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Carson Krieg is the director of global alliances at project44. He works with retailers to perform network analysis of their customer bases and develop exceptional delivery experiences. Carson joined project44 through its acquisition of Convey, a delivery experience management (DEM) platform he cofounded in 2014. Previously, Carson was a consultant at Metafora (formerly CarrierDirect), a software development firm for the supply chain industry. He started his career at GlobalTranz, a leading third-party logistics provider in North America. Carson is a co-inventor of two patented technologies related to dynamic carrier selection and management.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 00:00
It's down to the final week of holiday shipping. New workers are the most at risk. And the increasing need to know your partners and suppliers better.
Pull up a chair and join us as the editors of DC Velocity discuss these stories, as well as news and supply chain trends, on this week's Logistics Matters podcast.
Hi, I'm Dave Maloney. I'm the group editorial director at DC Velocity. Welcome.
Logistics Matters is sponsored by PERC, the Propane Education and Research Council. Propane is the safe, reliable energy for material handling. Propane-powered forklifts may improve air quality inside your facilities for a healthier, more productive workforce. See how propane can give your productivity a boost at propane.com/forklifts.
As usual, our DC Velocity senior editors Ben Ames and Victoria Kickham will be along to provide their insights into the top stories of this week. But to begin today: with Christmas only 10 days away, we're just about to finish the busiest time of the year for shipping. So, how are things going in the industry? Have we seen the snags of previous years, or is there too much capacity, and have shippers over-prepared for the season? To find out more, I spoke with Carson Krieg, director of global alliances at project44. Here's our conversation.
Welcome, Carson, good to have you with us on Logistics Matters today.
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 01:31
Hey, David, thanks for having me.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 01:33
You're with project44, and you're the director of global alliances there. Can you talk a little bit about project44 for people who may not be familiar with your company, and the work that you do, specifically, for project44?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 01:46
Yeah, happy to. So, project44, we're the connective tissue of the global supply chain, really optimizing the movement of products globally, and in doing so, you know, we're delivering greater resiliency, sustainability, and value for our customers, primarily shippers and logistics service providers. And being a director of global alliances at project44, I work on our go-to-market strategic partnerships with our strategic technology partners, systems integrators, and then also our value-added resellers, so I really work on the partner ecosystem at project44 and enabling the better-together motion with our mutual partners.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 02:22
Carson, we're into December. Christmas is coming very soon, before any of us will really be ready for it, and we're here to talk today about peak season. The past few years, we have seen some very chaotic peak seasons with Covid and all the pandemic-related supply chain issues. How are things going this year, and how to expect, overall, as we look back at this peak season, how will we evaluate it?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 02:46
Yeah, it's a great question. I think from you know, a root-cause analysis perspective, the pandemic taught a lot of our shipper customers, as well as our logistics service provider customers, how to be, you know, quote unquote, more resilient in the face of kind of, I'll call it third-party challenges associated with any sort of disruptions — could be origin port from the ocean perspective all the way through to the customer doorstep. So, we've seen some blips from, you know, the canal incidents that we've seen, as well as some disruption with the postal service and kind of weather delays in the previous years as well. So, starting to see a lot more agility within our supply chains for our customers and starting to see some, you know, situational analysis done prepandemic and pre-peak season in order to essentially provide that resiliency going into peak where you have the ability to, quote unquote, turn off carriers; facilitating some of your regions of the country, also, be looking for alternative routes from a[n] ocean port intelligence perspective to see if there's any spikes in dwell time associated with any of those locations, but we're really starting to see, really the primary disruptor this year was going to be the drought associated with the Panama Canal, but we are starting to see both those import and export dwell times start to level off here going into December, and the reality is a lot of our retail shipper customers did a lot of their ocean shipping back in the in the September-October timeframe in order to prepare for peak and have that inventory on hand. So, maybe call it year four of the of the post-pandemic world in terms of supply chain effectiveness, but we're starting to see some leveling off in terms of third party disruptions as well.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 04:31
We did see a lot of disruptions. We saw a lot of outages of certain kinds of inventory. Are we anticipating any of that this year as we get closer to the Christmas holiday?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 04:42
