Don Burke: 0:03

So it's, what data, what's important in terms of identifying those insights and then applying 'em to your business where you can make real change and real improvement and help to effectuate better processes that you might not otherwise even be aware is happening. Those hidden shadows of the business that, data exposes and helps you to improve

Tom Raftery: 0:22

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Digital Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Don. Don. Welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Don Burke: 0:47

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate, being invited today. Yeah. My name's Don Burke. I'm Chief Innovation Officer for Transflo. And we're a company that does a, a whole host of things to benefit the supply chain. I'm sure we'll be talking a little bit as we uh, as we move along here, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 1:02

Cool. Well, seeing as you teed it up nicely there, . Don, tell me a little bit about Transflo. Who or what are transflow? What do you do?

Don Burke: 1:09

Yeah, Transflo is are a really interesting and vibrant organization, and, and I've been with Transflo for about 25 years. So I've seen the progression of, of where we started to, to where we are now. And, and originally we started as a document company. You know, we found a niche in this whole area of document management for transportation companies. A lot of paperwork that's generated. As you deliver loads and, and process invoicing and driver pay and whatnot. So, in the late nineties, that's where we started developing document management systems for, for mainly carriers, for, for trucking companies. As we've moved along over, over the years, we've seen kind of a, a need to, to connect entities and, and organizations and partnerships together, kind of within the generic supply chain, if you will. And so we look to kind of broaden our reach. So we developed some solutions I think, that are pretty proprietary and, and a little bit different within the industry. One of our, big ones in the early two thousands was truck stop scanning, which allowed a driver to quickly, when he was stopped for fuel, to get the documents into his carriers in almost real time. And, and before it would be delivering it through a fax machine or dropping it back off at the terminal. So this really impacted, I think, organizations kind of ds o and kind of compressed this whole order to cash. Drivers got paid more accurately and more timely, those type of things. As we moved along, we started to kind of adapt and, and adopt some technology that further kind of enhanced the impact that we had throughout, throughout the industry. And so whether it's telematics our mobile application, which has a kind of a digital workflow for drivers and carriers from Location to executing a load, tendering out loads, being able to communicate with dispatch, those type of things. And along the way we, we've continued to develop some other solutions in terms of our, imaging and content management systems and, and the delivery of documents through even our acquisition with Trip Act. So, all in the spirit or the theme, if you will, of having this connected workplace where people could exchange data and documents to kind of further their business relationships and invoice customers and pay drivers and those type of things.

Tom Raftery: 3:14

Okay, and who's a typical customer?

Don Burke: 3:17

You know, the typical customer for us kind of break into three areas and they're carriers, brokers, and factors. So currently we have about 75,000 carriers that utilize our ecosystem, our network roughly about 400 or so brokers and factors are kind of a new space for us a little bit. And so we've got about 30 or 40 of those now that, are on the ecosystem and, and more coming every day. So again, in the spirit of kind of connecting these partners that do business amongst each other that somewhat are challenged with disparate systems or levels of sophistication with technology, bringing them kind of together in kind of a standard workflow that they all can kind of participate and take advantage of.

Tom Raftery: 4:01

Okay. And can you walk me through a typical kind of process that you have connected for a customer?

Don Burke: 4:12

Yeah, sure. So you know, again, Most of our solutions are, made to connect these different constituents. So for example, carriers can use you know, some of our solutions and, and one of, the examples I might give is we have pretty ubiquitous capture network throughout the country. So, we have roughly 3000 truck stops that have truck stop scanning. We've got over a million drivers using our mobile. And we've got, like I said, 300 brokers that are using what we call our velocity or broker product and why I mentioned this is all those different constituents are using technology that, that all somehow hook together. And by that I mean a driver can stop at a truck stop or capture documents from their mobile that can come into their carrier, but also can be forwarded along to a, broker. A broker can take an invoice and the documents to be able to pay that carrier, they can also turn around and invoice their customer, which is the shipper, and if there's a factor involved, they can use those solutions as well. So there's kind of, the process is simply capturing the data and documents upfront through some of our solutions, and then being able to identify where you need that data and those documents to go to kind of accelerate your business processes that a particular company would have internally.

