Name: The Post-Peak Parcel Roast: Supply Chain Fails & Fixes for 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T23:26:04.067Z
Duration: 1 h 10 min 12 s
Description: The Post-Peak Parcel Roast: Supply Chain Fails & Fixes for 2026

Transcript for "The Post-Peak Parcel Roast: Supply Chain Fails & Fixes for 2026": Just waiting for everyone to come up on stage here. Oh, wow. The title thing is alright. Very good. Alright. I think we got all our panelists in the right spot here. We'll just give everyone a couple minutes to join. What's everyone drinking today for happy hour? What we got? White white wine that apparently is invisible. Weird. Magic. It's magic. I have a pint of Guinness, and I'll let you all in in a little secret. If you voted on my online poll, the winner was Woodford Reserve for the Lovely. I had a bad experience with deferred reserve. I'm not allowed to drink. My wife doesn't allow me to drink brown liquid, so brown spirits. There's our slide. Who's stuff's drinking a matcha? Very nice. Alright. Just giving everyone a couple more minutes. I we have a lot to get through. Alright. Okay. I think we'll just start. I was just looking at all the scenarios, yeah, we should definitely start. So thank you everybody for joining us for the post peak parcel roast. Say that 10 times fast, not easy, but excited to get into this today. I've been hyping it up quite a bit on LinkedIn, so I hope you enjoy what we have for you. My name is Taylor Pawelka. For those of you who don't know, I'm the VP of marketing and alliances at Proship. And before I intro or get intros for our panelists, I just a couple housekeeping things. So we have attendees joining us on LinkedIn live as well as our webinar platform that's called Goldcast. Webinar platform attendees, you can engage with us through the q and a and chat, I think, too. Members of our team will talk with you there. If you have questions, we'll get to questions at the end. We also have some links displayed for some of our panelists and some of the representing some of the companies that are here today. And then if you are joining us on LinkedIn Live, we you can engage with us through the chat there. So members of our team will answer any questions or chats that you put there and send out the links to you so you have them as well. On both platforms, if we don't get to your question at the end of today, a member of our team will reach out to you via email so we can get that answered. And then just a disclaimer, this is a roast. So we've anonymized all the submissions because this isn't a roast of people. It's a roast of strategies. So if you see something familiar, don't worry. We're laughing with you mostly. The goal today is to have fun and share insights and learn together with just, you know, a little bit of friendly fire. So please don't get offended. Without further ado, let's get to our amazing panelists today. So these are people who have seen every kind of shipping disaster you can imagine and several you probably wish you didn't. So let's kick it off with Tony. Yeah. Thanks for having me today. Look forward to the the fun conversation here. I need to get a new, profile pic here and use less hair gel next A roast for himself. the for the next grow slide. Yeah. But, look forward to the conversation today. It's been fun planning this. Hi. I'm Jen. Is it me? No? Yeah. Jen, you're up. Okay. Thanks. Hi. I'm Jen. I'm from ShipHappens. I run a blog and media platform where we try to make supply chain and logistics make sense for small and medium sized businesses and people in the world of logistics as well. So I'm excited to be a little mean today. Alright, Jim. You're up. Come on now. I go? Okay. Yeah. Jim Burrow is here. And, yeah, I'm gonna also work on a hair gel solution for the next time. But, I've been, in the business for for decades. I've seen it all, and I'm really pleased to be here with the Proship, a great solution, great people, and a great partner, and looking forward to having some fun. Thank you. Thank you, Taylor. And I guess that leaves me, Matt Boland. Thanks for having me. Really excited that Proship is, as they always have, thinking out of the box, right, or inviting someone from an order management platform to participate. So that's exciting. Get a little bit of different perspective on how things can happen in a strategy and how something other than the standard, what you might think of shipping solutions as being an impactful solution. So thanks for having me there. I actually not only have been in software, but I worked for United Parcel Service for thirteen years. So I've seen lots of packages. I've seen how things can happen adversely in in particular, peak seasons. So, again, thanks for having me, Taylor. For those of you who are participating in my online poll, the winner of the gift from Proship was Woodford Reserve. So along with my pint, I will be sure to have a little bit of this, and hopefully, that'll let my inhibitions go down as we go forward. Thanks, Taylor. Back to you. Yep. Amazing. Thanks, guys. Alright. So now that you have met who is on the hook today for our commentary, let's get to our first peak season fail. So and it's gonna look like I'm reading off the screens because I am. I wanna make sure I get it right. Alright. So scenario number one, we have based our 2025 peak forecast largely on last year's performance and didn't anticipate the surge from a new influencer driven product line that went viral right before Thanksgiving. We exceeded our carrier thresholds on the first day of peak, triggered multiple penalty tiers, and had to secure emergency allocations with two national carriers. The result was five days of volume holds and significant unplanned costs. So, like, no one talks to each other at that company, like, ever? They just everybody just stays in their corners, and no one talks to each other. No one's ever been out to beers together. Nothing. The fact that there was, like, a TikTok something happening on TikTok and no one knew about it is wild work, to be honest. Yeah. Jen, you know, I agree. Who's in charge here? Who's in charge of planning? This is a, like, a critical failure. It's a classic success induced crisis. Right? It's a good to have because it's better than, you know, failing altogether. But you have to up you you need to really align your departments. Right? You need to align marketing with operations. And if you don't, the consequences are are clear. You're gonna have unsatisfied customers, higher shipping costs. And, so, you know, we really recommend good interdepartmental communications so that you can prepare for for things like that things like this. Many companies aren't technologically equipped, of course, to to even if you believe you're, you have backup strategies and ways of dealing with these things. But, if you're not, you really ought to, and this is a mistake. I hope you you know, they only make one time. Yeah. So it's definitely, like, a good learning lesson of, like, what systems are you using. Right? Are they still siloed? It's the typical kind of, you know, siloed company from communication point for your your mentioned, Jen. But, yeah, a lot of it goes, you know, from a carrier perspective is, you know, the the typical strategy of we only had one or two carriers that we were gonna fulfill for. Like, the you know, what was your excess capacity? Are you leveraging retail, regionals or other modes besides a traditional, you know, national carrier? Right? I think that's the, the excess capacity is it's hard to plan for in a one or two year negotiation cycle with carriers, but you always have to have that contingency plan. You know, people should be smarter. You should already know from the