Name: [Peak Feature] Why Your 2025 Peak Will be Better with Strategic Integrations
Uploaded: 2025-11-16T16:21:05.773Z
Duration: 1 h 5 min 8 s
Description: [Peak Feature] Why Your 2025 Peak Will be Better with Strategic Integrations

Transcript for "[Peak Feature] Why Your 2025 Peak Will be Better with Strategic Integrations": Good afternoon, everybody. It's Thursday, September 4. Thank you so much for joining why your 2025 peak season will be better with strategic integrations. My name is Andrew Sulock, and I'm the head of partnerships at ProShip. Before I introduce our panel, I'd like to get some housekeeping out of the way. We do have some q and a at the end of this session, and I would ask you to please submit your questions using the q and a function in the webinar. We can address these at the end of the session. If you're on LinkedIn, you can also add your questions to the chat. This webinar is being recorded, so you will receive your on demand recording within the next week. You can download any additional resources from the related content section. And finally, we also have a survey, and we're asking you to please complete that survey to provide feedback on the webinar. That can only make these sessions better for you going forward. So with that being done, let's introduce our panelists, starting with Ben. Hello, everybody. My name is Ben Emrick, and I'm the cofounder and CEO of Tusk Logistics. We are a technology infrastructure that gives shippers easy access, visibility, and full control over alternative carriers nationwide. Hi there. I'm Lawrence Roycroft. I'm a senior director of solution strategy for Blue Yonder. We're an end to end supply chain business, helping, businesses from manufacturers, logistics service providers, and retailers for everything from, planning, forecast, and demand solutions through to execution, WMSs, OMSs, and and transportation systems. And I'm Tara Buechler, strategy principal at JBF Consulting. At JBF, we apply our collective logistics experience to translate our clients' complex business challenges into operational and technology driven results. Thank you very much. We're very excited to have all of you here. So let's go ahead and get started. It feels like every week, there's a new surcharge, a new tariff, or a price increase that's throwing a wrench into the works. This, is a constant unpredictability, and it makes it really hard for shippers to budget and forecast their expenses. And, you know, we're heading into peak season. So how are shippers going to be dealing with this constant pressure? And what are the most effective strategies that you're seeing to not just survive, but thrive in this volatile pricing? Ben, would you like to start? Yeah. Happy to, Andrew. There is nothing more true than what you just said. Right? Like, this is a death by a thousand cuts situation. You know, I speak with shippers every day, and what I hear from them is this deep sense that the carrier ecosystem is is not on their side. You know, shippers feel pushed into a corner, and they're constantly surprised that their margins are constantly impacted negatively by things like holiday surcharges, changing DAS and EDAS ZIP codes, GRIs. These are things that sometimes they're somewhat predictable, but even something like a GRI or a holiday surcharge that you know is coming, you never know where it's gonna land. So here's here's what we say to the shippers. First and foremost, you must have a solid understanding of your data. And specifically within your data, you really wanna understand your margins. So for a three t l, that margin might actually be, like, where's my buy price and then where's my sell price per client. You know, three t l's really need to track that by brand, by client really closely. If you're a self fulfill self fulfilling retailer, your margin is actually, you know, the unit cost impact, the final mile shipping against your full basket size and where you set your free shipping thresholds and stuff like that. So my advice really is simple, but it's, like, get into the data, understand your margin, and then ways to improve your margin. There there's a number of opportunities, and we're gonna talk a lot a lot about them today. But in my space, in the alternative carrier space, the surcharges are low and predictable. As an example, like, every carrier on Tusk does not charge fuel, does not charge resi, has a very low holiday surcharge that's standard, and it's for only two months versus nearly four with the large carriers. So, you know, diversification is a real easy lever to pull going into peak season to keep those surcharges low and to get ready for the new year when you're staring down the barrel of a big GRI. So, Tara, given what you've heard from Ben, how can a a customer balance cost and service? It's a really great question. I do think as the pace of disruption and the scale of these changes seems to continue, there's not really a pause to regroup. And while this is happening to Ben's point, our clients are expected to manage costs, but they can't really make a trade off anywhere else. They're not able to manage costs at the expense of service or speed. And so companies are expected to find this really delicate balance across those, and that's while they're trying to do this in a really, really dynamic operating environment. And it's tough. And the companies that I think are really successful at doing that has systemic approaches. They've really mastered the basics to navigate all of this. And Ben said it first, which was they really have a good understanding of their current baseline. And that was in reference to cost, of course. And I think that the companies who have really mastered being able to do this and do it well, are also very, very well versed and have a a strong understanding of their performance, not just for cost, but, of course, for speed, performance, quality. And they're using that to really do, I would call it scenario based assessments when the unexpected happens. It's not uncommon to run across shippers who say, I don't have a clean baseline. I don't have clean data. And when the unexpected happens, they don't really have that foundation for making intelligent decisions. But when you have that available, then you're able to move, I think, beyond gut instinct or using basic subpar spreadsheet analysis into more scenario based analysis. So not only can you understand your history or reporting and tuning decisions, you can use that as the foundation for modeling out multiple scenarios and evaluating what the most optimal outcome is. And then, of course, you have to be able to implement that quickly and whatever new policy you have decided on to react, respond, or even prepare for something that is likely to happen in the future, that has to be implemented. So we're looking to, our systems to be resilient and to be flexible and ultimately enable us to enact sophisticated decisions or new policies when we're faced with these challenging events that, again, continue to happen and happen. So Ben was spot on in terms of know yourself, understand yourself, and then I think that's what enables these companies to better capitalize on, the events that occur and theoretically get ahead of their competitors who are still scrambling to try to figure it out and respond. So I think a common theme we're