Tom Raftery: 5:29

And where would those documents typically be going?

Don Burke: 5:34

Well, you know, it's amazing because one of the things, and this goes back kind of to the ethos of the company, what we noticed is these documents and this data that's being exchanged sometimes is, is done in kind of a, a silly way nowadays, right? So, it's a driver emailing documents into a broker or excuse me, to their carrier that might then turn around and email the documents into a broker. And then the brokers turning around and we're having these duplicate facsimiles of documents, if you will, being kind of slung around hyperspace. And so what we try to do is, Those participants that need those documents or need that data that we provide kind of this neutral, trusted place for all those documents and data to reside and then to be able to kind of be sent to the particular you know, entity that, that might be required in that financial transaction. So, for example, document will come in from a driver to a carrier, depending if it's a broker load. They will prepare the documents that the broker needs along with the invoice. And so that will go there if there's a factor in play. There could be a further transfer of documents and data to the, the factor as they decide to, you know, Purchase that invoice or not. So what we try to do is kind of think of it as a container where all these vested partners and entities can utilize kind of this cloud, right, that allows them to give access to the partners or to the companies that they wish to give access to so that they can get the data and documents in kind of a timely fashion.

Tom Raftery: 7:06

Okay. Okay. So the trucking industry is, is starting to digitise.

Don Burke: 7:12

Yeah. And, and it's exciting. You know, it's amazing when we go and visit various customers. You know, it's, it's kind of like, the top end of the industry seems to obviously embrace technology and, and the SMB or, or other portions of the market have a, a little bit more challenge in terms of capital outlay or expertise in-house to be able to kind of utilize that technology. And I think recently what kind of these digital solutions across the, the industry has provided is kind of a more level playing field. Technology is, obviously cheaper, it's somewhat more intuitive and those type of things that allow various. companies to adopt faster and to be able to utilize and, and show an impact to their bottom line. So I look at the digital kind of workflow that's being adopted and workflow generically. Obviously there's, there's a whole bunch in, in that one sentence there, but generally the, the ability to to, to connect the dots, right, to remove the friction and allow partners and and customers and whatnot, providers to work closer together and to do that in a lot more efficient and cost effective manner. So kind of exciting to, to see that happening across the industry.

Tom Raftery: 8:22

Okay, so you're kind of democratizing digitisation.

Don Burke: 8:25

Yeah, I, I, I think that's what, you know, and you can look at the consumer, analogy where, things like smartphones and tablets and, and things like that. And the cost of, of laptops and workstations has made it so, it can be readily adopted. You know, for example, I mentioned the. Thousand, or excuse me, the million downloads plus of, of our transfer mobile application. And the vast majority of those are bring your own devices, right? They're iPhones and, and Android devices and things like that, where 15 years ago there were no smartphones out out there. Now it provides drivers that, connection back to dispatchers and family and friends and other things as well, where they didn't have that option, just a short time ago.

Tom Raftery: 9:09

How are the drivers taking to the shift away from paper and to digital? Are they loving it? Are they hating it? Is there a spectrum there?

Don Burke: 9:19

Yeah, I think, you know, in the last five years, I think there's really been kind of a sea change with the drivers. They're adopting and being a lot more open to that technology because they can see the impact in their own lives and, and in their work on a daily basis. So, for example, our mobile device built into the load, what we call load workflow, or that digital workflow within that in that application covers roughly 125 to 130 different activities a driver may do on a daily basis. So being able to have kind of a Swiss army knife kind of device in their pocket that allows them to communicate back to their, their carrier or their dispatcher to be able to look at weather, to be able to obviously be connected to their ELD, their electronic logging device. Being able to do a lot of things in one place, I think has simplified their job. And the automation that's built in takes a little bit of the administrative tasks out of their daily lives in terms of You know, filling out paperwork and, and logs and that type of type of thing. So I think it's been a, a real benefit to drivers in, in so many ways because there's just so much potential with the technology to, to again, make their, their time more efficient and and, and not get caught up in a lot of the, the kind of manual stuff that they used to do years ago.

