Speaker 0 | 00:09.140
Hi nerds, I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Dylan Sluder, Director of IT at UCW Logistics. Hi Dylan, how’s it going?
Speaker 1 | 00:19.707
Hey Michael, good, hope you are.
Speaker 0 | 00:22.668
I want to start off real quick. We always do our icebreaker segment, random access memories. So we’re going to start with that. This one’s really easy. I’m just going to give you a few questions and you just respond to whatever comes to your head first. It’s super fun just to get the conversation started. What’s the best prank you or someone you’ve ever, someone else that you’ve ever seen kind of be pulled on a coworker or client using IT skills?
Speaker 1 | 00:50.657
Using IT skills. That’s it.
Speaker 0 | 00:53.799
Using IT skills.
Speaker 1 | 00:55.716
So it was actually a guy from Renovo Data. He’s Joe Delaney. He’s their lead operations man. I think they’re a lead engineer. He was telling me a story about he used to work for a logistics company before getting into cloud hosting. He told me one of their best pranks they pulled was they took their… firewall rules and they um they took a lot of people were getting on espn during the day and to be funny uh they wanted the web portals for a software they’re using called parade um so every time somebody in the office tried to access espn.com or you know uh any sports site it would automatically automatically redirect them to the uh web portal for you that they were trying to push for people to use um and he said that He had about 20, 30 emails in a week’s time saying, hey, why can’t I get on ESPN or check my fantasy league? So it’s funny that they used their firewall to kind of prank a few people in the office. That was probably the best one I’ve heard so far.
Speaker 0 | 02:10.805
It’s a great way to also get the web portal out there. It’s always the problem is engagement on the web portal. So it’s actually a clever, clever way to get people’s awareness on using the web portal. That’s a good one. That’s a good one. What is the worst advice? Because everyone always says best advice. I’m going to go the opposite. What’s the worst advice you’ve ever given or received about IT?
Speaker 1 | 02:35.203
About IT. The end user is always right. Excuse me. That’s kind of the worst advice I’ve given when I first started my career. I was like, everybody that comes to me and asks a question, then it. hey, we’ve got to find a solution to what they’re asking and give it about a year’s time. I said, yeah, there’s no way the end user can always be right. And, you know, that’s kind of where I saw, I was like, there’s no way everybody, you know, all these end user problems are always something that everybody’s, I mean, we always have to deal with end user problems. But it seemed that I wanted to, hey, it’ll be different for me when I get into deeper in my career. Now. There’s no way you can make everything 100% for everybody within IT and just like to.
Speaker 0 | 03:30.649
If the end user was always right, we wouldn’t have jobs.
Speaker 1 | 03:34.292
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 03:35.112
All right. What is the most frustrating bug or error you’ve ever encountered?
Speaker 1 | 03:48.221
Frustrating bug or error. That would have to be, oh, that’s a tough one. I would have to say we were setting up some IPSec tunnels for one of our warehouses to, you know, to connect to some cloud hosting services. And, you know, it was just having a hard time trying to get it set up to talk to the cloud hosting server. uh domain controller uh through their firewall um and we i think we tried for a few months because i was working with the msp um at that particular warehouse and i think we looked at that for it was two or three months i had logged into their firewall they had logged into our cloud hosting service i think and finally we figured out there was a um we didn’t know that they were actually they had an old um I think it’s an AT&T router that wasn’t hooked to their network in any way. It was just they had two ISPs running to the same office. we finally figured out they were connecting to an old wi-fi uh router that they had never told anybody yet still in use um we finally figured out they’re they were connected to this old wi-fi it was like a i think it was like dsl speeds and finally figured that out we cut that thing off and um made sure that they were you know all hardwired in fixed it three months of figuring it out and finally somebody down there and they’re like wait what is this so that was that was a frustrating one when i was new to uh new to the company and their msp was down in florida versus in georgia so it was yeah that was a banging our heads against the desk for a while and finally that is that
Speaker 0 | 05:48.621
does seem frustrating three months for a wi-fi for a rogue wi-fi that sounds uh that sounds pretty devastating but i’m so glad you’re on the pro on my program here because um Logistics, logistics, logistics. I’ve been waiting to talk to somebody that has been knee deep in the logistics because there’s so much to talk about. What an amazing growth during a short, short period of time. Right. And it’s, you know, from what I’m seeing, it’s still kind of going, you know. I get everything delivered. Everything in the world is delivered to me. I don’t go out and get anything. It all comes to me and it just arrives at my door. Logistics to me is a pretty interesting topic because there’s so much involved in it. There’s so many different moving pieces. Let’s talk about… what you do over there at UCW Logistics?
