Justin Cramer of Proship discusses the major changes and challenges experienced by the logistics industry, and how they'll shape its future.
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Danny:
- Hello and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series. I'm joined by Justin Cramer who is the cofounder of
ProShip. Justin, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. How are you doing?
Justin:
- Excellent. Thank you for having me.
Danny:
- Well I'm excited to jump into today's episode and learn a little bit more about you. For those who don't know about ProShip or have not heard of you, what do you guys do?
Justin:
- ProShip solves small parcel shipping complexity problems. And a lot of those problems are around speed. So if you're a high-volume shipper, somebody shipping 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, maybe even a million shipments a day, you know there's a lot of complexity involved there. There's a lot of data that has to move, and it has to move very quickly or you're not going to be able to keep up with your operators, your automated equipment, or maybe your batch processes. So that's really what we do in a nutshell is we simplify and streamline everything necessary to actually produce the appropriate carrier label to get the package to your customer in the time they expect.
Danny:
- Yeah, and we all know now that that online and ecomm and when you look at freight with even just B2B from raw goods to manufacturer, just the whole thing with the big demand in ecomm has just created this massive demand for all kinds of technology where we're seeing the supply chain is really struggling to keep up. And then there's all kinds of talk about the big thing is, the holiday season comes up, what kind of strain you're going to have on there. So I'm excited to jump into some more of these topics a little bit later, but right now, this part of the episode is I really want to get to know more about you, more about Justin and hear your story a little bit more. So tell me. Take me back. How did you get into this space? Was it something—did you go to school saying, hey, I want to go into logistics? What's that story there?
Justin:
- No, actually I started out in the US Navy as a nuclear machinist mate. I was operating nuclear power plants at sea, had created some very good friends while I was there, and one of them got out of the military before me and ended up in the Chicagoland area doing logistics software and said, hey, I've got a job for you on the way out. And so we started. And we realized that well, logistics software is complicated, but not nearly as complicated as nuclear power. So we found what we thought was a pretty good niche: helping to move data, helping to select the appropriate carrier services, and apply a lot of business rules. And customers, they can get to some really complicated business rules, and I think we got lucky in the fact that we were able to simplify what nuclear power was, so we were able to help our customers using some of the same techniques, simplify their business rules, or maybe not simplify but streamline and properly hierarchy their business rules such that back in the early 2000s, they'd actually get significantly more out of the lower-powered processors that were available at the time. And it just grew from there.
At first it was all about the integration. It was all about connecting to the rest of the enterprise software stack, moving that data, streamlining those business rules like I mentioned. But it was really about helping the customer to leverage the resources that they had with computing as well as labor which is a continuou...
