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Shireen Garrison >> Welcome to Smart Supply Chain, a podcast for supply
chain professionals who think and work smarter. I’m your host, Shireen Garrison, and I’m here with my sister in supply chain, Sarah Garrison.
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Hey, Sarah.
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Sarah Garrison >> Hi, Shireen.
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Shireen >> Today, we are talking about onboarding. This is the second of our series of onboarding discussions with our team here at ALOM, and we’re continuing our discussion with internal groups to talk about how they get involved in onboarding. I hope you got the first of our series. Last time we talked about that relationship between 3PLs and clients and how important that successful onboarding is to the relationship that you have between a client and a 3PL.
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Sarah >> Yeah, and today we’re going to continue that discussion talking with the functional experts in IT, ops, logistics, and quality. And this is when we get into the good stuff, the nitty-gritty that can really make a difference in that onboarding process.
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Shireen >> I mean, these guys are so critical to the successful onboarding of a new client. Just all the details that have to be sorted out, making sure you’re customizing the program for that particular customer. These are the guys who really make the difference.
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Sarah >> Yeah, for sure. These folks have years of experience, so they bring to the table a level of understanding and expertise that can help guide some really important decisions for the client.
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Shireen >> Okay, well, let’s jump in. We’ve got our first conversation where we’ve bundled together quality, IT, and operations. Let’s go. With me now, three exceptional leaders in our business. I’ve got David Edwards, who is our VP of Technology, Eric Schelm, who is our VP of Operations, and Kaveh Moraghebi, our Senior Director of Quality & Sustainability. Welcome to the Smart Supply Chain Podcast.
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David Edwards >> Hi.
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Eric Schelm >> Hey, Shireen.
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Thanks.
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Great to be here.
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Shireen >> I’m glad you guys are all here. We’re talking today a bit about onboarding and new clients coming into ALOM. As we all know, that’s one of the hardest things for clients to do. I mean, deciding to change your 3PL partner or changing from doing things internally to doing an outsourced business is always really challenging for clients. And it’s, you know, hard for them, not just for them, but also potentially for their customers. So, let’s talk about how your teams get involved in onboarding and what we do to make sure that it’s successful. I think just to kick off here, David, one of the things that I hear you and other people in our team often saying is we try to meet customers where they are. So why don’t you talk to us a little bit about what that means to you? And I’d love to hear from all of you guys just in terms of what we’re doing to partner with our new clients. David?
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David >> Yeah, great. Thanks, Shireen. For me, what that what that phrase means or that saying means is just simply evaluating what the customer requests are, what their specifications are, or their current business processes, and what their available technology is.
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And instead of taking an approach of putting the burden on them to snap to what our common technology footprint is for doing integration or setting up order flow messaging and that kind of stuff is really taking a tailored approach to standing up the capabilities that they need to meet their business requirements and doing that in a way that is as
easy and painless for them as we can make it.
And certainly that requires effort on our part to understand where they are at that time and what their desired outcomes are. And then we tailor our solution appropriately.
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Shireen >> Yeah, I mean, we’ve got to tailor those solutions for IT, but also from a compliance perspective and a quality perspective, Kaveh. And then Eric, just from operations perspective, what your team needs to do to support the client.
Tell us about that for quality, Kaveh.
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Kaveh >> Sure. Actually, David addressed most of the thing that we need to take care, but As a quality standpoint, it’s really important for us to understand what’s the need for the customer, what they need, and we identify what’s the quality or regulatory requirement that apply for their product. So for example, if it’s a medical device, we need to know what’s the requirement. If we ship it to Canada, we need to see what’s the requirement in Health Canada. So usually we hold cross-functional team meeting, and we sit with different departments, logistics department, account management department, identified what’s the requirement, how we can meet this requirement, and how we can promise the customer what we are doing is helping them to be successful in delivering their product to the end user. Eric, how about you, just from an operational perspective? Operations is the key thing that most clients are going to need and that they care about, right? So you must have a lot of involvement in getting people onboarded.
