Welcome, e-commerce logistics nation.Thank you for joining today's episode.We're on a mission to share e-commerce logistics insights, trends, successes, and challenges from the leaders and innovators in our space.
I think of it as a triangulation.It's inventory, it's transportation, it's consumer.Those are the three things that have to talk in real time.
Welcome EcomLogistics Nation.Today we welcome Bill Catania, the founder and CEO of OneRail.
Bill is a startup entrepreneur focused on developing and commercializing real-time technology networks, a leading omni-channel fulfillment solution pairing best-in-class software with logistics as a service.
OneRail provides dependability and speed to help businesses meet their delivery promise. With its real-time connected network of 12 million drivers, OneRail recently debuted as No.24 in Deloitte's Fast 500.
It was recently named as Freetech 100 for the third straight year.Honored with Inc.Magazine's Best Workplace 2023, ranked No.23 on Forbes' list of America's Best Startup Employers and named Inc.5000 Two Years Running.
the list of amazing accolades keeps going.And with that, you have over 7,000% growth.
Additionally, Bill is also named as 2022 Orlando Business Journal Game Changer, a 2022 Supply and Demand Chain Executive Pros to Know, and a 2022 Orlando Business Journal FIRE Award winner and winner of Supply Chain Leaders in Action Pitch Tank Contest.
What a background, Bill.I am so excited to welcome you to the EcomLogistics podcast and so excited to dive into this conversation.Welcome.
I'm really glad to be here, Hrishita, Nanan.Thank you.I'm having fun.This is a fun industry.And what makes it fun is all the problems we get to solve.
You know, I did not know about all the awards, but just now. how well you guys are doing out in the industry right now, Bill.And just your entrepreneurial journey itself, right?I did not realize that this is not your first business.
And serial entrepreneur, I would say to a certain degree, a local entrepreneur as well, because we come in right from Toronto right now.I know you're not from Toronto, but spend time in Buffalo and Erie.
We pretty much consider those things part of Canada. We're neighbors.I would love to hear about your journey of how you got here.Let's just start with that.What was the journey like?
Well, it started in second grade.I would draw pictures for people and I'd get a nickel.So that's where it started.And then it was baseball cards.
That's amazing. is in your blood.
It's just what I have been doing it a while.Baseball cards came next.I was studying at Cornell.I had an amazing job lined up with Altria used to be Philip Morris.I was an intern there during the summer and I don't know, it just bit me.The
had a classmate come up and say, hey, there's a local family that wants to fund a startup.That was the dot com bubble time.So it was nothing but excitement about IPOs and all kinds of stuff happening with with tech companies.
So I started my first tech company when I was still in college.But the big one that really helped me understand enterprise software was a company called MDOT that I did start just down the road in Erie, Pennsylvania.
As I always say, that was the epicenter of enterprise software.We had to cultivate the angel investment network there.There wasn't a lot of resources, but we found the resources.The community was beyond supportive.
And we ended up building what today powers somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of all digital coupon redemption transactions in North America. We connected the point of sale to the cloud.
We were the first company to do that, to run a 200 millisecond transaction to redeem a digital coupon from a digital wallet in the cloud.And at that time, nobody was putting their transaction data in the cloud.And what year was this?Exactly.
So we were going out in 2009 saying, we're going to put your transaction data from your point of sale in the cloud.Oh boy.We would get some funny looks.I had an amazing CTO, Mike Cavis.He was a visionary when it came to cloud.
The industry was 10 years old, so it wasn't like a new industry, but it was being done completely the wrong way on-prem in a store with a server.We abstracted that into the cloud and sold that company to Inmar.
One thing we did that was really cool was we won the Amazon Global Startup of the Year because of how we use the cloud to process transactions.That was really cool.
But selling to Inmar shortly after that and then taking the resources at Inmar and being able to expand that business to 20,000 stores, and now it's well north of 50,000 stores. processing north of 10 billion in shopper spend.
So that's how I really cut my teeth in enterprise software for this.