I would say outside of some winter weather and some events, most of that inventory's on hand. We've seen, again, as part of that root-cause analysis over the last couple of years, starting to see our retail partners take advantage of distributed inventory and regional facilities, [words unintelligable] things like micro warehouses, kind of doing some of that forward-stocking strategy in order to make sure they have that inventory on hand for that peak demand. And, you know, with the upstream disruptions leveling off as well, that inventory is kind of, quote unquote, already in the local market, so you've seen that strategy of moving to some order management systems like distributed order management systems in order to enable some fulfillment strategies and practices like ship from store; buy online, pick up in store for some of our brick-and-mortar retailers, that's allowing, essentially, inventory closer to the customer, so less time for that inventory to become disrupted and anything in that in-transit logistics move to, quote unquote, go off track. So, we've really kind of seen our retailers, retail and shipper customers and partners kind of rethink their fulfillment strategy in order to reduce some of those upstream supply chains that will have downstream negative consequences and effects for the customer base, and essentially, that notion of inventory closer to the customer is allowing our retail partners to not only make a promise in terms of an estimated delivery date, or a promise date, but also keep that promise to their customers and build brand loyalty. So, happy to see the progress that's been made there.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 06:19
It seems like consumers are still spending, and in some cases, I've heard of some shippers being over-prepared, actually getting their inventory in too early, maybe having more inventory [than] they need. What does that mean for capacity and the needs of shippers as we head into the next year?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 06:39
It's a great question. We actually roll out a peak season survey in the September timeframe to kind of understand consumer behavior associated with the upcoming holiday season, and what we saw was, 79% of the respondents are actually confident they'll receive their gifts on time, which is a[n] eight-percent increase, year over year, from 2022, where [it] was 71 percent. So, the consumers are becoming again, more confident in that lack of disruption — I'll call it that Amazon Prime two-day, keep a promise for ultimate delivery. But that also is because those shippers have done that preparedness exercises in order to get that inventory closer to the customers, start to ship things earlier. We mentioned the ocean-vessel voyage is kind of transacting in the September-October timeframe to get that inventory on shore quicker and have it be available for, call it the new 75-day peak season, where historically a lot of our shipper, our ... customer behavior have really been an incentive to buy between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. That's really been extended out. I'll call it 45 days, with retailers like Amazon doing their second Prime Day in October, and then some other retailers like Walmart and Target and follow suit. So, the shippers have quote unquote, conditioned that consumers to essentially start to buy earlier in terms of that peak-season preparedness, and it's starting to drive consumer confidence as far as, you know, the end consumer being confident that they'll receive their gifts on time. So, overall, it's all trending in the right direction.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 08:15
Carson, from the experiences that we know so far, and kind of looking back, even though we haven't finished peak season this year, are there some lessons that we can learn from the experiences this year to be able to adjust supply chains for next year's peak season?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 08:29
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that the consumer is asking for is, you know, an increased importance on accuracy. So, ultimate delivery day accuracy, in order to combat some things like you know, porch piracy; understanding that not every shipment needs to happen within their two-day transit, like Amazon's kind of conditioned us to expect, but just understanding, okay, a definitive day in terms of delivery so I know I'm home for this particular package are gift when it's ultimately going to arrive. And then also just the consolidation of third-party information on those disruptions. So, we have a crisis tracker on our website; we're also rolling out monthly supply chain insights in terms of various disruptions throughout the supply chain — could be ocean market, could be parcel market, but really starting to enable, not only our shipper retail customer base, but also the consumers, for any kind of looming potential disruptions, where you could potentially get ahead of that. So, the drought in the Panama Canal is a good example that [we] started to release, you know, kind of the medium dwell times back in the November timeframe to see if there is any potential, you know, upstream strategy ships for a reroute and start to on onshore some of that inventory in another port, which would have been helpful for anybody that kind of had any sort of seasonality demand associated with the December timeframe — so, starting to understand how we can better evangelize the information that's available to us to not only the shipper market, but also the consumer market, and making sure that it's able to be consumed, you know, in a very clear format as well.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 10:14
You mentioned the drought in Central America that is affecting transit through the canal. I mean, that was something that nobody really anticipated would happen this year. We know that this past year has been devastating in some markets for transportation. A lot of carriers are, have exited the market. What do you see now that some of those inventories have been burnt through from the retailers and the economy seems to be recovering a bit? What do you anticipate for the market for 2024 overall?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 10:45