gonna, be talking about today is know yourself, know your policies, know your data. What about our products? Are there any physical warehouse strategies that our shippers can implement, Lawrence? Yeah. I think there's it goes beyond just the warehouse strategies, and I think that the know yourself piece and yeah. I can agree with with more with what the other two have said, but I think one of the things that fulfillment optimization is is critical, so sourcing optimization, transportation optimization. But it's really looking at this collectively across the ecosystem that allows us to be able to really optimize end to end. And one of the things that's important is to, look at and understand your cost of the whole know yourself piece and understanding what those cost levers are for you in the first place. So this is matching the your customer proposition to what you're doing in terms of inventory placement. So, you know, you can reduce cost in the first place by having your inventory in the right place in the first place. So arguably getting this first mile right, and and that's been able to use shipping based data that you've had from pre seasons or you've had from previous peak seasons using that data as a knowledge base to provide intelligence for how best to position for this peak. So what we would look to do is understand how do you inform planning systems and placement systems that certain items were kept and collected. They were shipped across borders. They were shipped internationally. They were, you know, shipped from a warehouse or they were shipped to a store for collection. And what we wanna make sure is that we can take all that information of the fulfillment methodology, link it to the order and the order type, and then inform planning systems that based on these characteristics of orders of individual products, that we're then able to place the item in the first place in the first place. That way, we're able to minimize the the potential for for, surcharges on the carrier, but also we're able to forward deploy inventory as far as we can and get as close to customer as possible, because, traditionally, we would see that that having, you know, inventory close to the customer does tend to reduce the cost, particularly around peak season where there's so much load that actually distributing capacity from warehouses to stores, if possible, can be very powerful, for sharing the load and and making and keeping the right promises to customers. So it's all about understanding yourself, understanding your proposition to the customer. Do I want same day next day, whatever it be? And then putting the inventory in the right place in the first place and building the fulfillment around that those patterns. Yeah. Thank you so much. I would, just add to that a little bit that, even if you have all the data and all the information, it's not going to make much of a difference if you don't also implement the business rules that enable these optimizations in the first place. And, that's one reason why, multi carrier, shipping software can give you the data that you need to determine, those business rules, implement them, and optimize your enterprise software stack. You know, ProShip itself has great shopping, the flexible carrier options, and no matter where that inventory is placed, those business rules can optimize how those parcels are gonna get from the warehouse shelf to your front door. And that really brings us to our next topic, which is all about the technology integrations. We've talked about shipping software, but let's talk for a minute about how that essential piece really integrates into the larger ecosystem. A modern supply chain is a web of different systems. You've got the WMSs, the OMSs, shipping software, but they don't always talk to each other. So let's explore this idea of an integrated tech stack. What does a truly integrated system look like, and, how does it drive real operational impact? Tara, let's start with you. Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. So a lot of times when we think about integration, people think about an API or data moving back and forth between systems or parties. Basically, just getting systems to talk to each other, but the real intent and the value of true integration isn't just connectivity and moving data around. It's about enabling connected decisions. And I think you raised a great point about our multi carrier shipping systems being able to participate and really increase the value of the decisions that are being made in, the the end to end process. Companies are really moving beyond that traditional ship at the end, and they're going to intelligent ecosystems where their shipping systems help drive upstream, processes in a more intelligent way from the point where a customer is thinking about a purchase through the actual optimization of how the order is fulfilled. And so to go a little deeper on what Lawrence was talking about, we've always assumed that we can put the inventory in the most optimal place. But from the point the customer starts browsing, there is a big opportunity for your shipping systems to participate in that beginning of the customer's journey. Your shipping systems can help provide cost transparency during that buying journey. You don't wanna surprise your customers with shipping cost at checkout, so you can enable some of that transparency through leveraging your shipping systems. Also, of course, you can start to incorporate speed and delivery expectations, give customers options for how they wish to get those goods to their door. Are they able to get that through a traditional delivery? Can they get it through same day capacity like DoorDash if your company uses that strategy? So I think there's a big opportunity to see cart abandonment rates drop or even customer surprises drop if you start to incorporate your ship shipping system into the buying journey itself. And then, of course, once a checkout is made or an order is actually, available, we also can then get into the optimization of where the order is truly fulfilled from. So, again, thinking about what Lauren said, we've always assumed that inventory is in the optimal position based on its proximity to the customer, which is often true that that is probably the best place inventory. But we know that we have to look beyond just inventory alone when we're choosing where to fulfill an order from. And if we incorporate our shipping system into that decision, we can get a very accurate picture into your expected shipping cost, the speed. And I think when we start to talk about peak, we also start to have to consider capacity. And so if we're in a situation where an extremely high value shipper, we may have capacity constraints or we may have to use certain capacity mixes to, again, manage our costs while still meeting performance expectations. And so when you incorporate your shipping engine, which again understands the cost, the speed, and the capacity, especially during peak into that fulfillment optimization decision, you'll you'll have more optimal decisions, that, of course, help you balance that cost speed and service, problem that everyone faces, but they especially have to manage during peak. And it feels like peak keeps getting earlier and earlier in the year as businesses try to capture customers before