Earlier quoted context omitted.
3) Amazon grad takes hold of a freight forwarder, and then realizes freight forwarding is not a tech company, nor is it just warehousing and distribution. And then realizes his competitors rely as much on grizzled logistics veterans and their corporate knowledge about customs brokerage and how to Get Shit Done and Get Shit From Point A to Point B as they do on a cool tech stack. And then goes "shit." Don't get me wro…
This is a very nice sentiment but the truth is that the established forwarders operate in a way that is could be greatly optimized. Established forwarders (and Flexport) have teams of people that "move" shipments by applying an SOP (basically a written algorithm for advancing the shipment to signals that come in from a variety of sources (an origin factory various carriers like truckers, airlines and shipping lines,…
I agree, but land at a different conclusion.
I dabbled in logistics a bit at one startup and the thing I found true is that every warehouse and receiving dock did things a little different and sometimes that thing was computer software and other times it was a person with sticky notes all over the walls of their tiny office by the bay door who was on 2-3 phone calls at a time screaming at/being screamed at by people moving goods around the city/state/country/world.
Logistics has a ton of room to optimize and I’m sure we’ll continue to see billion dollar startups roll out every year solving some part of it, but in the day-to-day operations of supply chain, change is so incredibly hard. The middle layer of management always seemed so risk averse to making any changes that had the slightest risk of disrupting their existing workflow because if one day they goof something up it quickly spiraled down the chain.