I can imagine back in 2009, 10, just having that conversation with CTOs or, you know, even information security was just like starting to take shape and everyone was afraid of just like cloud be like, yes, I'm not moving my data into the cloud.
Just having that conversation and explaining like redemption.It's kind of money, but it's not money, but we're going to put it in the cloud and it's going to have people's information.I can imagine the stuff you ended up going through.
It was exceptionally difficult.We took on two difficult tasks at the same time. the cloud, which we talked about.Nobody wanted to hear about that right away, but we got there.
The other thing that was really hard that translated into how we built OneRail is the aggregation of all the coupon platform prior to MDOT.
Coupons.com, all these different coupon platforms would have agreements with retailers, and they would have a situation where you'd go to the retailer like Wegmans website, and we were the first company to say, we're going to create the only connectivity to your point of sale, aggregate all the coupons, because the retailer wanted to create that experience.
Of course. They didn't want you to leave the website.We were the first aggregator of coupons.We built the toll road to redeem the coupons.And then Inmar already had the business to settle them on the back end, the financial settlement.
So when you put all that together, it was dynamite.And that was really how OneRail became OneRail.You know, Lisa and I, my wife, You know, started this at the kitchen table in early 2018.
We were a tech-connected courier, and it was through being a tech-connected courier that I realized, in talking to retailers and wholesalers, they all had the same problem. I have fragmented capacity.
I don't have the right type of trucks in the right place at the right time.I don't have a standard way to integrate everybody.Half of them aren't even integrated.It was no visibility, no standardized unit economics.
And then I thought, well, if we could just aggregate the couriers into one massive pool of supply, and then we become the operating system that didn't exist. to connect it all, it really simplifies this whole process.
And that, it was the MDOT experience that taught me that.And that's where the word rail came from.I'm like, what's OneRail?Why OneRail?
When I rationalized all that, it felt like a FinTech because if you think about what a FinTech does, there's about eight transactions that happen in sub-second time. lightning, right?And all these intermediaries shake hands.
But as a shopper, you just want to swipe your card and walk away.You don't want to think about it.You should never have to think about it.We function much like a payment platform.But so you started as a courier though.We did.We pivoted.
If you think about roadie and the gig economy delivery companies, Freight, you know, is one that we work with a lot.GoShare, Bungie.Zapped was the name of ours.Yep.So it was,
About mid-2019 is when I realized it's time to stop trying to be a tech-connected courier.There's a lot of great companies out there doing that.The problem is supply and demand matching in a millisecond.
The problem is making all these things happen in a rules-driven way, right?So you have dependability, you have financial alignment, you know, with the shipper.
It was about September of 2019 that we pivoted and I wish I would have done it a little sooner.
I actually want to dive in a little bit deeper because I'm sure a lot of companies are going through similar struggles where they know that they should be pivoting or focusing on something in their business and everything else should 80-20 rule, right?
So what were some of those principles?And maybe if you can share a playbook that our audience can take away when you come to that junction where it's like, okay, should I pivot?And how did you make that decision? I'm sure it was very complicated.
Take that step and keep going down that path.
That's one of the easiest and hardest questions all at the same time.It really is, because that's what a pivot is.It's easy when you see what's supposed to happen, but then actually doing it is the hard part.
You have to, it takes a lot of courage to do it.And if I'm thinking like best practices, you get to a point in a startup where you realize there's a much greater value unlock that you're not going to be able to provide.
And then you have to make a decision.Am I happy settling with what my growth path could be?If I put that in perspective and context with this business, Lisa and I had a business.
We could have ran at the kitchen table or in a small office and we probably could have made personally a few million dollars a year because we didn't have to grow at the rate we've grown.We didn't have to do that.We signed up for that.
Want to solve the whole problem. Right.I'll tell you what happened.I started to sort of rationalize with myself.
If I was having a conversation with the CEO of a 2000 store chain like Target, they said, Bill, we want you to go live in every store and service us where my blocker was.
I couldn't figure out how I could put the diversity of vehicle types in every market and keep them busy enough to keep the network as a gig network.Exactly.And I realized I couldn't solve the problem.There is no one network.