Speaker 1 | 07:07.543
Yeah, so being the director of IT, so we’ve started out with, hey, just me as the IT manager. And we’re kind of a, I wouldn’t say unique logistics company. So we’re owned by a parent company, Wellly Family Ventures, and they all are… a lot of warehouses and then they also own ucw logistics which is a brokerage so um just for anybody hadn’t heard of what a brokerage is we we have customers that say hey we need to get this load covered going from uh north carolina to texas and we need to find us a carrier at this price and they give us a cost um so we go out and we broker that load out to our database of carriers we’ve got about 25 000 different carriers set up in Canada, US, and Mexico. So we’re basically brokering those loads. And then our warehouses, we primarily handle most of the cotton in the East Coast. So for me, so what we do is we use a TMS called the Transportation Management System. And this one’s a cloud software, so it’s called a power broker. So I’m… we have uh so we use the software to uh enter all our load data we even have you know edi connections set up so that hey we can they can send us those loads directly and then we take that load we source it through our carriers uh internally and then try to broker it to one of those carriers um and then using that software we even connect to other third party softwares like um for setting up carriers there’s my carrier packet so it can grab all that carrier’s data in an external database, set it up into our database, and then we can also track that load using GPS tracking from the second it leaves to the second it arrives. We can see dots on the map from point A to point B. And then it invoices, sends that invoice out to our carriers and our customers to get paid and for them to pay us. So, My main priority is making sure that that TMS system is up and running and managing that database as well. It takes five to six servers just to run the base software. So managing our cloud hosted environment as well as as well internally handling all the all of our PCs networks. And what you know, that’s kind of covering everything. And even down to the. got msp helping out with the warehouses but it’s you know started at first handling everything for IT. Then they got to hire an IT support person, then got to hire an application administrator to kind of, not so I’m wearing so many hats. So it’s really covering everything for IT from A to Z for the company.
Speaker 0 | 10:22.442
No doubt. That’s actually a really good and concise look at what you do within the company. And also kind of gives you some insight. Um, cause it looks, it sounds to me like this is a, it’s kind of a B2B, uh, um, setup where, you know, businesses need, uh, to get their, uh, to get their stuff somewhere, right. And from one place to the other. And so they go on what seems to be a marketplace of, uh, of, uh, different transports, basically where they can pick which ones they want to go with based on a whole variety, I would assume of different, uh, um. different pieces now and let’s talk about that um when they pardon me when they go on this uh um what i assume is a website where they would be able to kind of source these things right uh put their requirements in um are they able to see all the different ones that pop up is it like a search or is it or do they put in their information and and then the uh um your your company goes and and does that uh
Speaker 1 | 11:30.374
sourcing itself how does that work is it yeah so for us as we’re a smaller brokerage um so how we handle it is let’s just say you’re a smaller broken brokerage and you deal with that yeah if you say hey let’s we’re you know competing with like xpo and uh uber freight and rider logistics that you know looking at comparing us to them you know they’re in the billions of dollars a year so i want to get there well not only getting the billions of dollars but uh few hundred million but yeah that’s uh when say smallest comparing us to uh those guys i think there’s there’s probably you know hundreds of probably 100 000 different logistics and uh brokerages out there uh
Speaker 0 | 12:18.527
wow i mean it just be the sheer amount of uh different companies you’re working you said i think it was like 25 000 right And that is, that’s just an immense number. And for you to not be one of the bigger, that’s amazing to me. That’s, you know, but it also, what it also shows is there’s so much growth, you know, potential for that company, you know?