the COVID pandemic years of carrier caps, you know, don't repeat that mistake of kinda getting caught with a carrier capacity constraint. And, now if it's new products or now, you know, changing dynamics of how people buy, You know, I guess, more of a sounding board, you know, ever from as as ever of, you know, what else do you need to plan for for contingency wise? I think some of the mousetrap is harder to put put on. Right? So, obviously, TikTok shop the last two months and TikTok shipping is wreaked some havoc, particularly for three p l's supporting brands, Just a little. having have yeah. And so, like, nobody probably planned for that in January, early February this year off the heels of peak. But it's a it's a really dynamic world, and it'll be interesting to see what the next couple challenges are. To your point, Jim, sometimes they're good problems to solve better than a decline of sales in this case. Yeah. If I were to jeez. We haven't talked all over each other yet. This is pretty good. I'm jumping in. right on my. What? so. Wait. for a meal. Alright. Hey. Slow down, had a. couple drinks in. I take I take a little bit of an OMS perspective on this too is, like, when all else fails in planning, I start to think about visibility. Right? And do you have visibility into every way to lessen that constraint, right, that you have maybe at the dock or something like that? Are you leveraging all the inventory in your network? To to the point earlier, I think it was Donnie who said it, like, your systems talking to each other? Are you understanding your distributed network when something hits hard, like an influencer or something like that? Are you able to marry this is really a good question. Are you able to marry like, I don't know if this is a retailer or a distributor or manufacturer. I like to think of this in this in the in the from the aspect of, like, maybe they're a brand. Right? So they have b to b and they have b to c. Are those things within your organization, again, to an earlier point, siloed? Right? How can you make sure that you're fulfilling orders across your network that might limit the constraint at your dock door by having orders moving off to maybe fulfillment from in store or fulfillment from the three p l? If you don't have that visibility, that inventory, you can't make kind of those decisions that say, you know what? Fulfill this order from that location versus this one where our carriers can't handle the capacity. Maybe even shut down this location and fulfill from these other three DCs because here locally in this geo, we can't handle it anymore. We've gotta shut this location down. And if you can't do that through your systems really quickly, then, you know, the orders just keep piling up and piling up. How do you distribute those orders equally across your distribution network can really help to lessen that constraint that you're having, like, at the dock door or a specific geographical region. And that's, where business, logic within something like an OMS can pick the locations to ship from. Sorry. Go ahead. But, like, also, who ok'd this TikTok program to start during peak season as well? Right. Like, Right. that person's an idiot, frankly. Like, like, coming listen. It's all those like, launching something that you know is gonna drive sales, like, do that in the slower season when you're trying to get sales and you're struggling. Like, peak season is not the time to do that. That's I have I don't know what to say, which is unusual, for me, to be honest. yeah. Maybe it's just overconfidence. Right? You know, this you know, timing is never on anybody's sides and overconfidence of, hey. We can we can we can handle all the excess sales and everything that comes on. It's a little bit of, maybe protecting your job. Right? You know? Yeah. I'll sign up for more. You know? I think from a partners or systems, but there's also your your three p l partners. Right? You know, you know, Jen, Exactly. I think you said when you're talking about this the other day in prep for this. Right? Like, you know, where are your friends? Do you have friends? Where are, your. are people you can call to help kinda give you some more of that capacity or some more capabilities instead of signing it all up for yourself. Right? So. And what what ends up happening, again, back to visibility, if you don't understand the the like, an ERP doesn't necessarily understand the inventory that exists. within the network unless it's unless it's inside of its financial package. So, you know, it has to own it somehow or another. If it doesn't own it, it doesn't see it. So, again, that that ability to say, oh my goodness. We're spiking, and we use the three p l just for the b two b orders. But now with our with this visibility, we can say, take some of this stuff from the b two b orders to fill the higher margin online orders because this influencer is driving volume. Right? Those kind of plans, if you don't have the right plan, you have to have a plan to pivot. Right? You have to have a plan to flex. Yeah. Yeah. The, go ahead, Jim. you know, it says right right at the beginning, you know, we we didn't anticipate the surge from this new influencer the night before Thanksgiving. Right. That's just terrible communication, interdepartmental communication, terrible leadership. You have to bridge that gap some way. You have to get departments together. You have to have people talking so they can prepare, and anybody can prepare for the knowns. You have to prepare for the, you know, the unknowns. And, again, just a classic, lack of planning, lack of leadership, this is a this is an area that I hope it only happens once. I'm gonna say? one more thing because. Okay. I I'm gonna stick up. for I'm, gonna stick up for this. person. What's in. one thing? Well, we're only doing one scenario. Right? Or are there others? Oh, Okay. do we have more? No. Just one thing. Let's just roll. But to that point, right, they this could be an existing bunch of products that all of a sudden some influencer just picked up. Right? Like those they could have been planning. They may not have known this influencer done was going to do this. How do you to your point, That's, how do you. plan for the unknown? You plan for the unknown by having systems and strategies that enable you to pivot when something goes, not wrong, when something goes right. Right? This is going right for this this organization. I, mean, Their product has been picked up. thing is rare. Let's be honest. The odds of this being, like, an accidental influencer. situation is is so. rare, I'm trying to throw. him a bone. Like, I'm trying. to No. Like, let's be real. Like, somebody knew that. that influencer is the road. that product. Like, that someone knew. One after work beer could have fixed this whole scenario way ahead of time. Well and is that the is it more of a symptom of the business? Is it the a long standing brand with mature systems that doesn't have agility, is trying to be cool or relevant, and that's a, you know, that's a business growth area while being cool and relevant, you know, rears his ugly head. Right? Like, is it is it a legacy business from systems or processes or people there that now, you know, you need a new way of thinking, you need a new, you know, a a new path forward in with current times. Because it could also could be, you know, it could be the the director of logistics or whoever's negotiating the contracts that might find out about these trends six months later from their their kids or their grandkids rather than being on the on the cusp of it all. Right? It's. a little bit of a change in mindset and agility of the business, the systems, people, but it's just also, you