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Reflecting on the first full day of our user conference, Visibility 2019, we’re celebrating here at FourKites. We’re celebrating how this event has grown over the past year; we’re celebrating our customers and the incredible wins they have achieved this year; and we’re celebrating the opportunity we’ve had to collaborate alongside these industry leaders. We wouldn’t be here without our customers, and we’re thrilled that this event has enabled us to innovate with them. Together we’re redefining supply chain management.

We’ve grown a lot over the last year, and our user conference has grown in scope to reflect that. Last year, we had 110 attendees; this year, we’ve doubled that. But no matter how large our user base gets, we remain committed to making this conference a place to share best practices, to closely collaborate alongside our customers, to learn from each other and to give customers the opportunity to influence our product roadmap. No sales pitches, no vendors, no registration fees – simply a celebration of what we have and will achieve together.

Innovation Workshops
Designed to strengthen our foundation of co-creation with our customers, for the first time this year we held Innovation Workshops that brought together FourKites’ product managers and UX designers with customer representatives. The goal was to facilitate collaboration on some of the real-world supply chain problems they face every day, including track and trace, network collaboration, and a high-level view of operational metrics and trends.

Divided into three teams, participants tackled these problem statements and together the teams came up with some really innovative solutions. Our UX designers then worked through the night to develop wireframes out of those ideas, and presented them the next morning. This kind of agile development can only come from true partnership and close communication with your customers. We can’t wait to incorporate these wireframes into our product roadmap.

Golden Kite Awards
Our community of engaged, thoughtful customers is our greatest asset. Our success as a company is inextricably linked to our customers’ success. And to celebrate their achievements, this year we launched the Golden Kite Awards. I’d like to congratulate our first batch of Golden Kite Award winners and finalists – C&S Wholesale Grocers, PetSmart, Ryder, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Unilever, Ingersoll Rand, Land O’Lakes and Meijer – all of whom have exhibited incredible thought leadership and rolled out best practices across their organizations to extract maximize value from the FourKites platform.

Best Practices
Golden Kite Award finalists weren’t the only customers celebrating wins. Today we saw presentations from many customers detailing their unique applications of FourKites products and functionality to solve their supply chain challenges. Yone Dewberry, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Land O’ Lakes, gave the customer keynote, encouraging shippers to better the logistics ecosystem by sharing their data. “That’s ultimately what allows shippers to move products faster with less variability. Data in FourKites,” he said, improves the entire supply chain ecosystem.”

Our customer panel session showcased the experiences of representatives from The Michaels Companies, Inc., and Exide Technologies. In the panel, Jason Frerich, Director of Domestic Transportation at Michaels noted that with FourKites notifications to store managers, they are saving over 21,000 thousand hours of wasted labor (not to mention employee frustration!) by receiving staff. Those are some impressive numbers!

Kimberly-Clark Corporation was also celebrating huge gains in operating efficiency as a result of their application of FourKites. Tony Poole, the company’s Senior Transportation Manager, shared the company’s strategy of eliminating email related to monitoring and managing loads by utilizing the platform’s user messages, tags and notes functionality. Tony credits the company’s success with FourKites to its executive buy-in on the project. It was a pleasure to hear how Kimberly-Clark went all-in on their FourKites initiative from the start, and it paid off for them – a great example of how companies can leverage the platform’s breadth of functionality to work for their teams.

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Day 1 of Visibility left us feeling grateful for our thoughtful, passionate and growing network; proud of the accomplishments they continue to achieve with our platform; and inspired by the spirit of collaboration and entrepreneurship that continues to drive us forward each and every day. Looking forward to an exciting Day 2 tomorrow!

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