DoorDash can't even solve the problem. They solve a great parcel problem, but they can't solve the big and bulky problem.They're a great partner of ours.
That's why we assemble a network that has Sprinter vans, refrigerated, frozen, dry, TSA certified.That set me down a thought process of aggregation is the only way to really play this game.
I have a lot of respect for the couriers that we were competing against.At the time, we weren't really going head to head with hardly anybody because we were just in a couple cities with Zapped.It's hard to build a gig.
and an LSP that's a W2 model that has fixed assets, that's hard too.So I had a lot of respect for the companies that built that, and I didn't feel like I could out-operate them.It's like trying to out-price Walmart, right?
You're not gonna get lower than Walmart.Don't compete with Walmart on price.
And I think there is this other side to it, which is when people are starting new businesses, this is my pet peeve personally, and some people think that it's being too bullish and just like jumping headfirst.
But I feel like if you think there is just a decent idea, go do it.Because the fact of the matter is, Whatever you build at first is not what's going to take you to rocket ship.
I have not yet seen, or maybe there exists examples, but whatever thesis you start with, it's going to evolve.Jump in.Don't get into analysis paralysis.And I know some really, really smart individuals in the market.
The problem is just because they are so smart, they tend to just overanalyze about what direction they go.Because I know it as a fact, like if they just do it, they would build the most killer solution.
I think as a founder, you also end up just, it's your baby, right?So you end up resisting that change that needs to happen.
And I think the other inflection point is as a founder, like when did you decide that you should be getting investors and raising the funds?
Because that's the other thing that I see in the market where there are some really good solutions and really smart people, but they just don't want to take the money that it takes to grow.
When did you come up with that option and that idea and actually went through with it?
even before twenty eighteen which is when we started and what now is one rail which began as apt We operated for about a year and a half, just Lisa and I bootstrapping it.We had no investors.And then we made a decision.
We realized that the market opportunity, if we were going to go get it, it had to be fast.We couldn't just grow it on the capital we had or reinvesting profits.So we decided, let's go get a million or two of angel investment.
We had a lot of support from friends, family, people in the industry.And then the bigger decision was when we realized, oh no, we see this grand vision. then it's really time to go raise some capital.So it gets back to the pivot itself.
As an entrepreneur, what do you want to sign up for?If you want to sign up for making a really great living, you probably don't have to go raise capital.
If you're fearful the market's going to outpace your organic growth, you need to go raise capital.And I knew that we needed to go seize this market. That's why we did it.
That's why we raised the capital.Maybe that becomes the next line of question is the right time to raise.You speak about 2018, 19, that period and coming to 2024.
Our observation, it's like how much have logistic technology companies out in the space have gone through and seen the evolution through pre-pandemic stabilization to pandemic.
Money starts becoming, oh my God, what's going to happen to logistics is where everyone wants to invest.And you now have the bigger VCs trying to like get in and invest a whole bunch of money.We saw a lot of companies
We go through the 2022-2023 period, specifically 23, we are in the transportation segment, a large chunk kind of shrunk.A number that I recently heard was almost like half the companies went out of business last year in transportation as a space.
Here we are, we see now more mature investors, more mature startup, the realization that just an idea does not work.You also need experience and grit.You literally have survived through that period, but also started to being here at this point.
Can you share some of that journey?
I got to tell you, you summed that up really well.The investment cycle right now is amazing in front of us that we will see the next 10 years to really get to that 2.0.
If you think about what we've had to do to operate and you sort of summed it up, you have really social unrest during the pandemic.That had an impact on things that we had a horrible presidential election, just polarized, at least the United States.
Then you had geopolitical issues followed by financial crisis, followed by more geopolitical tension. And now another presidential election.So there's this crazy distempering of markets that's happened.
The generalist investors that don't really understand what we do, the first thing they think about is freight recession.And the first thing I do is say, we have nothing to do with the freight recession.We're dealing with omni-channel fulfillment.