know, adapting to the times. Right? Cultural. I didn't know my one more thing. was gonna. cause this, but I'm gonna roast no. No. I'm gonna roast Tony right now because he invented a new word, relevant. I know he meant relevant. So, Tony, I expect this to. come back to me. When I say something wrong, I expect you to get me, but it is a roast effort. Woah. So. We're supposed. to post because this, next one each. other. No more. This next this next one is, like, absolute chaos to me, and I I I really wanna get to it. So sorry. Let me read from my script real quick. Okay. So scenario two, we rolled out a new automated print and apply system early earlier in 2025 and thought all carrier service mappings were fully validated. On cyber Monday, we discovered the automation was assigning the wrong service to roughly 30% of shipments. This is wild. We had to divert labor to manually relabel more than 20,000 packages overnight, which caused a two day downstream delay and forced us to temporarily revert to manual processing. So I'm sorry, but I'm gonna I'm, gonna start. or did you make it up, 20,000? packages overnight manually. How one, how many people quit after that or didn't show up to help you? Two, unhappy exec team, would assume, do you still have a job? Like, are you here? What happened? Are you okay? No one's in the room now. It's just crickets now. Is this a real one, or did you make this up for real. the purposes of is? real. I mean, it's what someone submitted. Maybe they Now I break out my gift from you, it. a little, Oh, but this. is. lord. Hashtag open to work. Bill. Alright. Jim, how about to start with you? This is classic here, not adequately testing. I've been you could tell I'm the elder here. I've been doing this for decades, and and often, I will, get a phone call. We're in a crisis situation. We've got a real issue. And and I always say the same thing. How much did you test? Did you adequately test? Did you test all scenarios? It's just so common, and I don't understand that, especially going into peak, how somebody can be I'm gonna say dumb enough because this is a roast. So I'm gonna say, Oh, how can you be dumb enough? too crazy, Jim. Well, you used idiot. I can use dumb, I think. But, how can you be dumb enough to go into peak in an in an unattended, in motion, high speed situation without having tested everything, every scenario? And, you know, funnily enough, there's a lot of dumbness out there. This happens more frequently than than you would expect. But, you know, if you don't test every scenario, it's an assurance. It's a it's Murphy's Law. It's guaranteed. You are gonna have a problem that's gonna come back to haunt you. And, you know, testing, testing, testing. You know, you've heard the drill, drill, drill, and, you know, this, that. Test. Test. Test. It needs to be tested. every scenario over and over again. And by the way, no human has the capacity to understand how long it takes to test something. Testing for success requires, you know, being unleashed. Just letting the person test all the scenarios and keep finding things wrong until there isn't anything wrong, and nobody knows how long that's going to take. People who think they know how long that's going to take are fooling themselves and fooling everybody else and setting themselves up for a, for disaster. So, you know, plan early, plan often, test early, test often, and don't go live till you've tested every scenario, or you'll regret it. What we should have put up here is, like, the Spider Man meme because you can imagine the finger pointing that was happening, you know, either in the operations, mommy. or back to the vendors. And, this kinda screams like a bit of, like, lack of ownership. Right? It's very easy. You know, you you got your vendors in, you got your partners in, but, you know, it was their responsibility to test. Sometimes it comes down to ownership within the operation and, you know, who is owning these systems. Systems. Right? To your point, Jim, you know, giving yourself adequate timing. Right? Sometimes that just isn't real. Right? You have deadlines you gotta meet. So the same pissed off executive that's, you know, forced you to open to work on LinkedIn may have also forced you to go live. It's a bit of an unforgiving world, that that, you know, supply chains and business deadlines, for probably good reasons, create. Right? So, I mean, giving yourself more than enough buffer time to test, yes, but then also just internal ownership. Right? If you know, we've all had great, you know, partnerships with different brands and shippers that own things completely, and you are a part of the team. We've also had relationships where, all ship rolls downhill, and at some point, you know, the vendors are left picking up the pieces. Right? So It's giving that, like, it's giving that, like, someone just kind of, like, was told to test it and, like, tested a couple things and was like, that's fine. Because it's it's likely that this company, based off the the idea of, like, the ownership thing culture wise, like, if they didn't test the way that they should have, the odds are that they're, like their baseline structure or organization and operations was probably not great to start with. And they were just like, you know what? We're just gonna throw some tech on top of this, and everything will be great. And they were just like, it's fine. We can all move on now. And nobody really thought about it again after that. And then when it screwed up, they're all like, oh my god. Who who could have known? Surprise, like, Pikachu emoji. Like, oh my god. Like, who could have predicted this? Everyone. Everyone could have predicted this. Yeah. Just remember it's the unpredictable stuff that really buries an organization. You know, when things are going smoothly, everything's working, everybody's happy, but things don't go smoothly. Not in this business. And, you need to mitigate risk and be prepared and, again, test, test, test. Yeah. Again, I go back to systems, and I think, you know, when you when you work with an order management system that kinda owns the process from inventory to cash, right, that whole process, it's monitoring all the activity that's going on within all these different systems. It's not like, you know, you can't rely on middleware that just messages you know, sends a message from one system and to another and waits for some kind of response back from another system, you have to have systems that are intuitive and are talking and are applying business logic to all the different steps in a workflow. So when the printer prints something that's different than what the order expects, there's a disconnect and there's a discrepancy and there's an exception that gets waived. So, of course, somebody should be doing that QA testing to your point of, you know, like, matching, you know, that manual match. But when all else fails because things are cranking, everybody's working, just getting stuff out the door, order in, order out, order in, order out. Systems that can have the layer of business logic or, dare I say it, AI, right, that's looking for things and looking for anomalies and looking for mistakes constantly, there there might have been something there. And, again, relying on middleware just to be sending messages back and forth, message out, receiving an answer back, but not, you know, not giving you any quality assurance or or testing around not testing, quality assurance around the result that comes back to match is, you know, it's just not it's just not scalable. Right? It just doesn't work that way. And that's where systems that monitor activities, understand SLAs, understand the requirements of a spit you know, write down to