Speaker 1 | 12:43.850
Oh, yeah. It’s, and for us, it’s, you know, we, it just kind of from A to Z for us, it’s, you know, we go out and try to find customers that say, hey, we’ve got this freight. They don’t want to. they don’t want to invest millions of dollars a year in purchasing trucks and sending it to one carrier because once they you put all your eggs in one basket and that let’s say hey that carrier a goes out of business well now they’ve got to go and they’ve got 20 they’re shipping 100 loads a week well now their supply chain shuts down so that’s why a lot of customers move um customers that hey they need their freight moved they reach out to brokerage because hey we’ve got 25 you know we’ve got 25 000 accounting carriers um and you know north america that hey we can source them and find the best rate and you know the best one that’s let’s say hey they’re delivering in north carolina they go to california and say hey we’ve also got a uh we’ve got another one for you in california so you can come back to north carolina so that’s why they a lot of customers move to brokerages versus trying to do it in house because they don’t have all this overhead They’re not worried about their supply chain shutting down because one of their best carrier goes out of business. It’s, hey, now we can help source that for them. And kind of how that works is, hey, we’ve got a customer. They’re tendering us loads. So then what we do is they send that to us. And then our internal brokers, they go through our TMS and source those carriers using our database. They can. something called waterfall tendering can tender out those loads, PNN, private network notification, and that keeps all of their data. So let’s say they can, inside the database, the UI, they just put in, hey, this is the lane, this is the rate we want to cover it at, and then it pulls up a list of those carriers. And then we can, even like I was saying, my carrier packets, we also use a third party called AssureAssist. And what it does, it tells us, hey, is their insurance good? You know, because since we’re a brokerage, they have to have, we have insurance, but they also have to have insurance to cover. Hey, if you’re moving. a truckload of uh dale pcs and it’s a million dollars well you know if you wreck and you destroy all those hey you’ve got to have insurance as well to cover you know all those destroyed pcs no no doubt it’s actually pretty funny because um i
Speaker 0 | 15:20.279
once had i was once i was moving um and and one of the companies i previously worked for um i was actually had a whole bunch of equipment because uh it was during the time where so many people were doing remote and so There was no office to put all the equipment at. So I just ended up with like, you know, 30 MacBooks. And I had loaded them in my car. And I just realized, I’m like, you know, like the amount of MacBooks I have actually equals more than this car that I’m driving. So you’re absolutely right. I was like, I haven’t insured the MacBooks. I’ve insured the car, but oh, no. So, yeah, it’s a good point that it needs to be insured from. the moment it leaves, you know, and it goes. And if it’s not, you know, they’re liable for that. So that’s actually a really good point you bring up with that insurance test, you know, makes sense. So many different pieces, it sounds like. Let’s talk about this software too, right? Because I think this is a, we’re talking a little bit about the process and pieces, but now let’s talk about the software and how you support it, right? Because you have to have… Yeah. you have this software which also mentioned obviously as a database sounds like it’s running up in the cloud is what you talked about right um you have to keep this thing running it has to um it also sounds like it has different uh components that talk to it right and and you also have an edi interface that’s happening so it’s interfacing with a whole bunch of other things which happens to be a lot probably because amount of people that are coming in and sending in their requirements automatically so There’s a lot of links to this thing. And when that shows up, it means there’s a lot of things that can break and need to be troubleshot. Do you run into that a lot?
Speaker 1 | 17:14.949
Yeah, because we use EDI and API. Usually our APIs are set up directly with, let’s say, my carrier packets, AssureAssist. Yeah, most of the third parties, EDIs normally get a little bit older. communication piece, but that usually is where our loads come over and then we send our invoices. So for that piece, it’s trying to, it’s, yeah, I’m troubleshooting. We’re a 24-7 brokerage, so we’re running day and night. I mean, truck drivers, they sleep during the day, usually, and drive at night. So that’s where having to make sure that all these API connections and EDI connections are working. And that’s the good part of the… software we use is there’s a lot of error reporting that the second something goes down, we’re getting first off the broker, the customer is going to let us know if they’re not getting updates. And then second off, hey, these are kicking back error messages 24-7. Hey, if this isn’t working, the software that we have is good enough to notify us, hey, there’s a process not running, got to jump on the server. log into that software and kind of start troubleshooting it. The good part about that is, you know, we’ve got a contract so that, hey, if they’ve got to write any code, they can do that in the background for us. But we can also pretty much troubleshoot most of it just because, I mean, it’s really a suped up SQL database. So it really, we don’t have to do too much. That’s nice.
Speaker 0 | 18:54.605
Yeah. It’s nice that it’s not a proprietary database. And yet, you know, you can get some of those sometimes. You’re just like, you know, and then you’re kind of limited as to what their interface can do with the database. Rather, as SQL, you can just hop in and be like, all right, let’s start running commands. And then you can kind of get cellular with it, too, right? Because you can set up your own views and get alerts and reports and stuff like that and really do the maintenance there. So that’s actually really cool. um sounds like you got a pretty good piece of software there um the i saw i want to get this right i saw that you had spoke at um and i’m going to ask a couple questions about this because i don’t i don’t know what it is the 2023 miglia uh software user interface uh sorry software user uh conference i mean uh and uh you did so in digital freight matching uh it sounds like right so um I don’t even know half of what I just said. But it sounds cool. So why don’t you help us kind of figure out what that is?