those customers can go to other vendors. So given that peak is happening sooner and sooner, it's coming up very quickly. We're in we're in peak. We're in peak right now, quite honestly. Like Yeah. I mean, like, our volumes our volumes started popping two weeks ago. Like, back to school is now the new Thanksgiving, basically. So, like Yeah. We're we're in peak. So given that we're already in peak, what can our shippers focus on right now then? This is gonna be a recurring theme for me today, but, like, just be super tactical. Like, I worry sometimes in our industry that shippers get overwhelmed with complexity, and as a result, they get stuck in, like, a doom loop of analysis paralysis. And at the end of the day, look back and say, shit. I didn't do anything today. Right? Like and where that where the rubber meets the road in a place like a warehouse is, hey. It's almost September. You're not gonna put in any new tech realistically. So fully leverage the tech you have. Right? Like, it doesn't matter what TMS, what WMS you have in place, but I guarantee you, you're not using all of the features that are already present within that technology to the fullest extent. Here's here's one example. Like, packaging optimization is often present in a lot of TMS and WMSs. Like, most people just kinda, like, default to what packaging they see on the shelf. Right? Like, that's the picker determines it on a whim and they just kinda grab the corrugated option that they see closest to them within his arms reach. Like, no. No. No. No. Like, spend two hours on a Monday morning, watch your pickers, put stuff into boxes, and then determine, like, oh, actually, these two of 10 package types are actually going into the wrong corrugate option. Like, we just have to rearrange which corrugate is on which shelf. Like, stuff like that. Yeah. Like, using the simple tools that you already have, or they're not even simple, but, like, the tools you already have to really optimize for process, optimize for margin, optimize for cost. I would just encourage people to not try to reinvent the wheel, especially when we're almost in September and we're already in peak season. Yeah. To jump just to jump on that, but I think Ben's absolutely right. You know, to be able to do things quickly in a short period of time is is super important. I think one of the things that's important is to always remember that, yeah, we deal with text backs and we're dealing with parcels and stuff, but there are people at the end of it. There's people processing it and there's customers receiving it. So, really, we need to make sure that we're able to make the right promises to customers. And to Tara's point, you know, it's about getting those promises as far up the buying cycle as we can so that customers can make informed decisions about when they're gonna receive stuff because we all know there's a returns epidemic at the moment in in many forms of retail. And, actually, if we get the promises right in the first place, then we can reduce the impact of those returns by by making sure it hits people at the right time because we know particularly around peak that, you know, companies end up selling stuff. And if you miss, carrier cutoffs or you miss the last post day, you know, or you tell customers it's gonna be there, you know, on the December 21 and it arrives on the twenty seventh. It it's it's not something that people are gonna go with. So you need to make sure that you can guarantee, to Tara's point again, the capacity of your network, of your fleets, of your processing, and remember that there's customers at the end of this. So only make promises you can keep and be clear in what those promises are. And on top of that, a lot of businesses are influencing code freezes because they don't want hiccups. They don't want, processing delays. So, that may mean that for some of our viewers, they're going to feel the pain of their issues no matter what. So, taking a longer term view of the future, what's the biggest benefit of having a tightly integrated system for a shipper's long term strategy, particularly for going into next year's peak season? Lawrence? Yeah. I think for me, it's it's, you know so, yes, you know, BlueJeans does stuff in the in the kind of, the shipping space. We got transportation systems, but we also, as I mentioned before, look at the end to end. And, really, for me, you know, one of the things that's really important is, you know, that kind of old Mike Tyson phrase of I think it was attributed to him where everyone's got a plan so you get punched in the face kind of thing and and key kits and all the plans are laid out, and then suddenly everything's up in the air and then you're trying to deal with stuff. And what you really need to be able to do is have planning replenishment allocation, WMS systems, TMS systems, all integrated together so that all of the event signals that have been created in those systems are able to talk to each other, and you're able to use the pieces of information to make decisions in real time. So that may be that a store is overwhelmed with customers because the point of sale system is is going off and and there's the and they're they're processing a lot of orders. You don't wanna send a 100 online orders to that same store because they won't gonna be processed. If a warehouse has got low labor that day, you're gonna have to understand the capacity. We need to feed that back to the system so that they can make decisions on where to allocate, where to source, where to optimize orders. And it's really being able to use a single platform that can give you that kind of interoperable, opportunity. Now, you know, you can't do that overnight. That's something that you have to think about long term and and look at how do you build in the use cases and and the places where you've seen challenges in peak before, and how do you optimize that for the next time. So, you know, starting to, you know, I I I wouldn't say that we're done for this peak because I think people at a push can still do stuff. You know, not all is lost. You know? Everybody can can do things where they need to. But, really, in order to drive that success, having, a a integrated landscape is is something that's gonna be much better than a bunch of disparate systems, you know, creating noise, but they're not really being able to communicate to each other. And it's really bringing that data back that allows us to to create the the integration between each other. Better, Tara, anything to add to that? I I think that, like, where people find significant margin, especially in in the short term, is when they kind of connect the tech to the app. So here's an example. Like, we have a a perishable a frozen fulfillment provider. So a three p l that does frozen food direct to consumer. And they use their system to identify that the Tusk network was delivering parcels more quickly than FedEx or UPS. And then because we were delivering items more quickly, they then kind of connected it to their operation and realized, hey. Instead of putting dry ice into these parcels, which is more expensive, they could actually use frozen gel packs, which are roughly, like, 30 to 40% of the cost of dry ice. And, like, all of a sudden, they got a cheaper parcel delivery. They got lower weight, which then reduced the parcel's cost