We just keep operating.And that's kind of how I think about it.The number one advice I have for any entrepreneur is you don't quit.You know, you pivot, you change, you tweak.
You figure out where you can add value back to your original question about pivoting.You have to recognize what's the maximum punch that I can create into the market where I can add value.
And so if you can do those things, you can continue to operate.2021 was all about grow, grow, grow and get up and running.
And there's a lot of really great companies that never really got past that hump of starting to show operational leverage in their business and good unit economics.So that right now, that's everything you have to grow and you have to be profitable.
And the amount of companies that actually popped up specifically in the local courier delivery network, regionalized, or not even regionalized, they were all like city-based startups that popped up and they expanded into one or two or three.
You see a lot of them now starting to struggle or some of them actually gone away.
I think there is some great consolidation at least coming on that front that's going to end up happening because I think one of the challenges with aggregation at your level, then you bring in asset light. as a solution underneath it, right?
And then there is three sets of margining on a single transaction.We already have that problem.
I'm much closer to the e-commerce fulfillment ecosystem of like warehousing and distribution that in that particular arena, the idea of 4PL struggle is because
you're already talking to small merchants, which is different for you because you talk to large retail.
But when you talk to small merchants that are doing fulfillment in a 4PL environment, now that 4PL has actually given it to a 3PL, we are distribution itself, big pack is already a race to the bottom, right?
Like it's about providing the cheapest service at the best value.What ends up happening is the 4PL and the 3PL are both vying for a margin where traditionally there's only 10 or 15% margin sitting in there.
And in your case, now you have two or three levels if there is asset light in between, right?How does that play out?
Like, is there the margining is enough and there is less of these asset light organizations sitting in between and that's what's changing.It's the aggregation of mom and pops that's actually growing or is it acquisition, consolidation, mom and pop?
So it gets back to. When we sat literally, remember like it was yesterday, we sat around a table in Orlando in our little office when we had eight employees and we were initiating our pivot.And we made a very strategic decision.
We're going to target the biggest retailers on the planet and the biggest wholesalers on the planet.Now, that's that's not conventional wisdom.The ICP.Yeah, I agree.And I realized.
In hindsight, what's hurting companies that are in that tech-connected, even not tech-connected, just fixed asset careers, if you don't have enough volume from a partner, because we were going to be their partner to give them volume, then you sort of get distracted and go do something else, right?
You lose your network. So our thought was, if we could get high volume partners, we can build density.If we can build density, we can build optimization.We can get unit economic advantage.And it took several years for that to play out.
But when we launched Lowe's Home Improvement nationally last July, that's what it took for us to start seeing that.And it wasn't without growing pains.
It wasn't without spinning up an AI and data science department that does nothing but optimize that data. And we had to have data to optimize, so that took a couple years to build, right?But that was our theory.
And now you can carve out a product that can help that ICP that you didn't start with, the mid-market and the smaller ones, you can actually bring that in by saying, okay, now I have enough data, enough optimization, enough of a network, enough of a density to be able to say, all right, let me help you.
And I think that's also the same thing applicable on the distribution side.A lot of folks start small, And now you got aggregation of all of these little, little, little things.
But if you were to start big, then getting down to the small ones, because you have so much density, so much knowledge, so much optimization, it actually, and again, I know we are not talking distribution right now, but like same things applicable.
And to the point you made about starting with enterprise, I think a lot of people are afraid of starting with enterprise. Because it's so much easier to go sell to a mom and pop or to a brand that just started their business or whatnot, right?
But if you want maturity and you need domain knowledge, you need the depth and understanding of what that enterprise is going to want to hear.But if you can acquire enterprises first, that's what you should be.
I would say it really does need like enterprise is not an easy beast.So the fact that you had been through that before, I think it really helps to kind of tackle that.But just going in, because that's another thing we've seen, right?
New startups that come out and they're like, we only want the whales.We will not say yes to anyone else who actually wants to buy our services.So for the people that are listening, it's
think through if you can actually go after the enterprise players, because to Bill's point, he had been through that enterprise playbook before.