an individual order can make a difference in a in a in an end to end workflow and how things are processed and the results that you get at the end of the day. Yeah. Anybody that bought that automation tool at MODEX and left that conference with, hey. Here's the sales pitch. I'm gonna go get it in play. It's always tough to make it work. Right? So, yeah, I've just I was thinking back to this. It's the automation is supposed to reduce your, you know, temporary manual labor, actually create more of it. Right? It's a bit the. irony in creation. Right? And so that ROI of that automation equipment coming out of MODEX or PROMAT or whatever, you know, conference that it was pitched at, for the ROI of headcount reduction is, flipped on its head a bit. Might need a few more years for ROI on on that, on that project. Yep. Right. Well, I am getting yelled at that we need to move on. I can't believe it's the bottom of the hour already. So let's pivot to scenario three, and this one has to do a lot with budget problems. So to manage peak season costs, we allocate a large share of our volume to a regional carrier offering competitive rates. Their network became overwhelmed by early December, leading to significant backlogs at their main hub. We ultimately had to pull back part of our freight and re induct it with other carriers, which disrupted our SLAs and introduced unexpected handling and transportation costs. I feel like this is more and more common these days. Dad. I mean, In order to help you catch up, I'll start. I I won't talk about during this one. listen. Good, Jen. To. to a good day. to quote Miranda Priestley, if anybody knows where that's from, I. buying. on rates, groundbreaking. That's not a shock at all. Like, we've all seen this so many times where somebody is like, you know what? We're paying too much for our trucking rates or our carrier rates or whatever rates. And they run back and they look for somebody else. They buy somebody cheaper. And then again, they're like, oh my god. They can't they can't support us during the busy time. Who could have predicted this? Again, everyone. Everyone can predict this. Anybody that's been doing this for more than two years could tell you that this was going to happen. And it's as clearly, I have thoughts on this. It drives me crazy because there are so many other places that you can look for savings in your operation. And so the. fact that people keep falling back to rates every single time is just laziness, honestly. There's other places to go and look. I'm sure I could walk into any warehouse and find at least one area where money is, like, flowing out the door where it doesn't need to, and you can just make a small change and, like, fix that and then have some savings without having to, like, beat your carriers into, like, a low rate. And I feel like it's it's kinda crazy now because I I've seen people go to these smaller pop up type carriers. And with the volatility in the carrier market today, like, will that carrier be around still in a month, in six months, compete? Like, Alright. you gotta find a balance of of risk if you're unhappy and and the stability behind why some of these national carriers have been around for so long. That's right. Tell her everybody beats up on on carriers because they're expensive. You know, they raise their rates every year and, you know, Yeah. they they come up. with a 5.9% increase, and then you found out your your spend went up 15.9%, you know, after the year is done. So there's a lot of reasons why people get upset at. the national carriers. But, you know, clearly, this is another misguided, situation because you have to realize that you can't buy parcel carrier rates like you buy a toaster oven. It doesn't work that way. Toaster oven isn't your partner. A parcel carrier is your partner, and that's why UPS and FedEx stocks are rising. That's why they're, you know, just doing as well as they are. You can't select, based on price alone because there's always gonna be this low price dangling in front of you. And most of the time, people that get get this low price really don't know how to optimize their their contract rates to get the most out of it to begin with, and you need good technology to do that like ProShip. But, you know, there's, you you have to communicate with your partner, your parcel carrier. You have to let them know about, anticipated volumes, and you have to have a relationship. And that relationship has to be honest where they can tell you we can handle it or we can't, and you need enough advance notice to be able to plan. So like everything else, this is leadership based. It's experience based. And, these things happen. Right? But let's hope it doesn't happen a second time. Let's hope whoever this happened to learned their lesson and and, understand that it's not just about, you know, the low rate because that's long forgotten when your customers aren't getting their orders and and you're having to pay, you know, double the amount that you expected for for transportation costs. A low price tag is long forgotten when when a crisis occurs. Just remember that. Yeah. Jim is so optimistic. mean, history is What's that? Said Jim is so optimistic. well, the this scenario is like, were was this shipper Matt, earlier, you're kinda the the affirmative position. Right? Like, was the shipper bullied into getting cheaper rates? You know, like, that's the market pressures where they bullied into getting that regional because, you know, it wasn't just 15%. It was 25% the year before from a cost increase or a fuel surcharge here or there, and then all a sudden, it's eight times a year that a fuel surcharge gets increased, even after you've negotiated a rate. Right? So, you know, did they get bullied into this and then some of the ramifications of, you know, the ebbs and flows. Right? History will repeat itself. Right? There's always the the carrier market, the shipper's market from a negotiation positioning perspective, and they'll always find a way to get something on your invoice that wasn't quite expected. Right? But I think that's where knowing where you're getting pushed, maybe piloting a carrier, testing out that network, you know, back to having friends in the industry. Other people have gone through this. Maybe you don't have to. There are probably some shining moments where regional carriers have overperformed, above expectations, and maybe maybe lean into some of those. You know, if you're in the geographies, right, not everybody can just set up a line haul from a from a single facility to to take advantage of regionals, but there definitely are more and more options out there. So it's tough to sift through. It's not a not a easy proposition, and The bad thing get this in the the bad thing about this scenario is the ship has sailed. Right? It's all in their DC. It's like you anything that you could have done prior to or any pivots you could have made, you've got this unforeseen experience where it sounds like, you know, the drivers just keep picking up, picking up, bringing it to the DC, and there's nobody there to process it. Tough recovery from there. I mean, once you know, you all of the it sounds like all of the systems did what they were supposed to do, got it to the right carrier based on something, but now the ship is sailed. It's all out of your control. Right? Now I mean, their their pivot worked, but it cost them an awful lot of money in expedited shipment. Right? And, you know, I to the point of earlier conversations, hashtag open to work. I mean, heads will roll, I guess. Right? Somebody's head is gonna roll. And I'm sorry I lied. I said I wouldn't jump in on this one, and I did. So, no. I mean, especially thin margin