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Eric >> Yeah, we really do. And having that dialogue and interact with the customer is really critical for us to understand. We talk about where they’re at, and we need to know that. But I also really need to know, and the team wants to know, where are they trying to get to, right? Part of our role is ensuring that we’re enabling the current and the direction they want to get to, maybe more so about the, where are they trying to get to as opposed to how, right? So we’re not looking, in some cases, the customer says, Hey, we do this this way and this way and this way. And what we really try to do is understand what is your objective and where you’re trying to get to and how can we really enable that in the most effective way. So we’re trying to understand things like, what channels they’re involved with, right? Is this direct-to-consumer? Is it B2B? Is it retail compliance? And ensuring that we’re setting up the right solutions that scale properly and are responsive to those needs and that can give them assurance that we can execute their business day-to-day. And also when we talk about an onboarding, how are we going to do that in such a way that it creates zero disruption and is transparent to their customers? And that we spend a lot of time talking about what does that ramp plan look like? What does that transition plan look like? Is this a bit by bit or is it a big bang? And we try to make sure that we’ve got the right plan in place that we can execute too.
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Shireen >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they need a cutover plan; closing down something else and the starting up with us, or sometimes they would just want to go all full in. We have to change it kind of as that client needs. You guys work together on a lot of stuff when we’re doing onboarding. Talk to me a little bit about that.
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Eric >> Yeah, so I mean, we start thinking about what’s the right mechanism for how to fulfill their orders and fulfillment, for example, right? The our IT teams have a suite of solutions that we can look at to select from and combine. So my teams and David’s teams will work very closely to identify the use case. Right. And we’ll tend to look at as a multi-line parcel, because this is the best practice we have for that solution as opposed to it’s single line, single unit orders direct to consumers. Also, what level of data collection we need to be able to support, whether it’s serialization or lot and exploration management, any of those critical attributes that we need to ensure that we have alignment on how to manage. And then finally, I think ensuring that we’re getting the rich level of data from the customer about their products, right? So the details related to their products can drive the processes, the solutions that we present. How many are per carton? What are the dimensions of each? How do these things weigh? Are they fragile? All those things matter and those inputs inform the solution that we’re going to provide for them.
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David >> Yeah, I think I would add on to that, Eric, with another maybe adage that we have, which is, you know, doing our best to bring to bear our experience and add value to, as you said, right, not necessarily so much concerned with, you know, the customer in terms of where they’re coming from, but where they want to be. And we take care of all of the complexity of the how. And part of that is this adage I was referencing is putting ourselves in a position of giving them what we feel that they need, not necessarily what they’re asking for. And sometimes they don’t know the right questions or the requirements that they give is based on their experience. And we may have other experience that we can bring to bear to add value. And that’s, I think, a big key to our success with delighting our customers.
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Shireen >> One of the things that we’ve talked about is that a lot of our clients, it’s not like we have one business, it’s like we have many, many businesses because a lot of our clients are doing completely different things that must cause some challenges for you and your teams in terms of coming up with the right solutions for people. Do you guys have any good stories about onboarding or any challenges that we’ve run into in the past? Maybe successes.
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Eric >> Yeah, I was going to say, no, every one of them has been really the same and no issue at all.
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Shireen >> Yeah, no problems, right? You’re that good.
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Kaveh >> But one of the things that I can share is for our customer, visibility is really important. So for us to show them what’s the result of our incoming inspection for the parts or items that belong to them or we purchase for them or what’s the inspection in line or before shipping to the end user. That’s a good character that we have. We always make sure that these data are available for the customer. So at the startup project, we work with IT to make sure all of this data is available. And any time after any inspection, if customer wants to see what was the result of inspection in the receiving point, in the production online or before shipping, all of this data is available and they can see it in our data that we offer them.
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Shireen >> Our reporting is really, really good. And I mean, I know, David, we constantly are coming to you and saying, Oh, can we get this or can we get that? And we add a lot of stuff into our reporting. Are there any challenges around providing so much reporting or is this just status quo that most customers need a lot of reporting? Or do you think there’s anything special that we’re doing?