So as much as that's really, really needed, sometimes you might not be able to have that as your first customer, right?But I think, Bill, you started touching on something that's really interesting.
So maybe if you can tell us a little bit more about what kind of AI and ML investments you made.I love hearing about true implementations and use cases and how it's making a difference in our industry.
Great questions.Honestly, if it wasn't for it, I don't know if we'd be in business.I would say it with that much confidence.
So when we built the first version of the platform and we launched just a handful of customers on it, it was what we would call digital dispatch.So we had a very small courier network.Think of it as proof of concept, right?Small courier network.
And we had support agents, right?They were dispatchers. So the order would come in from our customer.They would look at it and go, yeah, it looks about for this courier.
And they would select a courier from a dropdown menu and hit submit, and then it would dispatch it to the courier.One person, 80 a day.
Once we pivoted, though, and we built the first real machine learning version of this, one person today can dispatch.They're not dispatching.It's all automated.Almost 3,000 deliveries.So we went from 80 to 3,000 a day per head.
And the number of heads went from 6 to 50 on that team.So think about the, we'd have to have well over 1,500 employees today. If we were just digital dispatch, we couldn't do it.So back to your margin question.Yeah.
We couldn't afford to hire 1600 people.Yeah.No different than when we were a tech connected courier.We couldn't have afforded to build a network as a tech connected courier to serve target.
So that's why we aggregate for us.It was a matter of we can't build the business without it.We had a brilliant enough CTO that really understood how to do that.
And then as we started to really get volume last year, the only way that we can improve the business was to start a dedicated AI and data science department.And all they do night and day is work on optimization.And what does that mean?
Well, if you take a product that for 20 years fit in a box truck, but you can put it in an SUV, because you've turned it 360 degrees every possible way you can, and you know the max openings, and you know the max and min dimensions, and then you can start building data models to predict that, and then you can start building a network to predict when you need that for that particular SKU, because we know those SKUs deliver at a certain time of day that are that size in a certain place, all that
is far more than you could possibly do.
I think something really critical that you just said, having worked for FedEx, one of the biggest problems on the courier front is you don't know what's inside the box.
And once you start learning what's inside the box, you can start becoming so much better.That is one of the biggest problems the large couriers have.All you see is the outer box.
I mean, you know, the FedExes and the UPS and DHLs of the world, and you had USPS, right?You know where the density, where the volume's going, what kind of boxes. they don't know what's inside.So that data, one layer deeper is missing for them.
And so when you are starting to capture that level of data, you can start becoming so much better from a data aggregation perspective.And shaping the data models that you require to the point that you're making here in demand, I know how to shape it.
I know the dims of this product, and I know how I can deliver it better.So that I did not realize you are capturing data to that level.
Yeah, from day one, we were skew level. Because we've always believed and that kind of parlays into the importance of inventory is everything.I think of it as a triangulation, right?It's inventory, it's transportation, it's consumer.
Those are the three things that have to talk in real time.And the inventory has always been the center of our universe.The reason that we felt so strongly about getting the SKU level data is because we needed cubes and weights at an item level.
Also with all of the Gen AI tools that are coming out, a lot of the unstructured data that you have, and a lot of us have, it's possible for these pre-built solutions to actually simplify it so we can use and deploy them.
The key point that I want the audience to take away is, what Bill and Anad have touched on a couple of times now is that critical use of it.Anyone can take your user manuals and turn it into read my PDF type of Q&A.I think we're way past that.
I think it needs to be truly business changing kind of use cases that you truly use for Gen AI models.And I think you need to really deep dive and use it in the right way.
I think there is a deeper challenge in the industry is because of chat GPT and OpenAI and everything that's gone on around LLMs and Gen AI.
Everyone wants to talk about Gen AI, but the fact of the matter is what we need to look at is what those pieces of technology did was bring the cost of compute down.Yeah. What logistics needs to focus on is an industry that's not new.
Gen AI should be utilized, but before that is machine learning.And I think computer vision and machine learning that were there, it's been around for 10, 15 years.It has now become cheaper and more accessible.So tap into that.