Speaker 1 | 20:07.264
Yeah, so the McLeod User Conference, it’s kind of they have this every year, and they do it in a different city, so it’s pretty cool. I think, what, last year we had it? Phoenix. Yeah, this year it was in Phoenix. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 20:22.676
this year Phoenix, sorry.
Speaker 1 | 20:23.777
Had it in Nashville. Nashville, okay,
Speaker 0 | 20:25.518
cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 20:26.879
they usually take it to a pretty cool city, and I think they bring about 5,000 brokers and carriers that are using their software. So, and what I spoke on the user conference, so digital freight matching is, it’s taking, so there’s two pieces to that. There’s your internal digital freight matching, which is, let’s say, hey, we need to source another, we need to source a carrier from North Carolina to Texas. And basically what that’s doing is taking all of our history that we’ve ran on that plane. showing, hey, these are the carriers you’ve used previously. And then, hey, let’s say if we haven’t used them, well, our carriers, they enter what lanes they want to run. And then it also pulls back the list of the carriers that want that lane. So then we can, instead of having to call each and every one of them, that’s saved in our database, and we can go out in what’s called waterfall tender and just start shooting out an email. Here’s the rate, pickup time, and where it’s going. So then they can say, oh, yeah, I want to. they can then either accept and it’ll automatically set them up on that load to use or they can say counter offer and say hey i want to do it for this amount and then we can counter offer and go back and forth and then once they accept it then everything’s done um done digitally so they don’t have to sign a piece of paper send it to us well they just we send them the electronic rate confirmation they send it back and accept it um and that’s kind of the first internal piece And what I spoke on was we’ve been using digital freight matching using AI. And what the AI piece is, there’s a couple of companies, one’s Parade that we’ve used and the other is Neutral. So they set up an API connection that sends them all of our data. And then what it does is it also takes all of the data from everyone else, their carriers. And it… So the carriers are constantly updating their data in Parade and Neutral, and it’s showing where all their trucks are currently. So then AI in the background, when we enter that load into their system, well, when the API sends our load to the system, it would pull up and say, here’s all the carriers, here’s every location they’re in, and it would auto start sending that load out to those carriers using AI. So it was really awesome sourcing.
Speaker 0 | 23:03.728
those existing carriers and that’s kind of what i spoke to uh during that conference and that sounds it is extremely useful for uh for what you guys are trying to do which is which is great so um yeah and you know nobody likes paper anymore uh so anytime i don’t have to touch paper it makes me happy you know i have the worst handwriting in the world i don’t even like to sign the receipts uh you know they just look like a like when i sign my name it looks like uh one of those uh pictures of a uh a you know arrhythmia or something it’s just i don’t i no longer can do that i uh um i anytime i want to sign i just want the electronic signature to hit and be like there you go that’s that’s all i need if i never had to my
Speaker 1 | 24:00.652
Main goal is to, hey, let’s never have to use a piece of paper ever again in any office and in my personal life. And two, I absolutely loathe printers. So there if I never have to trouble again, I’ll be much happier.
Speaker 0 | 24:16.738
You see love letter. Oh, that was great. Now, you know, it’s interesting, too, is I switch forces really quick. I saw. that you finished a course. And the course is called Holding Yourself Accountant. I actually think this is really interesting because it’s, you know, I think all of us, all of everyone makes mistakes. And everyone, you know, you see sometimes people will hide from those mistakes. or try to cover them up and all that type of stuff and i never thought that that was a good idea right um the amount of times i make mistakes is uh uh numerous throughout the day And I always feel that if you’re true to yourself and you admit and own up to those mistakes, it just makes you much more valuable, really. Because, you know, every time you make a mistake and know that you did, you’re able to change and modify your behavior. And the same thing applies to the IT, in my perspective. I want to kind of hear your perspective on this, because if you’re able to do that with your IT systems, not just even yourself, but also move that into your IT systems and know that they’re vulnerable. They’re not, you know, your systems are not going to be 100 percent, you know, fireproof. Right. And if you let those that guard down.