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David >> No, for sure. I think certainly there can be challenges sometimes, especially when you talk about potentially things that are outside of our normal data collection process or current functionality. But that’s part of growing our capabilities and then adding that to our toolbox, right, such that we can bring that to bear and add more value to other customers, current or future. So, it’s definitely something that that we enjoy doing and look forward to doing. You know, but I would submit that that, you know, as you mentioned, right, we have a powerful suite of reporting capabilities already. And and certainly I think many of our customers are are pleased with that and leverage that as something that oftentimes is giving them visibility that their current providers aren’t able to and is a differentiator for us. So there’s always opportunities to improve the data we’re collecting and the visibility we’re providing, but I’m really happy with the toolkit that we already have.
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Eric >> I would add on to that, one of my observations is that because we have such rich data that we can have access to, one of the things we do is really become students of our customer and really try to learn their business. And so beyond reporting and visibility and access to data, increasingly we’re in a position where we’re giving them insights about their business that they didn’t maybe appreciate, right? So as we start to really dig into, you know, on Tuesdays, every third Tuesday, we see this thing happening and here’s how we can address that or optimize or leverage that. And so I think that kind of transitioning from data to insight is something that ALOM does a really great job of and we’re continuing to do that. Well, thanks to all of you guys for sharing some of the things that your teams are doing to approach bringing on new customers and making sure we’re successful with them. And I appreciate that you guys are able to take a few minutes away from your day-to-day jobs to share all of that information with us. We’ll chat with you guys later.
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Eric >> Great.
David >> Thanks so much.
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Kaveh >> Thank you.
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Sarah >> Well, that was great. One of the unique value propositions that ALOM provides to our new clients is this great group of leaders who are deeply involved in the onboarding process.
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Shireen >> Yes, this group of guys has a great wealth of knowledge. I’m so glad that they’re on our team. We also have some great experts in logistics, and we’re going to go and talk to a couple of people on that team.
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Sarah >> Great. Let’s jump into logistics.
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Shireen >> Welcome back to the Smart Supply Chain Podcast. With me right now are two of our extraordinary leaders. We’ve got Brandon Hulse, our Senior Director of Logistics, and Steve Brown, our Director of Strategic Client Services. Welcome, gentlemen.
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Steve Brown >> Thank you, Shireen. I typically don’t hear the word extraordinary in my name in the same sentence, so I appreciate that.
Shireen >> I thought I’d give you some extra kudos today, Steve. You were so extraordinary for jumping on a podcast with me. Glad you guys are both here. We’re talking today about onboarding new clients at ALOM. And, you know, this is something that’s really kind of hard for clients to do, make a change in their supply chain, you know, partner. And it’s also challenging if they were doing it internally and now doing it externally, it gets a hard thing for people to do. So how do we at ALOM make it easy? I know you guys have been talking about this, Steve, what have you guys been discussing?
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Steve >> You know, first, it’s a great question. As Brandon and I, as we think about the logistics piece, one of the things, Brandon, I know that we start with when we talk to customers about onboarding and logistics, is you have a series of key inputs and data that you need from the customer to help you kind of frame up the solution, the proposal. And can you share a little bit about what you need and what things you look for with our customers?
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Brandon Hulse >> Yeah, absolutely. So just like with day-to-day operations, we have standard operating procedures in place. And so from an onboarding standpoint, logistics takes a similar approach, right? And it’s all about understanding our customer requirements, their needs, and shipment characteristics. And so once we understand that, we can offer the standardized templates in order to help onboard them and make it as seamless as possible for our customers.
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Steve >> Brandon, do you, know, thinking through the variety of customers that we onboard here at ALOM, and all of the unique programs that we have, can you think of one that may have gone down a certain path or was looking for a certain type of onboarding from a logistics and transportation perspective, but just through your experience, through the relationships that we have with the carriers, you were able to come back with an alternate solution or a different solution that actually ended up working out better for the customer.