further, and they reduced their packaging spend because they went from dry ice at, like, you know, $4 a parcel to a gel pack that was less than $2 a parcel. So, like, you know, this this peanut butter and chocolate of, like, a technology insight or feature, like, kind of accelerator combined with an operational insight that you can only see with your eyes inside the four walls of a building, like, that's where the magic happens. And Lawrence is right. Like, you can still do stuff during peak. I don't mean to, like, paint a dire picture. We gotta be you gotta be realistic. You know? Like, you gotta place your bets. And and shippers and operators, like, they need to act boldly and act with courage and put some chips on the table and, like, not be afraid to, like, go for it, but also be smart. Like, it's a balance. Like, that's why they get paid. You know? Yeah. I think to add on to that, there's this common theme that Ben and Warrens and I have all talked about, which is, again, know yourself. So, Ben, you gave a great positive example, which is where you recognize things were going faster than expected. So you were able to make some packaging changes, reduce some costs, still meet your customer promise. It's a win all around. Right? I think that there's also a lot of opportunity during peak to understand where maybe expectations are not being met in terms of performance and decide how you incorporate that back into this decision making, that happens within your shipping system. If we've already accounted for the fact that carriers are publishing, longer transit times, and we've already accounted for the fact that we expect more surcharges. And that's in our shipping systems optimization rules. That's a great first start. Make sure that your decisions are made with what you believe will happen, your assumption of what will happen based on what your carrier told you. But when you start to measure what's actually happening, again, in terms of speed and performance, you can learn that those expectations are not being met. And you should have some policies for taking that real world insight or the real world feedback and overriding these published defaults when performance deviates from the expectations to start to make incremental changes into your decision process. So it's reflecting what's actually happening outside the four walls versus what you thought was going to happen based off what you expected from a Polish transit table as an example. So Well, just but Tara but Tara then but then the shipper, the operator, they actually need to, like, make the physical change at the pack station. Mhmm. And, like, you you you are putting your finger on something that's so important. Like, they they recognize the deviation from the promised SLA. Right? Mhmm. But then oftentimes, like, when I'm in buildings and I'm looking at the pack station, the picker, like a like, just muscle memory just prints the FedEx label. Right? Like, that even though FedEx is late or UPS is like, doesn't matter. The carrier, like, the the muscle memory of that human at the pack station is just so hard to override, and the organization has to have the insight, the data, but also just, like, the raw operational ability to make change. Yeah. I I totally agree. Or those decisions should be automated. Maybe humans should not be making those. Those decisions are actually automated. And number one, when we automate decisions that are driven by all these, understanding of what is supposed to happen or what actually is happening in the outside world, then we get more optimal outcomes. We are selecting the best carrier and the best service for the circumstances on a package by package basis, which is great. And that automation, of course, it's not just productivity, but, it can also free up time that you need to be able to understand that, oh, things are going faster than expected. What would happen if I was able to make a packaging change? It would save me this much. That's great. You can quantify the impact. So productivity is really, I think, the lever you pull to make your labor more effective at the the pick station, the pack station. But also when you think about other folks in the business, it gives them the time and space that they need to be able to evaluate what has to change to keep pace with everything that's going on during peak season or during an unexpected event. Yeah. I can do Oh, go ahead, Lawrence. No. I was gonna say, Tara, you you're so right. And and one of the other things just that one of the things that you keep talking around that I really love is is this kind of constant need to optimize in the moment as well. And just because we one of the things that, you know, I know Ben you would kind of saying how how long peak is now, you know, you kind of especially sort of the, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that kind of five, six day window. That's that used to be two days. Now it's like a week or two weeks, and and it really is a prolonged period of sustained intensity. But, actually, you need to be able to adapt in the moment as well, and you need to consistently look at what's going on to be able to make changes to optimize because you're having so much capacity shift in that period of time that, actually, you know, that could be a month's worth of of cost that you're absorbing if you're not doing it over the next couple of days. So I think being able to have the boldness as as Ben said to be able to make changes in the moment, but also the automated slash people and processes to be able to facilitate them at an organizational level right down to the pack station. It's really important to manage costs through such a a a challenging process productivity time. And And I just wanted to jump in with a a real world example that's happening right now. Obviously, anonymized, but I'm working with a WMS partner right now who, has a shipper that is experiencing significant shipping pain. They ship between 10,040 parcels a week depending on whether it's normal season or peak season. And they have somebody selecting the carrier and the class manually. Uh-huh. How many people are doing that? How many people does it take to process 10,000 shipments a week? How many people does it take to process 40,000? How many errors are they, causing when they're going through this? You know, these people are so rushed to be able to get the job done that they're just trying to move to the next parcel and get that label printed. So that's, I think, really where ProShip comes into play as, you know, you can have a black box that does all of this for you based on the business rules. Once you've identified it, you are, taking away all of that pain, all of the frustration that both the company and the employees are experiencing. Right? And, if I could just add one more thing for those shippers who are unable to make, major implementations and changes, I highly recommend that you, keep a a little journal with you at all times so that when you are in the pinpoint at that very moment, you can write it down and you have a full list of everything that you need to solve for next year coming that's coming up. And it's gonna be here quicker than you think. Having those, pain points listed will enable you to argue for better budget next year if you do need to make, a change. And so, you know, all of