Grow without turning every new customer into a new project

John Thyr has spent years working in logistics and supply chain — both hands-on and at the strategic level. He explains why the ability to quickly connect, and disconnect, new customers has become critical to growth for transport and logistics companies.

- The companies with the best supply chain solutions will be the winners of the future, the ones who can guarantee customers get their goods on time, at a fair price. That applies to both B2B and consumer markets.

Warehousing: a new success factor

Just in time (JIT) has been the dominant planning philosophy for logistics and distribution for decades, but it hasn't held up, leading many companies to shift back toward a more traditional approach to inventory management. At the same time, the distribution market has transformed remarkably quickly, with many new players entering the field.

– Until recently, supply chain focus was on the inflow of goods — now it's shifted to the outflow. In other words, guaranteeing delivery has become more important to companies than streamlining how goods come in. As a result, companies are increasingly building up stock capacity for raw materials. We're even seeing the largest industrial companies now investing in their own warehouses.

This shift is exactly what makes you, as a 3PL, more important than ever. More and more companies are choosing to place their warehousing with an external partner instead of building their own — which means more new customers, more new partnerships, and more new systems that need to work alongside your own.

Flexibility decides who wins new customers

The same logic applies to established transport and logistics companies. Competition for new customers is intensifying, and the winners are rarely the ones with the greatest capacity, they're the ones who can connect a new customer to their own systems the fastest.

– The key is making it just as easy for you to connect a new customer as it is for them to choose you. Instead of building a new, unique connection for every customer — point to point — you need an integration platform that makes those connections structured and reusable. That way, you can reuse work from previous integrations in the next customer relationship, which creates both speed and cost savings. It's that flexibility that determines how quickly you can bring on a new customer — or offboard one, says John Thyr.

Build resilient distribution chains

Distribution chains are highly sensitive. If a link breaks, goods simply won't be delivered, and the risk grows even greater when several companies' systems need to be tied together. An integration platform makes the whole system more resilient. John Thyr recalls a situation where a customer's IT systems were hit by a virus — a problem that threatened to bring down the entire company. iCore found a solution in no time.

– Because iCore's integration platform acts as a layer between different systems, it can also pinpoint where a fault occurred — making it much easier to fix.

Tips from John

- Today, and in the future, you have to pick the best of the best. There's no standard solution — it's about assembling different IT systems into a functioning whole. In other words, the integration between systems plays a major role. If you understand your situation and get it right from the start, everything else tends to fall into place on its own.