solution program, they have their solution of the year. Right? And various carriers have other things. Look at it. And again though, the reason this is so important, and I'm going to go back to the early two thousands where we spent one month a year updating things. Now we spend six calendar months a year with a team of 20 updating carrier changes. Without that relationship, we would need even more people because we're doing things even later. So when you are talking about taking advantage of these things, oddly enough, I'm going to say the relationship between the software provider and the carriers is extremely important because sometimes what is written and what is expected are two different things.

Scott W. Luton [00:31:36]:

So the carrier specs are great, but without somebody to explain, well, when do we round these numbers, right? All of a sudden you no longer have great rates or you no longer have accurate rates. Okay? If you don't have accurate rates, do you trust your shipping software anymore? All of a sudden you no longer are creating a compliant maxi codes or compliant PDF 417s, right? If your shipments have to be relabeled by the carrier, that's not a great way to take advantage of these new features.

Scott W. Luton [00:32:03]:

So Tandreia, one of the many things that Justin shared there that I really like and I love each time this comes up in these conversations. It's creating an environment where the carriers can be successful so you can be a shipper of choice. You can build a relationship that leads to good business for all parties across the ecosystem. But Justin shared a lot more around how you can unlock and develop relationships with carriers that can lead to all sorts of features and integrations and most importantly, outcomes. What did you hear there, Tandria?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:32:34]:

I heard it would be mind boggling to try and do this without a partner like crochet. You think about them being the experts at what they do and how much time they put into ensuring that it works and that it works properly and that it gives you the correct outcomes. I just can't imagine trying to do that as a company on my own.

Scott W. Luton [00:33:03]:

Yeah. So first off, you're going to get a supply chain academy award for the beautiful, dramatic way you just expressed your last perspective. You kept us hanging over every syllable as you shared. I loved it. But secondly, Justin, but you made his day for sure, and appreciate teams day at a higher level. I think one of the great points you're making there, Tandreia, is our teams, our organizations, the industry, we've got to turn to technology, right? I'm a big believer in the human factor, right. One of my favorite parts of this whole technology imperative age that we're living in is how more and more organizations are using that again to empower, to enhance, to help the human factor find more success and open up new doors of opportunities. But the cold, hard truth is we can't do it without technology, ProShip or otherwise.

Scott W. Luton [00:33:53]:

And I think that was a big part of your last response. So well said there, Tandreia. I will give you your oscar later, my friend.

Tandreia Bellamy [00:34:00]:

Aside from the complexities, if you don't do it right, in a lot of industries, it's going to cost you money. There are chargeback, there's retail compliance. There's just having a setup where you end up not using the right carrier and it costs you more. Not using the right service levels and it costs you more. So in this case, not only do we need to keep it simple, but we need to make sure that we keep it as cost effective as possible. And mistakes in this area really can cost you hard dollars.

Scott W. Luton [00:34:29]:

Excellent point there. We had planned Justin and Tandreia to talk about this fifth strategy weeks ago, and then I think all of a sudden in the last week, this becomes much more relevant.

Scott W. Luton [00:34:41]:

Right?

Scott W. Luton [00:34:41]:

Because we're talking about ensuring operational continuity with automatic updates and of course, minimizing, eliminating downtime. That's always been important. It's timelessly important. Right. Operational continuity in light of what we've seen over the last week that Tandreia and I kind of open the show talking about, Justin, tell us, especially as it means to dominating high volume shipping. Tell us more.

Justin Cramer [00:35:03]:

Well, first I'm going to ask everybody to think about when did the carriers make the largest changes? They don't make the largest changes now. Yes, post office being the exception, they don't make them now, six months before we go into peak, they're going to make them the day after Christmas, the first operational day, so to speak, after Christmas. Right. When you probably still are trying to get those last packages out, when things are still stressful, let's say, in the warehouses, in the stores, in any of your origin points. And if you don't have the right technology, if you don't have the right carrier business rules, if fuel surcharges changed, if a peak surcharge changed, if anything like that changed, that's when we've seen customers disrupted the most, both from a package delivery point as well as from a cost standpoint. And so I think a lot of this comes down to is how do you keep that up to date? Okay. How many systems do you keep it on as well? That's part of the how do you avoid something like cloud strike? But that's a really difficult question.

Scott W. Luton [00:36:09]:

Yeah.

Justin Cramer [00:36:09]:

Okay. But that being said, the ability to insert these new updates, to make it so that as a new universal routing file comes down from FedEx or an ERC file comes from ups or any of the files that are associated with any of the other carriers, that those can be put in place without stopping shipping. Not only does that mean that you can during peak, run a 24/7 operation, but it also means that because if you have a way to apply those live, that also means that if there is a patch that needs to come out, you can get it. Okay. That means that it has those business rules which we've been testing for months. Right. Well, they need to take effect. You know, let's say it's a Friday and your postal trailer has pulled.

