In a career that has spanned nearly three decades, I’ve been fortunate to work with customers around the world and touch seemingly every aspect of supply chain logistics across all verticals. If it were any other time, and any other industry, it might feel like I’ve “seen it all,” as they say.
But it is not any other time or any other industry. Global supply chains have never been more top-of-mind in the public consciousness. They’ve never been more critical to a world rattled by unforeseen events and disruptions. They’ve also never been more stressed, more fragile or more in need of modernization.
That’s why I am so excited to be settling into the newly created role of EVP, Industry and Market strategy, at FourKites, the company that invented real-time transportation visibility and that continually sets the agenda for a future of pervasive supply chain visibility and actionable insights.
My mission in my new role is to ensure that FourKites delivers ever-greater customer value through industry-specific strategies and solutions. Our work is already underway, as we invest in:
It’s exciting to be building out these deeper capabilities based on such a strong foundation.
First of all, customer-centricity is deep in the DNA at FourKites. The company has been literally co-creating its solutions in close collaboration with customers from day one, resulting in breakthrough innovations such as multimodal order visibility, which was developed in partnership with Meijer, or courier tracking with Cardinal Health. FourKites’ recently expanded Innovation Partner Program and 2021 Customer Advisory Board include a “who’s who” of global supply chain leaders – Henkel, Ecolab, Eastman, Kimberly-Clark, Meijer, Smithfield, Canadian Forest Products and Anderson Corporation, to name just a few.
Second, FourKites was prescient when it set out to build the world’s biggest and most reliable real-time transportation visibility platform. Today that platform tracks 2.8 million+ shipments across road, rail, ocean and air every single day for more than a thousand of the world’s biggest brands. The superiority of the platform, with its high-quality real-time data and its powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, is solving pain points for every mode and node – whether you need to optimize capacity in the yard, manage appointments and labor based on real-time ETAs or communicate and collaborate across your network. What’s more, FourKites’ strategy goes beyond providing visibility and intelligence, but to create and integrate applications and features that make it easy to consume it. FourKites will become an ecosystem that brings the innovation of the whole industry together.
But the thing that gives me more confidence than anything else – more than the company’s singular vision, more than its unrivaled record of innovation, and more than its commitment to customer success – is the company’s culture.
Culture can be hard to define, and sometimes it’s as much about the feelings you experience as it is about the behaviors and values on display. As I engaged with FourKites, I saw on display – at every turn and in every encounter – honesty, transparency, humility and teamwork. An overriding ethos to roll up the sleeves and solve problems together.
Sometimes, in their eagerness, hiring teams will overemphasize the company’s greatness rather than listen to the candidate to ensure a good fit. With FourKites, I never once felt “sold to.” I just felt inspired, time and again.
FourKites is a special company, one with a vision and a heart big enough to equal the moment. That’s why in my new role here, I’m eager to bring that vision to life – to help FourKites usher in a new era, creating a tech ecosystem that ties together not just our innovations but that of the entire supply chain community.
Seen it all? Not by a long shot. Stay tuned. There is so much more to come!