Yeah, that's a great question. It feels like the new normal is the quote unquote, new never-normal. So, really, establishing that agility within your supply chain so that you can start to understand the downstream effects, and really having that data available to use so that you can enable that agile supply chain and start to reinvent some of those strategies that maybe had been kind of written in stone previously. But, really, understanding, from a global perspective, what kind of force majeure issue or, like, Mother Nature events are gonna affect your supply chain in 2024 is, obviously, very hard to forecast, but, you know, they seem to be changing, and it seems to be a global problem. You know, it could be drought, could be winter weather, but what we're seeing is, you know, these storms are getting more severe, droughts are getting more severe, so having, you know, the ability to make changes to your fulfillment strategy, with that concept of inventory in motion. So, you know, we['ve] recently been rolling out this notion of understanding, okay, a supply chain with a specific amount of velocity behind it, how are you able to, you know, make those downstream decisions further upstream with the data that's available to you and start to embed some of those third-party data sources, like weather events, things like that into that model? And what can you do from AI, ML [machine learning] perspective, to start to predict some of those failures and kind of, you know, chokeholds, choke points within your supply chain and start to establish alternative strategies. But it's really hard to kind of forecast, from a crystal ball perspective, what other supply chain kind of events are looming in 2024, but we definitely, what we're doing to kind of combat that is making that data more readily available with things like our Port Intel product and understanding, from a global perspective, are these canal issues, kind of droughts in any particular locations? Is there any other alternative locations where you can be onshoring your product?
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 12:47
Right. Well, as the past couple of years have taught us, there's a lot to be said for being resilient, and I guess that's what everybody should really focus on going forward.
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 12:56
I think it's a great call out, right? Understanding, you know, what learnings from the past can you enable for alternative strategies in the future, and really, what's going to enable you to do that is bringing that some of that previously available data to light and then starting to implement alternative strategies associated with what the past has taught you.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 13:17
Well said. We've been talking to Carson Krieg. He's the director of global alliances at project44. Thanks very much, Carson, for joining us today.
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 13:27
Absolutely. Happy to do it. Thanks, David.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 13:28
Have a happy holiday. Now let's take a look at some of the other supply chain news from the week. And, Victoria, you wrote this week about some new research into the vulnerabilities for new employees when it comes to workplace accidents. Can you share some more about these risks?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 13:44
Absolutely, Dave, happy to. Yeah, so with the holiday shopping season in full swing, many businesses have boosted their ranks with seasonal help to accommodate the rush, but they may also be boosting their chance of employees incurring workplace injuries, and that's according to a recent report from insurance provider Travelers. Travelers released its 2023 Injury Impact Report, revealing that a third of workplace injuries occur during an employee's first year on the job. This report covers all types of businesses, and the results show that restaurants, construction, and transportation industries are most affected by those first-year injury rates. But other logistics-related businesses, including manufacturing and wholesale, are at risk as well. The report also found that those first-year injuries account for a third of all workers compensation costs.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 14:37
That's interesting, Victoria. What kinds of injuries are we talking about? For example, what's the most common?
Carson Krieg, Director of Global Alliances, project44 14:43
Well, we're basically talking about strains, sprains, and fractures. Those comprise more than 50% of the injuries tracked in the survey, with sprains and strains accounting for the bulk of it. The most common cause of those injuries is overexertion, followed by slips, trips, and falls. Now, overexertion could include injuries resulting from twisting, reaching, lifting, jumping, using tools and machinery, all common practices and warehouses, on loading docks, and [in] manufacturing facilities, of course, and the survey found that those types of injuries account for a third of incidents in manufacturing and 36% in wholesale industries. Slips, trips, and falls, ranked second among manufacturing and wholesale, accounting for 17% and 19% of industry incidents, respectively, and they also had the highest cost per claim. The data on all these first-year injuries continues a trend that Travelers identified last year. So, this was interesting to me for many reasons, but I think because the bottom line seems to be that companies really should keep an eye on those new employees and really make sure safety and training practices are up to snuff.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 15:53
That's very good advice to start 2024.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 15:57
Absolutely.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 15:58
Thanks, Victoria.