Justin Cramer [00:36:57]:

Right. Your next pickup is probably going to be Monday. If Monday goes past that time where the business rules are supposed to change, you need to be rating your postal based off of Monday's rules while you are rating ups, FedEx on track, whomever, based upon Friday's business rules. It's really subtle, but it can cost tens of thousands when it's not done properly. So having that update process, having an architecture that allows for real time updates to be put in place without stopping shipping, having more than one production server with the ability to fail over to them rapidly, these are all just very generic things that I think you should be looking at. Even if you are using a native cloud solution. If it's not native cloud, if it's promisable like ProShip is, well, then you can do other things. You can real time backup your own solution.

Scott W. Luton [00:37:50]:

We've seen a lot of different ways to do it. And again, though, that gets down to the relationship level between you and the vendor, hopefully your vendor will give you the information necessary to allow you to leverage the backup strategies you may already have in place.

Scott W. Luton [00:38:03]:

However you get there, then it comes to ensuring operational continuity. Justin shared a lot of different things you can turn to, including his organization, as he should, because ProShip has been on the move. But Tandreia, before we move in, we're going to move into a kind of story time. We're going to share some examples of business leaders here in just a second that have been acting on these strategies and others that Justin's going to share with us. Tandria, what'd you hear there? What's important that you pull out and put in front of our audience there?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:38:31]:

I think communication, sometimes you don't even know where your failure points are, your weak points are, or what things can go wrong. So being able to have high level people that are necessary, that are looking out for that number one, but also communicating that number two, so that the team is fully aware of all of the things that have to take place to make it seamless again for their clients.

Scott W. Luton [00:38:56]:

Well said, Tandreia. All right, so Justin, I think goes without saying, the five strategies that you've laid out here, what I think in a really agnostic manner, all apply to ProShip. Right. These are strategies you and your team have really baked into y'all's approach of doing business and a technology that powers shipping and global supply chain. But I'll get you to tell us a couple of examples, a few stories where business leaders have embraced these strategies or others and have truly transformed their high volume shipping results. Your thoughts are, Justin?

Justin Cramer [00:39:30]:

First things first. ProShip has a lot of retailers, so I talked about one that's Wisconsin based. We've got others that you can see on our website, like Alta and GNC, Petco. There's a lot more than that. And really what it comes down to is all of them have looked at their solutions, looked at their needs, they have told us what their limitations are, then told us what their expectations are. And for almost all of them, it boils down to a single thing, and that is finding the best way to meet a customer's expectation for the lowest cost possible. That might mean executing from a store, because that store is in the same delivery zone. It's a zone zero or zone one, if you will.

Justin Cramer [00:40:12]:

So we know it's going to be delivered tomorrow. That's the great experience at the lowest cost. If were going across country, looking at multiple different carrier service levels to see which hits the lowest cost and coming soon, actually looking at do we ship it today or do we ship it tomorrow? Because as we see dynamic ratings start to take effect. If lanes are full today, they may not be as full tomorrow. And if the service level will still meet the customers expectation, it might be better to hold this package until tomorrow morning. Okay, so there's a lot of things that we're looking at. There's a lot of things that our customers, retailers especially. And of course, you can't talk retailers without talking about three pls, because who do three pls usually ship for? Retailers and manufacturers.

Justin Cramer [00:41:02]:

Right. So really, that's what it comes down to for our biggest three customer segments is that now, as you move over into a regulated or healthcare right, which we separate the two of those regulators, usually Department of Defense, FAA, something of that nature, you still have to worry about some other things. But usually this is a lot more control over data, because now you're no longer working with PII, personally identifiable information, but you're working with PhI, personal health information. And I'm going to tell you that the practices that you use in healthcare work really well for some of the most targeted industries out there, retailers, to help ensure that they don't have data breaches. That's what we see with these companies is not only they're applying the operational execution, not only are they building systems, like I said, that'll hit a million packages a day with us, but they're also protecting that data at the same time.

Scott W. Luton [00:41:57]:

So, Justin, I tell you, your passion for what you do leaps out of your camera and into the digital universe here. Tandreia. A bit passionate about what they do at ProShip, and I'm learning all kinds of new acronyms. PI, Phi. I thought I'd conquer most acronyms and global supply chain. Learned a whole bunch more here today. We've covered a lot of ground here today.

Scott W. Luton [00:42:19]:

Right.

Scott W. Luton [00:42:19]:

We laid out the five strategies, plus the bonus one about going out there and gathering that market intel from across the ecosystem. It's really important. Folks can sleep on that one a lot, I think, because we can kind of get stuck in the day to day getting things done and we need to get out there, you know, looking around corners and finding ways of doing that. But I digress for folks, if they wanted to get started today, to start on that path to dominating high volume shipping, what's one thing folks can do today? Justin?