businesses. Right? I mean, any. cost increase. Yeah. Right? It might not be the person that made the decision that ultimately gets the open to work on LinkedIn. It's somebody else in the organization. Right? But, Right. that margin erosion is real. Jen, to your point too, you can you can can find other ways to to get savings besides just the the easy button that a consultant to walk you in a negotiation room and type day. Right? I mean, that's definitely an. approach. It's not the wrong approach, but it's gotta be coupled with others. Right? Right. I mean, you can check out my blog. I wrote a whole blog on ways to save money that aren't right. Post it. There you go. it Nice here. There you go. Post it in the chat. I should Alright. Are we are we thinking we're done with this one? Oh, don't ask. Don't ask because people. will jump in. we're gonna. be done with this one. So, I mean, I guess it's important reminder that cheap rates come with expensive lessons. It kinda reminds. me of something my husband's in garage doors, and he always says, you know, door repairs are cheaper than medical bills, so call a professional. So it just it kinda reminds me of that. But, anyway, That's what my. wife said at the last time I cleaned my gutters. Yeah. Alright. So scenario four. Scenario four. Our shipping stack relies on a modular API first architecture with multiple microservices. During peak traffic on Cyber Monday, one of our decisioning services hit intermittent latency issues. Label generation slowed by more than a minute, which backed up our conveyor, paused parts of our automation, and forced us to temporarily remove two carriers from our routing options. Because several systems were involved, it took days to fully trace and resolve the root cause. So, yeah, I feel like a lot of people are running into this. I feel like, you know, APIs are better than they used to be, carrier APIs specifically. But if you're in a high volume warehouse that has a lot of automation, conveyors, box building machines, a FedEx API that's returning at twelve second response time on Cyber Monday is gonna put stuff through the jackpot lane. Nobody likes that. Yeah. So it's really the analogy of, you get the you get the rental car. It's a it's a it's a good cheap rental car. It's it's it's quick to get into national. You pick and go. And then you gotta turn on the New Jersey Turnpike in a four cylinder, you know, Kia, and you got semis, you know, coming coming up your up your backside. Right? So I I think carrier APIs definitely have a place. Don't get me wrong. Maria. Right? But, you know, the industry, I think, is getting kinda pushed to carrier APIs. Carrier is trying to, you know, leverage those investments they've made in the technology. Right? And they've they've gotten better, but it isn't a it's another risk factor for a shipper to add to their stack versus, you know, traditional kind of manifesting systems. And so, you know, some some carriers are forcing APIs, again, kinda getting bullied into lower rates. Sometimes you're getting bullied into tech stacks that aren't maybe as performant as you need them to be for your operation. Sometimes you're not picking the right vendor. You know, it's a plug for ProShip as far as kinda speed and and throughput, but, you know, sometimes the the the vendor that is, we'll get you live up and running in three weeks, don't worry about it, isn't the one. that's always, you know, answering their phone, during kinda critical Cyber Monday operations. Right? And that kinda goes. back to ownership, who your friends are, have you partner as well. So I don't know if anyone wants to pick off of that, but that was I just, it's a personal experience of having a four cylinder trying to get on New Jersey Turnpike and will not happen again. Will not happen again. Just stay in the right lane. Yes. I this one irritates the hell out of me. And, you know, for for the first twenty years of my my career, we installed, software on premise, including ProShips. And then we went to API, and and I used to sit in front of executives, and they used to say, you think we're gonna start shipping and use APIs versus on premise? And we said, well, that's the trend, and now everyone's doing it. Right? And. it? it it was a trend. Now everyone's doing. it, and people are starting to realize what I've been saying for for decades. Read the API agreements. The carrier is telling you firsthand. We don't guarantee this is gonna be up a 100% of the time. So? you. have. something that's not Sorry. I had to put that in. just happen to find that zero zero zero zero point, you know, or just not. gonna be up. You can't guarantee it. It's impossible. There's hackers. Right. There's network issues. There's viruses. There's all sorts of things that go wrong today, and you need to prepare for those things. And so, you know, the carrier's telling you we're not gonna guarantee it a 100% of the time, so be prepared for those times of 1% or 2% of the times when when it's not up or when it is, responding very slowly. Any seasoned executive responsible for entering peak season without a a backup strategy in in this situation is you know, really should just go do something else, like, you know, open up a choco lottery or something. That's how I view it. Believe that you go to choco. lottery as, like, the option. It's just so random. I love that. This one, I don't have a lot to say on this one. I don't really understand how I p APIs work. All I can say is that it's you should have some backup options. That's all I got for this. Sorry. Yeah. No. I think that, you know, when you talk about stuff like this, you know, if you're piecing together and cobbling together a whole bunch of APIs from all these different vendors and piecing together these workflows, you know, you're just asking for error. You're asking for challenge. You're asking for breakages within your system. You know, I like to think of what we do here with the OMS is with the order management system is, you know, the application comes out with a library of APIs that are preconfigured that have been over and over again. So you're dealing with one person, right, or one vendor in the case of Infios that is, you know, creating these APIs that are common and are used over multiple times. We have a client who you know, if I I won't take too much time unless later on we can talk a little bit more about it. But the APIs that are put together for their business workflow, they they, in their peak season, had 2,000,000 transactions in a day. Now that doesn't mean that it it necessarily runs all the way through our order management system. But at some point in the workflow of hitting, like, the pro ship system or to get a rate or hitting the warehouse system to call make an inventory call, all of these are different APIs to different systems, but you're still dealing with one vendor responsible for those APIs. That's the way to think, right, in in these kind of situations. So 2,000,000 hits on APIs, various different APIs in a day is huge for a peak season. And to be able to successfully say at the end of the day in fact, this this customer said to us, there aren't many companies that can keep up with us, and you guys did. And that's a testament to testing and testing these things over and over again. And find a vendor in your network who especially technology, who owns that process, right, owns that workflow process from inventory to cash. Right? Who is responsible for that process? Because that's all the integrations that are happening, all the business logic that's layered in. And, you know, in the case of what we do for our customers peak seasons, we bring up war rooms, guys who are monitoring that customer every day