this is it's really leading us towards this this future of of not just managing today's problems, but building that proactive supply chain that can, anticipate tomorrow's challenges. And all these new technologies are on the horizon. And yeah. I mean, we've heard some buzz words like AI. They're going to fundamentally change how we operate. And in a way, yeah. That's very much true. I think we've heard that quite a bit though. But let's talk about that a little bit. What what role, do you all see AI automation and these new collaborative models playing in the future of ecommerce fulfillment? And how can a shipper leverage their partnerships to stay ahead of that curve? Lawrence, let's start with you. Yeah. Sure. I I think, you know, the example that you gave there where you've got people manually choosing shipping labels. Right? That's that's, an obvious one that you would want to automate. And then the next progression of automation is into things like AI. You know, for me, I don't think at the moment that that people will necessarily be completely replaced by AI, but I think people who use AI will be better than people who don't use AI. And I think businesses is the same. I don't think anybody's gonna, you know, wake up tomorrow and find AI doing all of their jobs, but, you know, people wanna leverage it to make better decisions to crunch, you know, terabytes of data that you just can't do as a person, and actually allow you to make that decision. So for me, you know, AI is becoming, something that everyone has to use all the time. And with the evolution from, you know, standard language models into generative AI into AgenTek AI, You know, agents are now having the capability to actually go and do things. They can essentially take huge amounts of data, provide you with good decisions, and then go and action them. So, you know, at at Blueyonder, the way that we're using them is we're creating agents for areas of our business such as inventory or shelf ops or, transportation management or or inventory management again. And we're getting those agents to crop data and mine information from across our ecosystem from planning all the way through to execution, then use sort of external datasets to make decisions on and then actually provide it the capability to go into our solutions to to make, the changes if allowed by a by a human. So you're creating these kind of human centered AI enabled experiences for people using technology, and I think that's really where, you know, the market and people are gonna be going so that, you know, you can leverage the power of AI in in your own role, but actually, you know, make better decisions faster with with more sets of data. So it comes back to everything that everybody's been talking around. I'm surprised it's taken us as long to mention AI. But, you know, Tara can understand. A good thing, Lawrence. That's a good thing. Yeah. I like you know, when you talk about knowing yourself, getting data, these these models, these systems run on data. So getting getting your data in order is is really important, and then being able to use the integrations, work with partners to make sure that you have the right partner integrations and data sharing to be able to provide these models with with the date they need to go and make really, really smart decisions to make the people use them even smarter. Yeah. Lawrence, so one thing that you said that really sticks out as true to me is the fact that, like, AI is not going to replace full humans anytime soon. It is it is going to accelerate their progress when they choose to adopt smart aspects of AI. So we've seen this within our our shippers, businesses and operations as well as within our own operation. Like, one example for us is we were realizing that, you know, part of what Tusk does is we watch every parcel in real time. And we had a lot of, like, old school kind of Boolean statements that try to approximate for urgency. So, like, if parcel is more than one day delayed, then it is more urgent than a parcel that we think is only gonna be one day delayed. That kind of, like, old rigid model. And we used AI to build what we call an urgency score. So we now have an AI informed urgency score for any parcel that flows within Tusk's ecosystem, and it's determined in real time, and the urgency score can go up or it can go down when factors change. And, like, that's something that we couldn't have done without AI, and it has a direct impact on our operations team's efficiency, cost, the experience of our carrier partners who now receive less but more urgent escalations with more context behind them. And it was something that was, like it was hard to build. But now that we built that, the next AI projects we've worked on since have become incrementally more manageable. Like, the team has just gotten better at doing things like that. So I would encourage folks, even amidst peak, like, where there are opportunities in your business where you think to yourself, like, oh, you know, this is an area where I have structured data, but I'm still kind of, like, depending on this analyst to run a manual Excel report every week to determine, like, a a key insight or a a key decision that we do often. Like, that's where you should be thinking about applying some meaningful AI. I'm curious, like, if if you guys have seen that on, like, the shipper side recently. I'm sure you guys have good examples of that. It's really interesting because, I think that there's two ways to go about getting value from AI, and it is either build that capability internally or look to your current partners or potentially new partners to acquire the capability. You're buying it. And, having seen a lot of different software companies within the logistics and supply chain execution space, I can say pretty confidently that most, if not all, are using AI to power feature function in their applications, which I think is very, very interesting. AI, when it especially is human in the loop as you both describe, requires really a feature or function that can interact with a human and sign an application in a logical, intuitive, cohesive way. And that often comes when you are working with your current vendors and they understand your domain logistics, let's say, very, very well. And they're technology practitioners, and they can bring those two things together into a very, very well designed and easily used and adopted AI powered capability that gets them some kind of, value in their operation or when they're thinking about their strategy and how they should make better decisions or where they have opportunity to optimize. And so what I love about this is I think there's a lot of ways to go about leveraging AI, but AI is just a tool. And it happens to be a very, very interesting tool that's able to do things that we haven't necessarily been able to do quite as well, within software applications. And so for the most part, we're seeing adoption of AI embedded AI powered capabilities in software like what we've been talking about today. And that gives shippers the opportunity to start to adopt those capabilities for analysis, task automation, decision automation, all the things that we've talked about today and really get some of the benefit that they hadn't been able to before, and they're able to do it in an iterative way. And so