Speaker 1 | 26:02.704
uh you know that’s when the real um you know strengthening can occur what’s your thoughts on this yeah i 100 agree that’s where you know when i hear somebody say oh yeah this is impenetrable we don’t have any issues that’s bs i mean that’s just what it is i mean there’s if you if you take if you hold yourself accountable when just let’s say hey when i first started you know it was my first time, hey, I’m over managing all of these systems. And there was a lot of times I didn’t fully understand the software getting started. And if I just kind of blot my way through and said, oh, yeah, I know what I’m doing. Don’t worry about it. I don’t need anybody’s help. It’s you don’t people start, they stop asking you questions. And that’s what I noticed at first was I didn’t, you know, if they’re let’s say hey the software went down and it was down for four hours well if i just said oh this is this is our cloud hosting server or this is our cloud hosting provider’s fault this this isn’t me um but instead hey i was you know trying to change a a policy in the background and hey it locked a few users out well if i own up to it say hey this was me i went in and i was making some changes that were um I know we had a security vulnerability needed to make these changes and I did that on a Thursday at 2 p.m. that locked a few people out and I just said oh that’s our cloud hosting provider well then that kind of this makes people feel oh well this was his fault but again I’m not I’m not learning from it and I’m not showing people that hey if you own up to it and to and hold yourself accountable people will trust you more and they’ll trust your um judgment and what you’re trying to do and they can see hey uh hey I changed this policy and it locks the people out but this is why I did it and this is why it was a an immediate need that we had to change and on up to it people will trust you more and that’s what I’ve seen as a you know grown as a person as a IT leader the more you’re honest and upfront and hold yourself to certain accountability. Well now, hey, if I’m going to make, if there’s a, hey, we’ve got to restart a server during the day to fix some issues and let everyone know, hey, we’re going to restart this at 12 p.m. today. This is why this is, we apologize for this, but this is something that’s needed. Hence, it can, security concern or something that’s not working properly, people start to trust your judgment. You know, I’ve seen that people just They’ll ask questions, but they also now, hey, they trust that I’m doing this for the good of the company and to make sure, hey, we can all make more money because, you know, we’re covering more loads and it’ll make us better in the future.
Speaker 0 | 29:03.357
That’s a great answer. You know, that’s it. You know, it’s interesting because I had I had a third someone along that and I don’t remember the person, but they had promoted their systems. as self-healing, right? We have self-healing systems. And I said, I want to know more about what that is from an IT perspective, what makes it self-healing? And the response was, well, we take solutions that we have. And when something happens and something breaks, right? we update everything, update the policies and stuff like that immediately after we fix the issue, and then we move forward again. And so I was like, well, that makes complete sense. I mean, so I guess that does fall under the. uh you know the uh the guise of self-healing because that’s exactly what self-healing is is is identifying when you make a problem how to prevent it from happening again and turn it around and and uh um and implement you know policy procedures new systems and stuff like that that will prevent that one issue from happening that is self-healing so it’s an interesting uh thought process uh you know a little bit of a kind of a you know promotion of them you of themselves and stuff like that. But it made sense to me. I mean, when it was explained, it’s like, well, I guess that is kind of a self-healing solution. So it’s really, it’s an interesting concept, but you’re right, accountability. And I’m glad you posted that out there about that. Accountability is such a huge piece in both your professional life and systems and stuff like that. and personal life too i mean that’s you know bring that inside right because those are things that i will definitely help help you out um now you mentioned that your team when you first started it was just you right and
Speaker 1 | 31:24.174
then you’ve grown your team a little bit right how many people you have on your team right now uh three in total we also have a msp that uh yes lake works we don’t have to drive
Speaker 0 | 31:38.090
fly out in so many locations hey that’s a listen that’s a uh um it’s a great strategy uh um as a as a uh um person that is a cio for an msp right um we uh you know i uh um i i actually uh love to co-manage and uh and work with uh great individuals uh to you know to make solutions happen so it’s actually um uh you know it’s we’re moving into a world where it’s not just my team is you know three people right your team is partially that msp as well because they’re doing they’re doing work with you and um and on top of that you know um you know it can be any of the uh um different partners that you you team up with they’re all helping you do those solutions right so if you’ve got a um and i’ll give you an example um let’s say you’re getting some support for this software, right? And you frequently talk with one or two people there that really know their stuff. And you’re like, oh, I got to get this guy or I got to get this person. She knows what’s going on. And you’re laughing and smiling. So I know you’ve got the people. This happens all the time. They become an extension of your team, right? They become an extension of your IT teams. And they might work on other IT teams too, but… but they become an extension of yours. So it’s interesting in this kind of, you know, a new dynamic that we’re in with so many different interconnecting parts and pieces that, you know, you just end up with these IT teams made of a multitude of different pieces. So you’ve got three direct reports, right? A software person deals specifically with software and about, apologize to listeners by the way, I’m getting over a cold. So, but you’ve got a person that deals with the applications. What was the other one? You had a person that dealt with?