throughout their peak season saying, oh, we see an anomaly or oops, we're seeing a stall in where's the stall exist? We're actually doing this on behalf of the customer to make sure their peak season flies. And it's a it's a testament to the guys in the backrooms, right, that you don't think about who are constantly watching these things, but make sure that you're not just buying a this Tony, you can probably appreciate this and Taylor. Not buying APIs off of a marketplace. Right? Marketplaces are great to find APIs, but you don't wanna be cobbling together microservice after microservice and API after API. Consolidate those things as much as you can. Yeah. I think I think that's the that's the last takeaway I'll have on here is, like, APIs and simplicity of connectivity and, you know, how quick you can start using something has commoditized, you know, from a shipping perspective. And then and then it ultimately commoditizes the customer's operations. You start making decisions that aren't best practices to try and fit into this technology window. Yep. And it I've seen it personally. Right? You know, a a customer or a prospect may be leveraging a, you know, inferior solution, and they've changed their entire warehouse workflow just for that one stop gap. And so why would you have one of your 15 vendors in a warehouse could be controlling the entire workflow when it isn't the WMS, isn't the automation equipment? And so having that flexibility is, you know, what we obviously provide at ProShip, but it's interesting, you know, I guess, dynamic in the industry that that. we've come across as far as embracing slowness and doing some more things upstream or the WMS. has to do more work. OMS has to do more work for the lack of speed or capabilities downstream where you hit the actual bottleneck. Right? So it. just moving the problem around instead of addressing the the best practice the best practice approach, which sometimes takes a little bit longer, sometimes takes some ownership internally, isn't always the easy button Yep. Yep. as well. So I wouldn't build my strategies around micros my entire strat. There's a great guy out there, and I recommend it to the crowd. I won't I've I've written a few articles, but I'm not an expert. Read a guy by the name of Sam Newman out on LinkedIn, and he talks about, microservices and some this stuff. And he loves microservices, but he says, unless you are a software development or you have a software development company within your business, microservices aren't really the way to go. You wanna find a company that does 80% of what you need or 90% of what you need and then plug the little gaps with an occasional microservice or an occasional API. I'm watching the clock, Taylor, I'm ready. I'll stop there. came out to just come holler at you. Alright. So we wanna move on to our last scenario, and it's all about store level communication, which, you know, we handpicked just because Matt Bowling graced us with his presence today, and we thought he could answer this one pretty good. So here it is. We ramped up ship from store for peak, but our order management system wasn't fully integrated with shipment execution at the store level. Orders were fulfilled, but shipment confirmations and tracking weren't consistently written back to the OMS. Customers saw orders stuck in processing while packages were already in transit, driving a spike in WISMO tickets and forcing customer service to manually reconcile order and shipment data during peak. And go. That's all I got to say. No. Is, that all is the have to say? is the that's it. it. So jump don't, believe. you. You usually have more. growling. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm still growling. well, yeah. Actually, the the six I guess you could it is a success story. Maybe I'll put it in the chat before, I'm done. But the customer that I was talking about that was hitting our system 2,000,000 transactions a day is act was actually doing ship from store and buy online pickup in store. So, you know, those systems there's nothing more I can say except that inventory accuracy, near real time inventory understanding, systems communicating back and forth. This is actually one of the companies we brought up a war room for. They did 1,600,000 orders during their peak, which is only about three weeks three to four weeks. I I think I can tell you who it is. It's Spirit Halloween. Right? So if you think about that company, you see those stores pop up nationwide. Right? And then they bring them down. Right? Bring them up, bring them down. Somewhere between 1,400, 2,000 stores. I can't remember. the there's ever. a building that went out of business, I bet you. Exactly. There's this that's go right in there. there. You could tell. I'm free time. exactly right. Not only is it a testament to the software, but it's a testament to their business, their ability to do this. Right? And having real time inventory accuracy, understanding systems talking to each other, just that ability, like giving your client an estimated delivery date. I could go on and on on this topic, but think about the capabilities that has to happen for that small peak season that is you know, if you don't have that gift by Halloween, it's not like you can give them the gift after Christmas. Right? It's, you know, wait till next year. Right? So if there's a failure, you know, that's not something that you dress up and go to the office as, you know, uncle Sam three days after Halloween. You have to have that in time for the party. And that's what they were doing there is all these transactions, all this volume, sub second calls to understand inventory, to make the promise at the store level to ship that from store, be ready to pick buy online and pick up in store, sometimes even store transfers in multiline level types of shipments. Not only am I ordering the costume, but I'm ordering or I'm ordering two costumes. Right? One happens to be in one store, one happens to be in the other. The system having a logic to say, let's first do a in store transfer and then let's ship it out, right, to the client. Or let's do an in store transfer so that uncle Sam's outfit meets up with, you know, Pumba from Lion King. Right? And and the two are there in the store to be picked up or the two are there in the store to be shipped out in a consolidated manner. If you're doing split line shipments or those things aren't arriving at the estimated delivery date, immediately to your point, Wizmo. Right? If you're shipping from two separate locations, Wizmo. Right? Where's my order? I got one piece. Where's the other one? Communicating that stuff back at the line level so that customers understand what's happening is all about reducing that Wizmo. And this is one of those and I'll stop right here. This is one of those atmos one of those angles where we're incorporating the AI to handle the WISMO types of requests and inquiries so that you're taking the burden off of the call center, right, to say, okay. I I'm the AI agent. I understand where all those line levels line items are. I can tell that to the customer without it having to be human interference where somebody has to hunt and peck systems because, again, the order management's responsibility is the system of process, the single version of the truth that it accelerates all that stuff into one view that both the customer and the and the organization have toward what's happening in the business. That. was multiple. think I'm. yeah. thirsty. I know. I'm gonna a lot, but it was good. I think I remember back. to I remember back. to a saying here during just during COVID pandemic and, you know, the soccer mom finally understood logistics. Right? So everybody