The Shipium Way
Enterprises who have gone on the journey with Shipium
Customers expect more
From consumers to corporations, buyers have more options than ever before and expect more from sellers in the modern age. If you can't compete on convienence, you will slow growth and lose customers.
Complexity is out of control
The pace of new technology has ironically made supply chains more fragile. The enemy is complexity, which is why operators often feel their supply chain is a Leviathan, unable to understand or control it.
The Classic Operating Model Doesn't Help
Organizations today have tried to change by using data, but they are stuck in a world with little insights and even less action.
Reporting fits the specific user. There isn't anything inherently wrong with dashboards and reports, it doesn't give insights to tough questions.
- What are you actually trying to accomplish with your supply chain?
- What is the goal or objective?
- Does your supply chain actually improve the customer experience or is it purely a cost sink?
- How do you resolve competing priorities between different organizations?
- Where should we sit along the speed-cost spectrum?
End-to-End Shipping Platform
On top of the platform are a collection of solutions that coordinate workflows, teams, and data across your existing technical systems to help turn shipping into a strategic value driver for your business.
- Supports any industry
- Supports existing systems
- Supports your unique operations and goals
Coordination and Control
Ensure that upstream decisions influence downstream outcomes. Make a promise at checkout, then keep the promise during fulfillment.
Data Leverage
Deploy your data paired with our unique platform-wide data through a collection of models powering real world AI + ML being used by customers today.
Manage Trade Offs
Answer the hard questions that drive the business forward by understanding and then taking action on difficult trade off decisions across the company.
What does it mean to make a promise you can keep?
- Product availability: The supply chain is procuring goods to make available to customers when they need it, and gives the transparency of that availability.
- Delivery transparency: Customers will buy more if they know when they will get it. Providing accurate estimated delivery dates is essential.
- Optionality: Sometimes customers want to schedule delivery, organize a pickup, or choose between faster or cheaper options.
- Product quality: Suppliers are a critical part of products not failing on their brand promise.
- Returns experience: Customers want a convenient relationship with their vendors and brands.
The principles of a customer-focused supply chain
Push vs Pull Thinking
Work backwards from delivery to identify the right workflows to maximize customer experience and minimize costs
Keep Your Promises
Customer sentiment is always higher when you follow through, which requires tying frontend and backend systems together
Constantly Evaluate Opportunity
Marketing must merchandize the innovations of Operations. If you innovated in a way that impacts customers, take credit!
End-to-End Visibility
It's hard to optimize downstream outcomes, like cheaper and faster shipping, without coordinating upstream decisions
The three reasons companies struggle to optimize
Competing Org Incentives
Different parts of the org work towards KPIs that negatively impact other teams, resulting in poor global outcomes for the company. Poor alignment is easy to spot if incentives are misaligned.
Deterministic Thinking on Probabilistic Problems
Most supply chain problems are stochastic in nature, which requires data and modern tools like Machine Learning, yet operators rely on old static rules that crumble under modern complexity.
No Data Leverage
Access to meaningful data is still a problem for most companies, and those who do have strong data infrastructure lack a true data science program with real data scientists.
Bending the Cost Curve with Shipium
Most companies still view supply chain costs as fixed in stone. The best example is the trade offs between delivery speed and shipping cost that every customer-focused business has to make.
Old World
As speed gets faster, costs go up. Finance and Operations prioritize shipping as cheaply as possible resulting in a worse experience, whereas Marketing wants to deliver as fast as possible at any cost.
New World
Improve experience while bending the cost curve. Understanding trade offs order-by-order results in ways to reduce shipping costs while still competing on delivery speed and accuracy. Everyone is happy.
We Power Continuous Optimization
Core platform components drive every solution
- Differentiated Platform-Wide Datasets
- AI + ML Models
- Universal Business Rules
- Web Console with 100's of Features
The four unlocks of automation with Shipium
Self-Adjusting Models
The goal of machine learning is to let the machine learn and adjust as conditions and results change. Shipium's platform reacts in real-time.
Flexibility
The world is in constant flux, so you must eliminate single points of failure and mitigate risk. Shipium's cloud platform allows for instant changes.
Repeatability
Workflows, data, and models combine to make a process scalable without requiring human intervention. Shipium provides enterprise scale.
