A breakfast in winter of 2020 at the Original Pancake House in Eden Prairie between executives from SPS Commerce and C.H. Robinson led to a new collaborative logistics product that is even more important now as supply chain disruptions are holding up key deliveries for companies.
The companies serve clients in different but complementary areas of supply chain services. Both also serve retail and consumer product companies, so they shared similar insights on customer needs.
"When people are using our product from beginning to end, they do need to jump out to other systems to do things that are part of the business process," said Jim Frome, chief operating officer of SPS, who started the process with Chris O'Brien, chief commercial officer at C.H. Robinson.
Minneapolis-based SPS provides technology to connect vendors to retailers and manage the flow of data on products and goods for both physical stores and online shopping platforms. But SPS doesn't do transportation execution other than for small parcels.
That's where Eden Prairie-based C.H. Robinson comes in. The company is the largest third-party logistics provider, helping companies get their goods and supplies, from across the U.S. or across the world. With its Navisphere software, the company manages almost 19 million shipments annually.
"SPS is here with order fulfillment, we come in right behind it with taking that order and executing it," said Megan Orth, senior director of platform integrations at C.H. Robinson.
The partnership allows SPS customers to manage C.H. Robinson services without changing software systems.
The goal is to "alleviate some of the stress when it comes to being able to secure LTL transportation at market-competitive prices," O'Brien said. LTL refers to loads that do not fill a whole truck or other freight vehicle.
"By automating the information exchange that's required during this context switching saves [clients] some time and data entry," Frome said.
The top level management support for the project helped. But Frome and O'Brien said there also was a good cultural fit between the two product development teams that allowed for the successful integration of services.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the start of work on the new project, but the two teams were able to finally connect earlier this year and build out the system.
"We used all modern tools to communicate," Orth said. "Gosh, just last month we met the SPS teams in person for the first time."
The Carrier Service LTL solution within SPS' system is now available and comes at an opportune time since the upcoming holiday shipping season is going to be extra-challenging for retailers and is expected to persist into 2022.
"From the very first breakfast through the entire process, what I remember was a pretty good cultural fit," O'Brien said. "I think we have a good vision fit, too, in that we were trying to solve problems for customers and we wanted to create new solutions together and this was one."