they're just continuing to chip away at productivity and improved outcomes using what their vendors provided to them. And I think that's really interesting because Ben, Ben, I think you said it earlier. Stay close to your software providers, especially during peak when you're not really able to make integration changes or major application changes. Stay close to them and understand if there are feature functions that you can leverage in the short term that are going to get you some incremental wins, again, to free you to be able to make those, more complex decisions that still require humans to drive it or to get the time back to then realize that you have other opportunities on the table to optimize your operation without, again, making serious technology changes. And so, that's just something that companies should be considering about their relationship with their software providers and making sure they always understand what is available to them, the value of those features and functions, and how they can adopt it, to really improve their operation. I think that's fascinating, Tara. That's that's gonna add to it that, you know, one of the things that we see is that I think that the nature of work is changing and how work is being done. And we see you know, we want AI to be essentially team members that you can collaborate with, that you know, they don't do different jobs, but it's like having a team of BAs at your fingertips so that when as a warehouse operator, you you don't go in in the morning, go, right. What am I gonna do today? I'm gonna have to crunch through these numbers and have a look. What we have is AI agents who will go away and look at all the operations of the warehouse and come back to you with a 15 brief of what happened yesterday, of what's happening this morning, what are the three major issues based against the SLAs that you were you were measured on, and what you should potentially do to resolve them. And it will lay them out so that first thing in the morning, you can see them. We're even working without having them put it into a podcast so you can listen to it on the way to work, but I'm not sure everybody's gonna buy into that. But, you know, we're looking at it because people wanna consume things in different ways, and they have this power to talk to people like a person. So if you can be on your way to work and you can hear, like, the daily digest of what's happened in your warehouse the day before so that you know what you're walking into at, you know, 07:30, 08:00 in the morning, that's a that's a pretty cool thing to get. And we're just seeing that this is where the benefits are, that you can start to get ahead of what you're trying to do on a day to day basis in a way that you just couldn't before because it's like having a team in your pocket all the time. Lawrence, it'd be really cool if if you could listen to that, like, news brief about what happened the day before in your British voice. I feel like that would be really soon I am yeah. I'm available for voiceovers. Start I start to start the day with with my British friend, Lawrence. Yeah. Hey. This is really this is really tactical. One thing that that our team has found helpful is, you know, it's really hard to, like, you know, AI, AI, AI. You sit down your computer like, wait. How do I start this? Right? So a really tactical tool set that we found as a team that helped us just kind of, like, grasp what it meant in practice to implement AI within our teams was a YouTube channel by a guy named Jeff Su. So that's Jeff and then Su is s u. So he does a really good job in, like, very plain spoken ways of just describing, like, you know, Lawrence, you mentioned, like, that that progression from, generative to agentic. Right? Like, what's the difference? Right? Like, that channel just does a really nice job of laying it all out and then giving you examples of how you can meaningfully apply AI to, like, wrote tasks that you're spending a lot of time on. So we did we did this, as a team. I would recommend folks just, like, start there as a starting point. You kinda branch off from Jeff Sue's channel. But that that is a really good resource, and and it's something that, like, I listened to when I was, exercising. Right? Like, you can kinda do it easily. So Jeff Sue on YouTube has been super helpful for us. One thing that I would like to say, is that I think AI is going to make every employee the CEO of their own role, in that now they're getting rid of the busy work. Now they're letting something else take on some of that tasking, and it frees them up for more decision making and for implementing the important decisions. And with AI in its current state being generative and probabilistic, and sometimes it it it does hallucinate details. So that's really where having that fundamental knowledge about your systems, your business processes, your customers, your macro environment comes into play. Because if if an AI hallucinates a recommendation for you and you don't have the fundamental knowledge to be able to recognize that and course correct, well, you're you're gonna be in a world of trouble. Right? So given that the AI is going to make people more proactive problem solvers rather than task completers, Tara, are there any tools or tools that shippers can use to find new opportunities even when in peak? Like please go ahead. Yeah. Certainly. I think it's always a good idea whether, you're in peak or not to ensure that you have strong historical analytics platform. Again, know what's been happening. And, ideally, that is well designed and can surface the opportunities that help you further improve your operation. That could be as simple as highlighting where you're experiencing dips in performance or you have negative trends, or it could be a little more sophisticated in the sense that it understands that there is a pattern of, negative trend happening, and it would then prescribe how you could overcome that or how you can, work to improve. So I think that that is, of course, the most basic, the most important. But on top of that, there are a lot of great, modeling and contract analysis tools now that can help you turn around, propose rate increases, or propose peak surcharge analysis in hours or days versus weeks. And I still see some of our clients spending weeks trying to analyze, proposed rate changes and understand, first and foremost, what does it mean for my spend? What happened to my budget? But also, they use those types of tools to decide how they optimize their carrier network, or their carrier partners within their existing network. Ben's talked about, diversifying, and we do commonly see a lot of our shippers diversify so they can capitalize on, lower cost for regionals, faster speed for regionals. But, of course, they still get the scale and presence and large, capacity for their large volumes with their their national partners. But when you have price changes or you have, time in transit changes and you're working across multiple carriers, it becomes a lot harder to understand what the impact of that is and to understand if you should change how you're leveraging your carrier partners or if you should add new carrier partners. And, again, what does it all mean for my budget? What does it mean for my customer experience? And so I think that those are, the tools that