Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Devin Johnson, CEO of FirstMile (Part 3)

Devin Johnson: Technology has really come a long way to help support that. It’s made things very efficient. That’s where it’s ended. You now have five carriers that say, “We’ll deliver your packages to these parts of the country and you have the software to make it really easy to use.”

Now you have five trucks that have to come to the same two dock doors everyday between 4PM and 6PM. You now have five different invoices that come in every single week. You now have five customer service departments to deal with. You now have five different claims departments to deal with.

Over the last six to eight years, things have become very efficient in the multi-carrier shipping technology environment and thereare a lot more last mile delivery options in the market. Things are still very inefficient once you get parcels ready to go on the dock. Even from just an environmental standpoint, think about how inefficient it is to have five trucks come to the same dock door.

FirstMile has married our technology and our transportation to accept shipping request from a customer and, in milliseconds, determine which of these downstream transportation lanes have the best product for that particular shipment based on its weight, where it’s shipping from, and where it’s shipping to, and provide the necessary documentation for that individual shipment. Then it all goes on to one truck.

Our technology and our infrastructure gets those parcels downstream where they need to go. You can still take advantage of who’s best in particular lanes but you can do it efficiently. Maybe more important than anything, you’ve been able to maintain your spend integrity. One thousand packages a day in one network has much more strength than 200 packages a day in five networks.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like what you’re doing is equivalent to a feeder service in the international shipping terminology.

Devin Johnson: Yes, that would be an accurate comparison. There are a lot of international consolidators, USPS being perhaps the largest. When you ship a package internationally, the USPS doesn’t have USPS mailman delivering packages all over the world. In most cases, when you deliver a parcel to some other country, those parcels are getting consolidated and handed off to a last mile delivery network. In many cases, it’s that country’s postal entity.

You have USPS taking all of these packages and using different partners to deliver these parcels all over the world. What we do is essentially the same thing, but on a domestic scale in the micro environments or within these networks that have unique specialties. Some of our partners are really good at 3 to 8 pound packages. Some are good at specific areas of the country. As our network grows, we become much more flexible in being able to surgically help our clients take advantage of better shipping products.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Devin Johnson, CEO of FirstMile
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