Time for Strategy
Control gives you confidence, and confidence gives you the room to strategically think and plan ahead. Shipium gives you maximum control.
Connect each part of the business
The new operating model for modern supply chains is a feedback loop that continuously invests in optimization and automation.
Customer experience powers growth
Frontend improvements to customer experience, like greater product availability or faster and cheaper shipping options, generates more revenue.
Optimization and automation power cost savings
Backend improvements to technology and operations, like reducing shipping costs and improving automation, generates more profitability.
Make a Promise
As you increase the quality and quantity of promises you make, revenue will grow
Maturity Stage
Keep a Promise
The tech required for profitable scale while commercial teams compete for growth
Establishing Control
Capability Expansion
Competitive Position
Advanced Operations
Industry Leader
More Revenue Growth
More Cost Savings
Example Initiatives
- In retail, get a handle of shipping operations at every node, from warehouses to stores to dropshippers. With new technology, you get visibility into costs and performance that gives you new control over shipping decisions that impact the P&L.
- In most B2B organizations, operations is a patchwork of different systems and business units over the years. By centralizing shipping operations across all nodtes and system, you can protect and grow margins.
- Almost all companies across all industries struggle to show exact estimated delivery dates. After getting control of operations at every origin, you can begin to show exact dates which will have a dramatic impact on conversion percentage.
- Control over shipping origins lets you start to simulate decisions across those origins and how it might impact future outcomes. The most important link between frontend and backend systems—simulation of models—is now possible and sets you up for the next stage.
Example Initiatives
- Diversify shipping options to show both fast and free, as some customers prefer one over the other.
- Add more carriers to increase arbitrage opportunities.
- Use technology to do concepts like "Intelligent Downgrades" which picks cheaper carriers that can still hit fast delivery promises.
Example Initiatives
- Next-level efficiency is found when introducing complexity like zone-skipping or injection. While most schemes like this are not a novel concept, using them in a modern real-time way to influence promises made and kept to customers is rarely done well.
- Smart operators will begin to tie growth metrics to advanced operating metrics, such as truck utilization rate. For example, if FedEx does one trailer pickup at 3pm every day at a fixed rate, the more orders in that truck, the greater the efficiency metric on that trailer pull. How do you improve that metric? By selling more product, which is directly influenced by things like better delivery promises, cheaper prices, and unique promotions.
- Marketers and merchandisers start to deploy customer-specific promotions or programs. For example, an apparel brand might launch a new product targeting major metro areas like NY and LA, and show more aggressive delivery 2-day delivery promises for just that product to customers only in those regions. Meanwhile, in a B2B setting, an automotive parts distributor who sells parts to mechanics might show highly competitive same-day promises to high-margin parts knowing it wants those sales, and reserve slower promises for low-margin parts that are less competitive.
Example Initiatives
- Adding more warehouse fulfillment origins.
- If a retailer, lighting up store fulfillment in a scaled way.
- Merging dropshipping with all other operations so that business rules, constraint tradeoffs, and cost optimizations factor in inventory sourcing from dropshippers in the same way as first party inventory.
- Complex ML-based decisioning, such as forward drain, among many other advanced ideas. What's forward drain? It's the act of projecting inventory levels at all available origins into the future, to anticipate probable drain. For example, shipping from Reno to Denver is $1 cheaper than shipping from New York to Denver. But if Reno's inventory goes to zero, a future order going from New York to L.A. might be $10 more. Forward drain modeling helps model out the understanding that spending $1 more today will save $10 tomorrow.
- Regular network optimization takes root, such as over night rebalancing. In this scenario, companies look use multiple models to identify SKU rebalancing between origins, and run LTL loads overnight.
- Order routing enters maximum efficiency by reducing splits through order consolidation. Sophisticated ML modeling can see situations where fulfillment can be delayed in order to consolidate multiple products into a single shipment and still hit a delivery promise date
Example Initiatives
- Launch a Premium Customer program (like Prime).
- Inventory placement is tied to downstream fulfillment performance. For example, forward drain models show how much a particular SKU was under stocked at a given origin, thus informing how to increase it's allocation in the future.
- Identify powerlaws that are best for your business in scenarios like only stocking the most popular products at stores for store fulfillment, htus maximizing the utilization rate of that store in your fulfillment network.
- Add modern last mile carriers that can support Same Day or Next Day delivery promotions.