Speaker 1 | 33:46.165
IT support. So he’s covering basically any level one and two tickets that come in for many of our internal and external users.
Speaker 0 | 33:55.791
Makes sense. And what was the other?
Speaker 1 | 33:58.813
And then the application administrator, she handles all of our. software and processes for our TMS and any third-party software.
Speaker 0 | 34:11.002
Very nice. Very nice. So you’ve got a good little system here, Bill.
Speaker 1 | 34:15.546
So,
Speaker 0 | 34:16.367
yeah. Are there any other integrations, third parties that you work with that you think that we haven’t mentioned yet that, you know, that probably would help shed light on some of the complexities in the environment?
Speaker 1 | 34:33.000
Yeah. So I’d say… talked about my cloud and our and i’d say also our cloud hosting service um they’ve you know me being a um i’m pretty much our sysadmin but it’s also having uh our cloud hosting service they’re a very good partner that i mean there was another the other day they called me and they’re like hey uh you know your uh ipsec tunnels down right now and i was like uh it was like probably 15 minutes after i got to the office and i was like yeah there was a outage i just got to restart a firewall and router and he’s like okay cool i just want to make sure you know and you know and that’s not even a part of their job they just you know they’re so you know, the diamond in the rough that, hey, they reach out and want to help.
Speaker 0 | 35:18.955
That’s great. That’s great service. It really is.
Speaker 1 | 35:21.616
Exactly. And I think really, so we talked about digital freight matching. The other one is Carrier 411, Assure Assist. And I think I hit a little bit on that, but they’re a third party that they monitor something called like freight guard reports and reports. reports of double brokers, people that are, there’s these brokers that they act like, hey, I’m a carrier. They take your load and then they give it to a carrier and then they charge the carrier, then they never pay you. So there’s a huge issue right now with that and people going out and stealing stuff off of-I know. And that’s what they help us. They help us identify those carriers. And too, in the US, you can, let’s say, hey, mom and pop trucks- trucking service when they retired and they just sold their uh they sold their logistics their carrier company to um and usually and it’s weird it’s usually over um in uh the uk there’s a lot of double brokers it’s usually like kind of a russia region not anything negative about anybody russia but it’s just there’s a lot of brokers there and so because they’re in another country it’s hard to you know get your money back so they tell us by care for one assure assist they tell us hey their um the email address on this account changed or the uh there’s been reports of double brokering so that helps protect us from using carriers that are probably going to double broker or they they picked up loads never delivered it and it helps keep us safe you know we’ve got insurance we still don’t want to have use that insurance so our premium doesn’t go up. So those are some other pretty good third-party softwares that we use to keep us.
Speaker 0 | 37:18.884
It’s amazing that that’s that prevalent. You would have such a prevalence of that kind of theft and fraud within the industry. But it’s good to know that, you know, and yeah, like you mentioned, we did a little bit touch on insurances, but Knowing that now, it actually makes for a much more important piece of software and service. So that’s actually really interesting. I knew the taking off of trucks and stealing off the trucks. That makes sense to me. I’m sure that happens all the time. And I think that’s been happening ever since they had wagons back in the day, right? But, um… i did not know that people were actually setting up companies uh and then uh you know move and moving it not paying anybody and say see you later bye so oh that’s such an awful thing to do uh man so i well i’m glad well in that case i’m glad that there are uh people involved that are uh uh helping produce that stuff like that yeah
Speaker 1 | 38:30.979
that’s that’s a big help for us right you know we’ve got api connections set up so that hey the second that there’s a report flows into our system and as a broker they forgot to check 411 or sure assist the second they click and say hey they want to offer it to them it pops up and says wait a minute this is a double broker are you sure you want to use them 99 of the time they’re like no i don’t want to use them or maybe they’ll um and if not you know they’ll call us and we’ll have our we have a whole carrier um relations team that’ll then start calling the uh carrier and vetting them and making sure, hey, yeah, they’re legit. They just, hey, somebody, and so it’s happened, hey, somebody’s got mad at a carrier and said, you know, they wanted more money for a load or they just were late. So they’ll mark it as a double worker. It doesn’t happen much, but now we’ve got a whole team that just handles carrier relations.