we would recommend, and I, do still see a lot of companies who are trying to do these things on spreadsheets or they're leveraging a third party partner. And, again, it's taking weeks to turn that analysis around or, you know, the analysis is subpar because there's so much data. There's so many possible scenarios. A human just can't do it, but, a lot of these tools are built to allow shippers to do it themselves and do it themselves very, very quickly and with a high degree of accuracy and confidence in, the the outcomes that are being, described and give them the the information they need to make better decisions about how they should prepare, respond, react when those things happen. Alright. Well, we are running a little short on time, so I'm going to move into our final advice. Please, starting with Ben, and then Tara, and then Lawrence, if there's one takeaway or one piece of advice that you want our viewers to take with them after this webinar, what would you tell them? Spend time at the pack station. Like, look at it with your own eyes. Like, be very, very, present in seeing what is actually happening at the moment that a label is purchased and applied to a package. And then take action accordingly when you see shit you don't like. Sarah? I've already talked a lot about data, so I won't I won't say that one again. I will say that in peak, if you're not already, take a collaborative approach. Do that with your internal teams. Work with your digital teams, your planning teams. Map out promotional calendars. Understand your demand forecast. Sit in S and OP. Make sure that you understand what the business is expecting in terms of, peak capacity needs, and then use that intelligence to brief your carrier partners and, make sure that your team understands what's expected to happen so they can start to work together to prepare for what we expect is coming in the future and be best positioned as one cohesive team to to manage the the chaos that comes with every peak season that we have. Love that. Lawrence? Yeah. So I think I'm I'm gonna go back to something that Ben said, which was, you know, as a as a vendor, you know, stay close to vendors, plan, prep, and remember that the customer at the heart of it. You know, make sure that you can can scale your propositions and that you you manage the capacity that you have. So, you know, you need to work collaboratively with the people that are supporting you, and all work to make sure everybody has successful successful piece and is able to manage the the the unprecedented scale that that everybody's dealing with. So, you know, there there can't be a weak link. It's not just down to one person. We will have to work collectively, collaboratively together to to get everybody through it because it's it's getting harder and harder every year. And on top of that, we all have to be good stewards of the brands that are that are selling these products. Right? Because consumers don't necessarily blame the carriers. They typically blame the brand when something goes wrong. So we should all be striving for perfect order order delivery every single time. And with that, let's move into q and a. Let's see here. Questions, questions, questions. Alright. Question one. We're trying to build a modern tech stack, but it feels like we're just adding a new vendor for every problem. How do you manage all these different partners and ensure they're truly working together and not just creating more work? Who'd like to take that one? Well, I can I can start? I think yeah. I'm happy to happy to chip in. I mean, I think it's it's fair that, you know, challenging is and just vendor after vendor can be very difficult, and it's making sure that the tech stack is is truly connected, and having a kind of unified solution behind it. So I think, you know, focusing on integration, making sure that you have, data harmonization so that you're able to see data from from platform to platform, But, really, just making sure that you focus on the use cases that each solution is trying to solve and and try not to have too much kind of vendor sprawl, as too many vendors will does become become complex. So try and keep it relatively lean, but make sure that what you invest in is kind of integrated platforms rather than, silo points of views. I would also like to add to that, the importance of assigning ownership internally to your own organization. I think that, you know, tools, they're not gonna manage themselves. So if you're designating an owner or a product manager for each of these major systems, or assigning an architect or an integration lead to oversee how tools are talking to each other, that would that would really enable you to create, like, a source of truth map, which system owns which data, that kind of stuff. And then one other thing that I would consider is, you know, holding vendors and internal teams accountable to the outcomes, not just, like, the uptime. Right? So, establishing KPIs, tracking tool cost of ownership across tools, monitoring redundant functionality, and reviewing your vendor stack every, like, six to twelve months to eliminate some of these underused tools. And and associating the cost that total cost of ownership to that owner's p and l, mapping it directly. Absolutely. Alright. Question two. We have an older, maybe even a little clunky legacy system. What should we watch out for when we try to integrate a new modern solution with our old infrastructure? I could probably take that one. I I think that it is certainly not impossible or even, uncommon now to see legacy infrastructure or legacy technology integrating with newer, more modern solutions. It absolutely is possible and it happens all the time. And I think some of the things that we watch out for is ecosystem compatibility. Can both systems connect to each other in the same way? Can the way that one system talks, be interpreted by the other system and vice versa? Some very basics about, integration. And then the other thing that we always think about is how innovations are applied within those two different types of solutions. It's more common in older infrastructure, adapt innovations, releases, patches, whatever it may be applied on a less frequent cadence, because there is typically a time and a cost associated with putting those updates into older technology. It is much more common in newer modern solutions to see vendors, of course, managing those updates themselves and doing it a much, much greater frequency than, the the older legacy applications. And, that's not a problem as long as you understand the cycle on which all of those things are being updated, and you make sure that they are still working together and nothing has been broken after the fact. So if I had to say those, those would be if I had to say what folks should watch out for, those are probably due to two those two biggest things that I would call out. But, again, those are not insurmountable. I think they just take a solid understanding and a good plan approach into how those two will inter interoperate and how you will continue to manage them once they've been initially integrated together. Tell you something that's, slightly, an odd side effect of integrating modern platforms with with all the legacy systems can be actually that you get more life in the legacy system because sometimes