understood what it was gonna take when, you know, Target was out of stock and when they were gonna get their their shipment to their house. Right? They knew all I'm in Milwaukee. It's gonna go to Chicago or Rockford, UPS hub. Right? The person. never had to think about shipping, and that that's still around today. So Wizmo is even more important. It's almost less about did you get it there in a day and more about did you. communicate throughout the whole process. Right? So did you make it visible to eliminate that call because they already know it's this carrier. They usually come around 04:00. And, you know, European market, they already have a preferred carrier and know know the person. US market was always just get it to me as quickly as possible until it just didn't show up. And now it's a big problem for businesses and visibility, being being keyed. And then I was just this scenario just being, you know, data. Data's gotta flow. Pick the right partners. Have that internal ownership test. Right? think this is. also back to another issue of, like, lack of testing. Like, you wouldn't use a new foundation on your wedding day. That's crazy. So, like, why are people out here deciding to trial this out during peak season? Like, that just seems crazy work to me. super, confident. I Super confident. like, I'm listen. If I had that kind of confidence, man, look out. It's over for the rest of you. I'm taking over. Like, I had that kind of confidence, I'd be running all kinds of things all over the place. I'd be doing so well. But, like, I this this whole idea of, like, just trying things out right before right before or leading into peak season is peak chaos vibes. Like, I feel like. an Aries decided that or something. I don't know. Well, this year was interesting, though, and I've made a maybe it was some of the the business pause with the tariffs in 2025 at this front end of the year, but there was definitely a lot of a lot of things being slammed in pre peak, at least from from our experience. This was a first for me. I've been about fifteen years in the space, but had multiple people ask us what pro ship's code freeze was, which is very interesting to try and answer that question, this year because of just some of the chaos that maybe, in my opinion, tariffs slowed down any progress of peak planning and what are we gonna do for 2025. And that all started, you know, July 4 instead of March 4, like normal years. But that was the first this year, Jennifer. Like, a lot of things were happening late. A lot of code freezes were being pushed. It was the first year I had to answer multiple times when our code freeze was when we don't have a code freeze. It's our customers to choose, right, back to ownership or things like that. So very interesting 2025 peak, and I'm sure 2026 will be just as interesting in a in a different way. Yeah. There was a there was just a comment in the chat about AI doing the wrong things. I'll tell you a little bit about our AI, and I would expect maybe ProShip's got kind of the same strategy and was welcome to hear it. We're not an AI company, right, looking to looking for customers with problems to create AI use cases. Right? We use standards. We have over a thousand years of supply chain experience that are creating those those AI queries and things like that. So I think it's really important. Don't go out there and find just an AI company that says, oh, yeah. I know supply chain. Right? Look for supply chain people who are cooperating AI. Look for transportation companies like ProShip. How are you utilizing AI to make your solutions better? Don't just, you know, do it yourself or find an AI company out there that says, we have AI for regard whatever your solution is or whatever it is you need. Anything you want. We got it. Okay. Alright. We are nearing the top of the hour. So we've survived all of today's peak season horror stories. Cringe. Very cringey. But thank you all for sticking with us. If you do have questions, put them in the q and a. Please don't be shy. We won't roast you, at least not too badly. But before that, I do wanna get to our panelists and give them the stage to just give some last minute thoughts. What's your final advice? What do you want people to walk away with from this session other than what not to do? Jen, let's start with you. Listen. Did you say Jen or Jen sorry. sorry. That is. very close. Jim has had a few too many already. Ladies first. Look. I'm drinking pomegranate green tea. I don't know what you guys are drinking, stuff will really you sometimes, Jim. Sometimes the issue isn't with the software or the strategy. Sometimes it's with the people and how the culture is built in the company. If testing isn't. happening even when it's supposed to, q and a is not happening, if things are being slapped on top of bad processes, you're still gonna have those issues. And so you need to kind of look at your the culture of your business first and the people and make sure that those things are working the way that they should before you start slapping on software and other tech and things like that because it'll just compound your issues. So that's all I got. Beautifully said. Alright. Jim, your turn. Test. Test. Test. That's all I want people to do. You can't predict how long it's gonna take to test. If you think you can, then you think wrong. You know, when you call a plumber and they come over the house and they say it'll take, you know, two hours to do this job and it takes six, They can't figure out how long it's gonna take to do a job. Electricians can't figure out how long it's gonna take. They're building a bridge from New Jersey to New York, and they think they got a handle on how long it's gonna take and how much it's gonna. cost, Jim I guarantee a problem with the trades. He's had some? bad experiences. It's no different. It's just no different. Humans have no capacity to understand how long it's going to take to do something. And testing, you want to afford the tester all the time they need to get it done, or you're going to have problems. So, you know, start early. If you're buying a TMS system or any type of solution you're gonna use during peak, now is the time to decide. Now is the time to get it going, get it installed, and give yourself a lot of time to test. So test, test, test. That's and backup. You know? Have backups. Don't rely on Internet and networking and you know? Those are the things that you need to do to be prepared. Communicate, you know, interdepartmental communications. Bridge the gap. Don't just say you understand what somebody is trying to tell you. You know, if you don't understand it, just say, I don't understand what you're saying. You know, tell me more. You know, get an understanding. The influencers out there that are potentially gonna drive, you know, lots of business. That's marketing. Marketing should be with operations. Finance should be involved in these discussions. That's it. That's what I got. Thanks, Jim. Alright. Matt. Yeah. Real quick. I think don't don't just sit back and say, you know, what's done is done. Explore. You know? Explore what new technologies are out there out there. Explore how, you know, previous seasons happened and, you know, what what the potential impacts are. Get into that vision aspect, the what if aspect that leads to the testing and all the other things that folks were talking about. You know, if you and then, you know, deal with those who have done it before, I think. If you need a garage door, call Taylor's husband. If you need a shipping system, call ProShip. You know, the the the big thing, I think, is just, you know, talk to their partner networks too. If you've got a great vendor that you work