Speaker 0 | 39:24.867
I want to get into our segment where we kind of figure out, you know, what’s the upcoming uh future of it um and uh but you know i mentioned i’m actually going to give you a little bit more time in this segment that i usually do because um we may need to spend a little more time specifically focused around logistics uh because um there it has been such a rapid pace of an acceleration in logistics and technology over i would imagine the past five years that um who knows what the next five years is gonna bring right i mean there’s so much right now i mean you talked about already having uh um ai implemented into your um solutions And yes, AI has been around for quite a while anyway, but the newer generative AI that’s been in the market recently and expanding it quickly, you know, may have some impact there too. But then there’s so much other pieces, you know, you had also mentioned stuff about tracking and being able to see the shipments go from… A to B, which is such a huge deal now that you talked to me about the, you know, the, what do you call it? Double, double brokering. Right. And and even to the package level where, you know, we see these these packages disappear off the truck. Where did they go? Right. You know, it’s there’s there’s so many interesting ways now that a miniature tracking services and stuff like that that they have down to just a. a sticker right so um there’s so many different pieces to this uh i’m gonna give you the floor i’m gonna let you go nuts just go go to town and tell me where you want this thing to go and what where do you think it realistically will go yeah
Speaker 1 | 41:29.902
so i so i think really the two big things that are going to impact the logistics industry the most from a nazi perspective um obviously ai and that’s the hot button one but the other one is also going to be um iot internet of things um you know we’ve all sold you know we all know hey we’ve got we’ve got 20 different devices from our uh from light bulbs to google assistants to um you know saying hey google hey alex i’m sure my phone’s about to dip phone just freaked out because i said that uh so it’s in to the logistics industry um with internet of things uh i wrote a research paper when i was get my master’s degree on how Walmart handles getting their produce from the farms to the warehouse to Walmarts all across the world. And how they’ve used the internet of things is there’s gone from every truck, from even the person out there picking the produce, putting it in a basket, there’s a internet capable sensor, there’s an internet capable warehouse controller that shows, hey, they know the second that that tomato is picked off the vine down in, let’s say, Mexico, they put it into a basket, they know the second it was picked, the second it goes from being washed to then going to the warehouse and they’ve got, you know. 10,000 monitors saying, hey, what’s the humidity? Well, I’d say a better one is bananas. I used to work for a food line, and they showed us where they keep their bananas. They have to keep it in these, it looks like an airport hangar, and they have to pump in, I can’t remember what they pump, they pump in this specific, not a chemical, but specific. type of gas to keep them to keep them from going brown so yeah what they do is they can they have a specific set point that it tells them that if it drops above or below this well hey now we got throw out all these bananas and then they know each crate hey now it’s time for this to go to be shipped out to whichever um location within the us so it’s it’s interesting to see these thousands of sensors and then GPS location. It’s called ELD on trucks that sends GPS coordinates to where the truck is. And that’s just, in the past 10 years, that has just exploded with, they can, you don’t see as much bad fruit and veggies in the store now because they know that the exact second it was picked and the second it got to the grocery store. and when somebody bought it. So they know the second that they need to throw all these out. And it’s really helped with like E. coli outbreak. They know everywhere that’s specific. Yeah, I think it’s been romaine lettuce exactly where it is so they can pick it off the shelf. And that to me is going to be, that and AI are going to be the two biggest things. The Internet of Things just holistically is just going to explode and keep getting bigger and bigger. And then with AI, to me, I think AI is really, we already know the data we have, and we’re all trying to build these nice… good looking Excel files and Excel spreadsheets and Power BI reports, but AI in the logistics industry, yeah, we’ve got where, so we use, it’s called MacroPoint for tracking the location of all the trucks. So every single shipment we move has to have that applied. We have to set MacroPoint location tracking on each truck. And we can use their, and it even integrates, hey, with their cell phone where it’s at, or it can integrate with the ELD GPS device in the truck as well. So with that, what it does, it can even tell us, send us a monitor update and say, hey, there’s a hurricane. I think it was Ian that just came through in Florida, had a few trucks in Florida, and it said, send us a location update. Hey, warning, there’s a… bad weather coming through, well, guess what? They’re going to be delayed. And sure enough, AI told it, we already knew it was coming through, but it told us the exact times based on road closures and weather reporting that, hey, this truck is going to be three, four hours late. Guess what? It was three to four hours late, just like the warning told us.