Everyone wants to talk about Gen AI.Gen AI is cool, but in logistics, I think machine learning, and that's the application that you have, is to look at data. It's not as much an AI.
It's all to do with ML modeling and data shaping and trying to understand data aggregation.
Let's get into the conversation about the acquisition as well, because I think it's very cool.It kind of shapes where the evolution of where you guys are going to go next and would love to hear your vision behind that.
There was several key components to that model and data or inventory visibility and having logic around the triangulation of transportation and inventory was front and center as it took us this long to get to a point where we could either build it or acquire it.
Well, a year and a half ago, we took an investment from Arsenal Growth.So, got to meet the order bot team, Marianne Zachauer and her team and
got to see a lot of demos and we did the same with them and then started to go down a path about a year ago to do this.And it just wasn't the right time for us.We were in the middle of launching Lowe's.
Once we got past that, we got some of the operational kinks worked out, we got the unit economics looking good, and then just get the fundamentals of the whole business right, we were back in a position where we earned the right because our
It's not easy to do an acquisition, especially in this economy.And we earned the right to revisit it.When we did that, the thesis was strong as ever.There's an ecosystem out there of mature OMSs, right?
We're really not looking to replace mature OMSs. Now, certainly there's going to be retailers that want to install a new OMS, and we're certainly going to give it to them, right?
But our thesis was when we optimize last mile, we can optimize it from the point of receiving the order data all the way through to the consumer.That's what we control.And we always call that dispatch to doorstep.We own dispatch to doorstep.
And what we realized was there's still a lot of problems that are happening upstream in the order and notably around most of these sort of mature OMSs are defaulting the pick location to the closest store to the customer because conventionally that's the cheapest place to fulfill from.
That's before there were real time aggregated networks that can operate in milliseconds, right?We saw that.And we saw a lot of our customers struggling with canceled orders because there's only nine of 10 items available at this store.
And do you want to go to another store to get the other item or do you want to cancel or do you want to split order?Well, now we're talking another $15 a shipper.It's just not elegant at all.
And there's a handful of retailers that had the money and the time and the vision before COVID to build some of that functionality on top of a Sterling or whatever mature platform they're on.
So my vision has always been to be an eagle eye of inventory and order management, to not necessarily be the OMS, but to be the eagle eye value-added processing system that can say, if inventory is not available in closest store,
Send me every store in a market that has inventory in full.And this is the trick. then rate shop that against a real-time network that can immediately do it at the best possible margin.But if it's too high, then do split order.
That is all I care about right now.That is the number one use case that needs to be executed, and that's why we bought Orderbot.
So here's the fundamental, and this is enterprise-level challenges.At an enterprise level, the challenge comes down to most systems architecture is built in an NTR environment, right?You have commerce.
You have the OMS, and you have the WMS, and you have the TMS making the last point decision of shipping.It's like one, two, three, four.So how does it work?In most cases, it's you go to the website, you place an order.
The digital teams goes ahead and like their logic is like, I'm gonna make a promise that I will get it to you, something, right?Maybe I know the inventory exists, doesn't exist, whatever, right?But I'm making a promise.
And then I'm just gonna push it to the fulfilling system. And then the fulfilling system is going to then talk to its transportation guys and be like, I made this promise.
Can you now help me fulfill this promise, even though I am delayed, I got all of these challenges.
So the ideal state and this is, you know, to the large retailers, the ideal state because everyone talks about the Amazon experience, you want the Amazon experience, you need the final decision making system of transportation.
the decision-making system that looks at not only the transportation, but also the capacity, availability, resourcing, etc.
Be it a warehouse, be it a store, your ability to fulfill that in time, and then transpose that in real-time decision-making while the customer is still on the product information display page.That's right.
If you can achieve that, that's when you get Amazon experience.And oh, by the way, while you are at it, if you told a customer, you can get this tablet,
delivered in two hours while they are on that page, you better put a soft inventory lock on it so that someone doesn't come in and pick up three at the same time and you end up short selling.