what you find, and we see it in the order management space a lot where people have built out, ERP systems to manage order processing or integrate, heaven forbid, with with front end ecommerce websites. And no surprise, they start falling over because they can't deal with the chattyness of the web. But when you actually put systems that are meant to handle that load in place and you get get the original solution back to what it was originally designed ten years to do, you can get a little bit more life out of it, because you take some of the customization and extension that it's been built into it, away from it, and put it into more modern solutions, which can then handle the load in a in a much more efficient way. So sometimes you do get another tense an intensive consequence of, a little bit more life in the old systems. I would just say, tread carefully. Right? Because, a lot of these older systems often have tribal knowledge baked in. Right? There are rules that you don't know about, and if you break something, it it's more likely to happen if you're not gaining consensus from all of the people that are, you know, using that on day to day basis. Anybody else wanna add anything here? Okay. Question three. How do you prioritize which systems or processes to integrate first when integrations take up so much time and resources? Well I think when we so you oh, sorry. Uh-huh. So, Andrew, what we commonly, work through with our clients who are asking themselves this exact question is, why are we integrating systems? Systems are not integrated for the sake of being integrated. They're always there to solve some type of business pain or enable a type of business capability or process that doesn't exist today, and that typically drives incremental value for the shipper in, cost avoidance or typically soft benefits. And it's important when we're thinking about the possibilities of integration to understand the problem that we're solving and the benefits that we gain. That's our return. And then, of course, the time and perhaps actual expense that you mentioned is our investment. So, ideally, when we're thinking about what integration should we make, we're taking the ROI based approach, and we're sure we're relatively confident in the ROI that we've assumed because we built strong business case around value and improved outcomes, before we've made that decision that you're describing. Alright. And before we go on to our last question, we are running short on time. Does anybody else wanna add anything to that one? Okay. Great. So, last question. There are other questions, if you've asked them in the chat, I I'd I'd like to be able to reach out and answer those individually. But for now, here's our last question. We are doubling down on the customer experience right now. How does a connected system translate into a better experience for the person receiving the package? If I could just start with a personal anecdote, I have two Maine Coon cats, and I feed them, raw. Right? I I order raw from a online vendor and it gets shipped cold in transit and it arrives on my door, you know, perfectly frozen every single time. But, there have been one or two instances where it arrived a day late due to, inclement weather and all of a sudden, you know, it's above the maximum allowed temperature, or the box comes completely damaged and there's a corner open and all the dry ice has evaporated and it's just a mess. So, how could, a shipper, use a connected system to translate that into a better experience? Well, honestly, like, the first step is to be able to recognize when things go wrong. Right? Like, back to that sense of, like, urgency, if something has gone wrong, the shipper needs to have the ability to recognize when it did go wrong and take action accordingly. So whatever that brand was, Andrew, that that sends you your cat's food consistently, if they can proactively recognize the occasional bad delivery you experienced and make it right proactively, like, then then all is well. Right? Like, you don't mind as a consumer, but you have to have the systems and the app to be able to do that at scale. And so I would just like, you know, to kinda go back to where we started, it's all about the data. Right? Like, having the data, having it organized, and having a toolset that allows your team to, maybe even via AI, pull out meaningful insights, right, and then take action accordingly. Yeah. I mean, I'd I'd add to that, which is, you know, when you put the customer at the heart of what you're doing, which is what we should all be doing, it really comes down to nothing more in my mind. Obviously, the delivery experience, you know, you're probably throwing things over the wall. That that's something about humans and how we actually do that piece because no one's asking you to do that. It's just necessary. Something you you can't deal with. But I think the big thing for me is it's about if you know that when you place an order, you know the exact date and time and you selected the slot or the day or the the the moment that that debt is due to be delivered to my house or to my work or to wherever it is. If it doesn't arrive when it says it does, then chances are I did that because I'm not gonna be in, and then you start moving into the realm of what did was it there? Did it leave it outside? Was it in a safe place? And and you get all these complexities. Whereas, actually, if we just deliver what we say we're gonna do when someone's gonna be home, then actually, that's a lot simpler. So for me, it comes back to making promises, making the right promises, and making sure you can keep them. And to tag on to that, Lawrence, I frequently shop online on the app at a specialty retailer, and what I love about that experience is that I get to choose how it comes to my door. And I'm able to say, do I wanna buy online pickup in store? Do I want it delivered same day? Which store should I get it from? This store here or this store here? Or do I just want a traditional fulfillment experience? Can I wait a few days because it's really not urgent? And I like having the flexibility of shopping with a lot of options for when I get that, to to my front door. And so I appreciate when companies have a very flexible experience that meets me based on my preferences for whatever I'm buying, and I can select, again, how it actually, moves from wherever it's located to to, my hands. So that's one of my, favorite things that makes a difference in terms of where I buy certain things. Well, you certainly would have been. There's a lady called Jordan Spear who is the head of, research at IDC for this kind of omnichannel area, and she very much points out that personalization has moved beyond the product and into the delivery options. So you are very much one of her catchment for folks who who believe that. It's very important, and that's that's what one system should be able to provide. Alright. Well, we are out of time. Thank you all so much for joining us today, and a special thanks to my panelists. We really appreciate you, sharing your insight and your time with us. And if any of you out there are attending parcel forum next week, please stop by. ProShip team and I, we're all gonna be in Booth 233. So thank you all very much, and I hope you all have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Tom.