Victoria Kickham, Senior Editor, DC Velocity 15:59
You're welcome.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 16:01
And Ben, you wrote this week about the increasing need to know your suppliers and business partners better. What makes this particularly important now?
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 16:11
That's right, Dave. We write a lot about supply chains in the magazine, of course, and what we usually mean by that is the basic business relationships between companies for things like procurement or warehousing or transportation, and those are usually pretty straightforward. As long as the work gets done, then both parties are happy. But heading into 2024, we saw several stories this week about a growing need to get to know those suppliers much better, not just that they'll do the job that you've hired them to do, but just how they're going to do it. For example, who is their labor? What are their carbon emissions? How good is their cybersecurity. So that sounds like it's starting to pull back the curtains and get pretty personal about individual corporate business practices, and it is. One reason, there's a new range of government regulations coming online. Starting in the new year, for example, many companies doing business in Canada will have to report on their efforts to make sure that they're not using forced labor or child labor, either in their own production or in the products that they purchase or distribute with third parties. The U.S. actually has a sort of comparable law already on the books concerning the Uighur population in China — that's a minority group who are known to be forced, often, into labor in factories over there, sort of the sweatshop situations you hear about.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 17:38
Ben, obviously forced labor and child labor a terrible crimes, but what other reasons do you find that companies need to know their suppliers better?
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 17:48
Right. Another reason, you know, from those government mandates and sort of moral imperatives is self defense. And, you know, we're talking now about computer hackers. I covered another report this week from a cybersecurity firm called VicOne — they specialize in the automotive sector — and they found that nine out of 10 cyber attacks that were launched at automotive manufacturers are not actually aimed at the original equipment manufacturers themselves, but rather at other, smaller companies down their supply chains. So, the reason is that attackers often find it difficult to penetrate those well-protected companies, so they target less vigilant firms instead. That trend means that third-party suppliers — and the VicOne report mentioned logistics providers, as well as companies that produce the components and the accessories and the parts — have emerged as a growing focus of the attacks. In this age, of course, partner companies with each other are all connected digitally and online and through APIs, so hackers that get into one company can sometimes use it to launch an attack on another one. So again, overall, here, the lesson is that companies need to start knowing a lot more about their business partners and exactly how they do that business.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 19:03
Right. It is always good to work with companies that also have a common value to build that kind of trust.
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 19:05
That's a great lesson.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 19:05
Thanks, Ben.
Ben Ames, Senior News Editor, DC Velocity 19:05
Glad to.
David Maloney, Editorial Director, DC Velocity 19:06
We encourage listeners to go to DCVelocity.com for more on these and other supply chain stories. Also, check out the podcast Notes section for some direct links to read more about the topics that we discussed today.
And we'd like to thank Carson Krieg of project44 for being our guest. We welcome your comments on this topic and our other stories. You can email us at podcast@dcvelocity.com.
We also encourage you to subscribe to Logistics Matters at your favorite podcast platform. Our new episodes are uploaded on Fridays.
Speaking of subscribing, check out our sister podcast series Supply Chain in the Fast Lane, coproduced by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals and Supply Chain Quarterly. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
And a reminder that Logistics Matters is sponsored by PERC, the Propane Education and Research Council. Propane is a safe, reliable energy for material handling. Propane-powered forklifts may improve air quality inside your facilities for a healthier, more productive workforce. See how propane can give your productivity a boost at propane.com/forklifts.
We'll be back again next week with another edition of Logistics Matters. Be sure to join us. Until then, have a great week.
Articles and resources mentioned in this episode:
- Report shows that new employees are most vulnerable to workplace accidents
- Companies prepare for Canadian policy against forced and child labor
- Report reveals that hackers target third-party suppliers in automakers' supply chains
- Visit Supply Chain Quarterly
- Listen to CSCMP and Supply Chain Quarterly's Supply Chain in the Fast Lane podcast
- Listen to Supply Chain Quarterly's Top 10 Supply Chain Threats podcast
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