Justin Cramer [00:42:47]:

I've got to send them to ProShippinc.com. that's ProShipinc.com. dot the blog section in there. Not only will it have a link to this video, right, all the other videos we've done, there's individual articles, if you want to understand. Oddly enough, our single most popular page on our entire website is parts of a label. I mean, think about it. If you're not used to shipping and you look at a label, it might as well be written in Chinese, right? Or Mandarin, I guess I should say. But being able to sit there and understand the recipient block, the shipper block, where your tracking numbers might be, all that, that is the place where everybody needs to start in this industry.

Justin Cramer [00:43:27]:

And then, of course, if you want to dig down and go deep into all these things, that's really one of those things that you can do. Go to the various industry solutions, watch things like this, right? You don't have to do everything on ProShip. I will be out with one of the presidents inside ups at Parcel forum in Dallas this year. And that's where we're going to be talking about some very interesting changes that ups is trying to lead in the market.

Scott W. Luton [00:43:53]:

So when you head to Dallas, you have to report back to me and Tanria, the food scene, right? The place to get delicious barbecue or brisket or steaks, you name it, and what maybe to avoid. Okay, can we have you back do that, Justin?

Scott W. Luton [00:44:06]:

You know what, I'd love to do that, but I never leave the gaylord when I go there. DFW, straight there. But I will find some good places to eat.

Scott W. Luton [00:44:14]:

I'm sure you stay busy. A lot of those conversations out there, industry conversations. But Tandreia, in a second here. We're going to make sure folks know how to connect with Justin beyond what we've shared in a ProShip team. We got a couple resources we're going to share with folks, but I want to go back and go ahead and ask the patented key takeaway. We've covered a lot of ground here today, offered up a lot of strategies that folks can take outside of working with Justin Prosciutt or they can make the call and of course leverage Justin and the team equally as much there big opportunity. But what is one key takeaway from today's conversation, Tandreia, that folks can't forget even if it takes them, if they got double up on their ginkgo below, but to make sure their memory can hang on to it, what must folks not forget about this conversation?

Tandreia Bellamy [00:45:00]:

Actually, this is going to be an easy one and that's keeping it simple. The level of complexity that Justin has described is amazing. I was with the ups for 34 years and there's so many things that he's brought up about shipping, the act of shipping, the systems that are involved in shipping, complexities in shipping, the things outside of what I would normally think about it has been extremely enlightening. But it also has been quite perplexing that there are people that do this without some outside expertise. We had a great conversation the last time we were together about ROI and really understanding where your ROI is coming from here. If you don't know where you're losing money, it's hard to really quantify the benefit of something like this. But after a conversation like this, I would really have some conversations with experts to try and delve into what I may be missing when I'm looking to implement a system like this.

Scott W. Luton [00:46:05]:

Been there, done that. Take it from Tandreia. At least have the conversations, folks. And I probably preach into the choir to our audience because we've got the smartest audience in all of global supply chain, I can assure you. One of the things I take away from Justin and the team is Justin doesn't shy away from any questions, no matter how tough or complex he is. Ready, folks. He and the team are ready, I can assure you. All right, good stuff here today.

Scott W. Luton [00:46:29]:

Tandreia Bellamy and Justin Cramer really enjoyed the conversation. And Justin, again, you laid out there, folks want to connect with you. They can venture over to the website ProShipping.com. a lot of good stuff. Justin, safe travels to Dallas and congrats on all the success and growth that you and the ProShip team have experienced. We've been talking with Justin Cramer, co founder with ProShip. Thanks so much, Justin.

Justin Cramer [00:46:54]:

Thanks for having me.

Scott W. Luton [00:46:55]:

You bet. Tandreia Bellamy, the one and only, really enjoyed your perspective here today. And hey, you're leaving here with a supply chain Academy award. I don't know if we can fit it in your awards cabin. You got so many from your time in industry, but Tandria really enjoyed your perspective here today.

Tandreia Bellamy [00:47:13]:

Thank you so much, Scott.

Scott W. Luton [00:47:15]:

You bet. And folks, make sure you connect with Tandreia Bellamy and Justin Cramer on LinkedIn as well. Finally, folks, highly encourage you. Check out those resources, connect with Tandreia and Justin. Right. Have the conversations. Right. Get out there and see how organizations are doing things different to find success and in this case, to dominate high volume shipping.

Scott W. Luton [00:47:37]:

Test opportunities abound. So whatever you do, though, here's the challenge, folks, as we wrap up today's conversation. Take one thing. From all the brilliance that Tandreia and Justin have dropped on us here today, take one thing, put it into practice. Your teams are ready. They want to change how business is done. They want to find success each and every day. We got to equip them and empower them with the technology and know how to do just that.

Scott W. Luton [00:47:58]:

So with all that said on behalf of the Supply Chain Now, team Scott Luton challenge. You do good, give forward, be the change that's needed, and we'll see you next time right back here on Supply Chain Now. Thanks, everybody.

Narrator [00:48:11]:

Thanks for being a part of our Supply Chain Now community. Check out all of our programming at supplychainnow.com and make sure you subscribe to Supply Chain Now anywhere you listen to podcasts and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. See you next time on Supply Chain Now.