Speaker 0 | 46:31.263
So that’s-It’s amazing that it’s over exact now with that data. That is fantastic. And so Let’s take a second to talk a little bit about, you know, where we see the future of this transportation as well. Right. Because that’s another huge piece of logistics is the change in transportation,
Speaker 1 | 46:56.794
which is evolved. Yeah. Yeah. From a transportation piece. I mean, you can look at I mean, we already see I know. Tesla’s working on one. I mean, we’re looking at these automated trucks and we kind of get to see with this organization called TIA, and they’re the ones that are kind of on the hill, you know, talking about, hey, what are the regulations on these? Is there not going to be a driver in a truck that’s, you know, pulling 10,000 pounds of cotton down the road? Is, you know, how is… you know that’s pretty scary to think about i mean that’s one thing with a automated taxi but you get a 18 wheeler coming at you that’s got 20 000 pounds of cotton on it i mean that that could be pretty intimidating um and that’s where they’re i see that that’s going to i don’t i don’t think it’s as close as we think it is because of so many regulations um but i see that in the next 10 years just from what i’ve seen um we’ll start to see those starting to pick up more and more and i think right now it’s kind of a hot button hot button issue that um everybody’s working i mean everybody’s not to say anything negative to tesla but everybody saw the you know the tesla not stopping for the little kid uh out and hitting it hitting it but you know it’s eventually software software is always behind hardware um just remorse law but you see that they eventually that’s where once they get the smaller cars down then they’re going to start automating that carrier piece um but the only yeah it’s going to take a while from the um red tape aspect and those trucks you know uh 18 wheelers 100 000 well then you look at a one that’s automated well that’s going to be
Speaker 0 | 48:56.091
250 000 versus 100 000 so and what is what is the insurance company is going to think of that and then you’re going to have to have a whole
Speaker 1 | 49:03.926
more expensive insurance. So I see that that’s in the future. And I don’t, that’s, I think once they get past the regulation piece and the insurance piece, it’ll start to be accepted more widely. But I still see that being quite a ways off, 10 years minimum. But we’ve already seen some test loads go out through California where they’re testing it and no issues so far. But that’s definitely on the horizon for.
Speaker 0 | 49:32.365
So. So my last question to you in this segment here is, what do you think of how the future will help bring more shipments to more remote areas?
Speaker 1 | 49:53.762
Well,
Speaker 0 | 49:53.962
that’s a tough question. That’s why I saved the last one. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 49:58.826
yeah. I like tough questions. Now, I see it. and i see where ai is going to help that more because right now you have an issue where let’s say hey we just booked a load from north carolina to california what you want is Well, now that carrier’s in California. Well, they live in North Carolina. They need to get back. And that’s where we have a lot, you know, just we had an issue with our cotton warehouse. They would send shipments out in the middle of nowhere to deliver some cotton. Well, they didn’t have a load to bring back. So not a lot of carriers want to go out there. So AI in the future, and that’s how we’re already starting to use that now, is they can, when a carrier. shows where they’re at currently, and we’ve got a load going there. It’s matching them up. So that way, if a carrier leaves one DC, goes to another one to deliver a load, and they know that they’re going to get another load so they can come back home that week, they’ll be more likely to go out to that remote location and deliver those items. And two, we’re seeing all the fuss about Amazon and drones delivering too. I can… See that be a little bit more for the Amazon piece, but really for a full truck load. I’m seeing now that we’re starting to be able to use AI to match where these carriers are and notify the brokers and notify the carriers. Hey, there’s a, we call it a backhaul. If they’ve got a backhaul in that remote location, then they’ll be 10 times more likely to go out there and deliver a load and pick up a load. remotely. And that really helps everybody because it makes the rate cheaper for us and makes the carrier, they know they’re going to make more money driving out to that remote location.
Speaker 0 | 51:53.047
That’s an interesting, interesting look at the future of logistics. Thank you, Dylan. Nerds, this has been Michael Moore, and we’ve been hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. It’s been… Dylan Sluder, Director of IT at UCW Logistics. Thank you so much, Dylan. You have a great day.
Speaker 1 | 52:14.157
Of course. Thanks. You too, Michael.