But to be able to do that, you need transportation, order orchestration, and commerce to work together.The biggest challenge that I particularly see as digital organizations
And logistics organizations in large corporations are two different departments.That's right.And you have to bring them together to make this happen.
That is one of the biggest challenges.And something I want to point out that you very eloquently described, call it the legacy stack.And that's not meant to be a demeaning term.No, not at all.It's the 1.0.It's what everybody has.
Well, that's very linear.The process you described is linear.It's a series of handoffs, like an assembly line, right?What we do is nonlinear.
It's a triangulation of decision making that happens with interdependencies of transportation, inventory options, transportation prices, and then execute, right?Not visibility, execution.Visibility is inherent, but the execution is the key.
And so just to be clear from an order bot perspective, is it something that from a vendor, I'm sure you're going through an integration process right now, right?
So the vision would be to like put it together where you're getting the one real platform that also comes along.I'm guessing you're going to rebrand or an added module or something that's going to come together.
to help with commerce execution in front of the customer.Is that kind of the idea?
Yeah.So it's two things.It's business as usual.You know, we have big companies like Staples Canada that uses OrderBot and PatSense, Division of Tractor Supply, Red Hat.It's business as usual for them.
The teams have already, you know, we've spent the last couple of weeks whiteboarding and starting to build what we call dynamic fulfillment.
Right, which is that component that really combines order bottom as a DOM and one rail to triangulate that decision because that's a decision that an OMS can't make on its own.
And that's why I think it'll be interesting to see how the industry responds to that.
Let me ask you a loaded question.Do you see yourself then actually helping orchestrate the decision making for parcel shipping as well?Because if you are in the commerce environment making decisions for local deliveries,
Do you see yourselves actually because the commerce experience is also like should this go FedEx or UPS or should this actually go through a different mode or channel or a consolidation, zone skip, et cetera?
So we've actually been doing that.We've been doing it without. that greater richer data around the order.So again, we get fed an order and we act upon it, we execute upon it.We look at parcel versus courier.
We have one retail customer that wants to move almost 2 million off of parcel and onto our network.And it's because the rates are better and even more so the visibility is better. way better visibility, way better customer experience.
I'm excited about looking at this future of like bringing everything together from a transportation, at least the parcel transportation.
Specifically the national network along with everything else that goes with like your traditional fulfillment and be able to orchestrate all of that in a more centralized platform environment for large retailers.
And then, you know, using that as an advantage to bring it down to the mid market as well.
We've always had a philosophy.You have to be mode agnostic.You know, the mode should be a decision based on the order, not vice versa.Right.Exactly.
Well, I really appreciate you coming in and I know this is something we've been trying to put together for the last few months.So I'm really glad that we were able to make it happen and super special that we were able to do it in a studio as well.
So thank you so much for your time.This has been an exceptional session.And yeah, we look forward to many more conversations.
I appreciate the relationship.You guys are thought leaders and what you're doing for the industry is great.You take such a great objective view on the industry, which is something that I think everybody appreciates.So thank you.
Thank you very much.Thank you. Hi, I'm Nenad Acharya, CEO and co-founder of FulfillmentIQ.
And I'm here with Dan Call, CRO and partner at FulfillmentIQ.We're the team behind the Ecom Logistics Podcast.Our mission is to provide you with genuine insights from our work alongside logistics leaders to help you improve your supply chain.
In the Ecom Logistics podcast, we share the knowledge and the insights we've gained from working alongside amazing brands, retailers, 3PLs, and VCs, so you can make the most out of your supply chain journey.
If you like what you're hearing, we truly appreciate your support with a five-star rating on your favorite podcasting channel.Your feedback not only keeps us going, but also helps others find the podcast.
If you think Fulfillment IQ can assist you or if you have an idea related to logistics, just reach out to us on LinkedIn.We're always up for a chat and ready to explore new possibilities together.
Stay tuned to the Ecom Logistics Podcast on your favorite podcast platform for fresh and practical insights into e-commerce and logistics.Until next time, let's keep making a difference.
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