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Brandon >> So most of our customers require one to two day transit, and we had a particular customer that would allow for us a longer transit time. And even though we have a robust portfolio of carriers, they didn’t necessarily meet his customer’s requirements. So we did analytics with the help of our customer providing us with shipment characteristics and history, and we utilized that data in order to engage current and other carriers to offer us a longer transit service at a lower cost. And so we were able to do that, and by onboarding that new customer, managing them as we do other carriers, we were able to exceed our customer’s transit and cost requirements.
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Shireen >> And that’s one of the nice things, Brandon, about being carrier agnostic and not necessarily having to just use one or two carriers. We can use whoever we kind of need to use, and obviously we know that you’re negotiating great deals for us all the time so that we can offer that to our clients?
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Brandon >>Yeah, we are carrier agnostic, but at the same time, we also have key relationships, right? And we’re wanting to partner with reputable carriers that we can count on. And we perform quarterly business reviews with our carriers, similar to what we do with our customers, to make sure that they’re performing in a manner that we expect and that our customer and their customer has the best experience possible.
Steve >> Do you, Brandon, and it goes without saying that our logistics team is fantastic. And on every onboarding, it seems like you all have to be very agile and flexible and when you’re bringing the customer on. But when we consider like a U.S. or a domestic onboarding versus an international onboarding, are there any key differences there that you look at or you look for or need the additional information from the customer?
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Brandon >> Yes, there is. So we mentioned transportation management services and we also mentioned customer service, but one of the other main areas is compliance. And two areas of compliance that logistics specializes in and that we have subject matter experts in are international and hazmat. And from an international standpoint, we want to make sure that we’re working with the customer to gather all the SKU level data, the international data attributes, so that we can properly generate a commercial invoice, and we’re identifying any restricted parties, avoiding shipping to them. And then also, if we have to file any export compliance related items like EEI. So it’s really important to work with the customer, once again, following the process that we have established to make it as easy as possible, and the templates to gather those international data attributes. And then we go through UAT, right, both physical and systemic; provide that information to the customer, review it internally and with the carrier so that all boxes are checked before we actually start handling the shipment. Because it’s always much easier, right, to handle that upfront and upstream as much as possible in order to avoid delays and conflict on down the road.
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Steve >> That’s great. And kind of piggybacking on that, Brandon, just briefly, I know that every time you have a conversation with anyone, whether it’s internal or external, they bring up the tariffs or the de minimis, something along those lines. Briefly, what are you seeing there? What kinds of things do you try to accommodate for from that perspective?
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Brandon >> Right. The tariff changes have impacted us all. So, internally, we work with all departments on a day-to-day basis, and all departments within ALOM are impacted by the tariff changes, so ALOM has pulled together a tariff team and we have representatives from each of the departments. And one of the key area of focus is identifying reputable data sources and utilizing those reputable data sources to pull in information.
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But there’s so much information out there. So we wanted to find a data repository, make sure that we’re following what’s going on, we’re capturing that so that each of the departments, including sales and account management, is able to communicate that to our customers.
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Steve >> Well, Shireen, I don’t know about you, but we sincerely appreciate Brandon and his team and everything they do from a logistics perspective, not only on the onboarding process, but, you know, when you think about everything they do post onboarding with the customers and constantly working with their carrier relationships and negotiating our contracts. And so, we just feel very fortunate that Brandon and his team are part of our onboarding process.
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Shireen >> Absolutely. It’s one of those things that makes us more successful and helps us to ensure that our clients are successful with their customers as well.
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Thanks so much, gentlemen. Appreciate your time. We’re going to go and chat with some of the other teams around here at ALOM.
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Steve >> Thank you.
Brandon >> Thank you.
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Shireen >> That was a great conversation with Steve and Brandon.
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Sarah >> Yeah, so fascinating. Great to hear from them.
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Shireen >> Next time in our onboarding series, we’re going to be talking to Hannah Kain, our founder and CEO of ALOM. Please join us.
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Thanks, everyone. We’re the Garrison sisters. We’ll see you next time on Smart Supply Chain, or check us out anytime at alom.com.