with, right, if they call us, we're gonna say talk to Proship. If Proship you know, if somebody talk calls you and says, hey. We're looking to improve our our systems, you know, our our inventory, our order processing. Proship folks are gonna say talk to Infios. Right? You know, leverage the people who know the business. Right? And don't be afraid to try something new. I think that too many organizations have grown up over many, many years thinking that everything begins and ends with ERP. That's not the case anymore. It's just not. Right? So look at different systems to solve very specific problems. It's not always a big bang kind of a thing. Today's technology can fit very specific, very, very unique types of problems with very small, like, modules or capabilities that can be leveraged within your existing infrastructure. Think outside the box. Yeah. That that's the takeaway I was gonna have, Matt. You know, with any system change or strategy or realignment, you know, sometimes perpetuating what you've done for the last twenty years isn't the right move. It's the comfort it's the comfort move. Right? Yeah. But some. of it is is yeah. Take the wins where you can get them, but, you know, think outside the box. And then if you're gonna think outside the box, you know, be patient and diligent doing so. You know, renegade and, hey. It's gonna go live in in in two months time when you really needed six. I mean, that's, I think, the pitfalls. of a lot of these scenarios. Right? And, you know, it's never fair. Right? Some of those deadlines are just never gonna be fair on what's imposed for you as a, you know, as a executioner in the supply chain space. But that's what I would just say is, you know, take the wins and and get the efficiencies through some change. It doesn't always have to be a a huge win to get the benefits to add up. Yeah. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Right? How old is that adage? Right? When we talked about regional carriers and things like that who are promising you everything, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Falls, back on testing and thinking and all those things. That's kind of like vet it. Vet it. Vet it. And then vet it again. Yeah. We can do our next next webinar on our next post going. on AI. Right? AI is the biggest one maybe for for. six months down the road, but that is a bit of the fear of the unknown. Right? So vetting vetting peers, you know, use your network. Right? I mean, AI will absolutely take us all to the next, you know, generation. Who wants to stub their toe toe first is. gonna gonna be the interesting use cases. Right? But it it's coming. There's no no getting around it. Yep. Unfortunately, it's not like blockchain, which just just went away in, like, ten months as the main theme that everybody's moving to. But Put me on mute, Taylor, quick, No. while you have the. win while you have the window. Thank you all for the final advice. You know, everyone who's who's still on with us, you know, it's the last call for q and a. If you want some free consulting from some really amazing panelists who've been through it, please submit your questions. Now is your chance. Don't burn the opportunity. But for now, let me just get through what we got here. We got the speaker contact info on the screen. If you do have something specific for someone, please reach out to them. Their emails are there. But some questions before we end today, and I know we're over, so I apologize. So I'll just pick like one or two. Here's a good one. What is the best way to balance committing enough volume to negotiate strong rates without overcommitting and risking penalties when demand fluctuates? So this is kind of that carrier question. How do you commit enough volume but still get strong rates and not, you know, spend a ton of money? And who wants to jump at that one first? The cop the comment I'll make, Jim, I'll let you jump in as well too. I know you're kinda heavily involved in this. Right? I mean, with shippers. I mean, the negotiation game may not be once what it once was. Right? I think carriers are just they're pros at negotiation, and you can't expect every single time you go back to the table that it's gonna be the same, you know, negotiation win. So I do think it you I I think it's paramount to have some have some backing. Right? If that is peer to peer communication, if that is a consultant, if that is analytics and being armed with data, there's many different ways to be equipped for that scenario that you just ran through, Taylor. That would be my take is the the ebbs and flows of the industry is it isn't gonna be the same as your last negotiation cycle, and you gotta be ready for for kinda all different ways it could go. Jim, are you gonna Yeah. reply? You know, I think that, you know, with your national carrier, you have tiers. You have to meet your your tiers. Right? That's what we're hearing from our large enterprise customers. If you don't meet your tier, it's a big problem. You lose a lot of money. So you have to meet your tiers. And having the analytics will demonstrate to you what freight that you have available to give to alternative carriers. So start with knowing and predicting and doing it conservatively, of course, what freight you can commit to an alternative carrier and and start there and make sure you have the analytics and data that support that. The the other thing that was interesting maybe three years ago and really came out of capacity capacity needs was, you know, piloting. And that doesn't always help if you're in a, you know, negotiation. You're staring down a negotiation deadline, but piloting, having that first world, you know, expertise, if you would, how easy is it for billing, booking, induction, things like that, if you're if you're if you can afford the luxury of time and and agility to pilot a carrier. I think there'd be a number of carriers out there that would actually sign up for that, you know, show show you what they have, what they can do. Good. We saw a few examples. They were pre peak, and and they they the pilots went well. The the the brands didn't necessarily move forward with all the carriers for peak season, but it was a good kinda ramp in the September, early October period to kinda see what's what and then kinda go back to old faithful for for peak. But this next cycle, they're just, you know, more educated. Right? So, you know, maybe don't sign a three year deal. Sign a one year deal and give yourself an out. Jen, I don't know if you have anything more on kinda your experience with it. Well, One think too, minute. it depends on, just cut off. I'll. spend I'll make this concise. I think that it depends on, like, how many like, what are what your size of business is too. Right? Like, and where you are. Like, if you're in a region and you can go down to a regional carrier instead of a national carrier, there's some really great regional carriers out there. There's Dragonfly in in, in Canada. There's Jitsu. Like, there's so many, like, good regional carriers that you could turn to. And if you are in that that area or that possibility, then I would suggest doing that to kind of manage your costs because national carriers will be a bit more expensive, I think. Sure. That's. all I got. Thank you all. I do have to cut us off because they're gonna kick us out in fifteen seconds. So I appreciate everyone for joining today. If you're a shipper, click that let's talk button on the top of your screen there. If not, thank you so much, and we have hope you have a best rest of your week. Bye. Thank Thanks, guys. Taylor. Thanks, everybody. All right. Good work. Good job, guys. Cheers. Wait. Do we go backstage? I don't know how to do that.