Tom Raftery: 10:43

Okay. And for your customers, they are now probably you correct me if I'm wrong here, but they're now probably being exposed to far more data in real time than they ever were in the past. Is this something they're embracing? Is this something they're using to differentiate or are they aware of it at all or, you know, again, I assume it's a bit of a spectrum there.

Don Burke: 11:08

Yeah, there is a spectrum, similar to kind of that adoption of technology. There's some forward thinking companies that are learning and how best to use data. One of the problems with data is E everybody recognized the importance of it and how valuable it can be. But I think it's only valuable if you can take the data and look and capture those relevant insights to your business. That helps you do things faster. So by that I mean a simple analogy or example would be, are there things that a carrier can gather that can help Improve driver safety or be predictive in driver I mean truck maintenance. So, you know, you can avoid some of the costs there. Are there lanes and areas of the company that their drivers, prefer but it's all data that somehow they can adapt and use for their business to make timely decisions or to improve processes or to improve the life of a driver, for example. And so data for the sake of data just becomes, mind numbing nowadays. So it's, what data, what's important in terms of identifying those insights and then applying 'em to your business where you can make real change and real improvement and help to effectuate better processes that you might not otherwise even be aware is happening. Those hidden shadows of the business that, data exposes and helps you to improve.

Tom Raftery: 12:30

Yeah. Yeah. Data's a funny thing. You can often not well, I dunno about often, but you can at times find left field uses of data that might not have occurred before. So to give you an example of what I'm talking about, I was talking to an executive from Continental and you know, there a. Manufacturer of tires, but that's what they're best known as, but they only make like 40% of their revenue from their rubber products. The other 60% comes from making the kind of smarts that goes into a lot of vehicles. A lot of us are not aware, are actually in there at all, and they went on this journey to create a predictive maintenance platform called their remote vehicle data platform. And they're gonna sell this to the, the still are, as far as I know, to like service centers, to make the service centers more sticky so that the service center manager would be able to, or our fleets as well, fleet managers, but the service center manager would be able to contact you, I, and. Listen, Don, we've noticed that the light in your dashboard is about to come on. Your car needs a part. I've already ordered it in for you. Give me a day next week and you know, we'll have you in and out in half an hour, which is a very different kind of service center experience than what we have today. So that was the thinking behind that. And as they were developing this, they were approached by a weather company and the weather company said to them. Guys, you are collecting all this data from cars. You're collecting time of day, gps, external air temperature, windscreen wiper status, fog, light status, all this kind of thing. That would be hugely valuable information for us as a weather company. And so suddenly this predictive maintenance project that they were developing had a secondary revenue stream that hadn't even occurred to them when they went out and started the project. And they, they've reached an agreement with the weather company, it's all GDPR compliant and everything. It took them several years to dot all the, all the i's and cross all the t's and all that. But, you know, it, it just, it just speaks to the fact that, the data you're collecting can oftentimes have completely different uses than than you are thinking of when you start collecting it at the start of your project, whatever that is. So, you know, I, I don't know if there are any similar kind of stories you've come across, but it, it's always one to be thinking about because there can be weird or left field uses of that data, which can be quite valuable.

Don Burke: 15:04

Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's, there's kinda two areas that are, that I've noticed when we work with our customers on data. One is exactly what you're talking about, is that as they start analyzing data, they find things they had no idea what's occurring or weren't occurring, right?, like it's, it's these, these hidden pockets, right? Of things that especially when it gets linked together with, with other pieces of data, tells a story that they would've not had if they weren't analyzing that data. The other interesting area is, And you mentioned kind of this predictive analytics or predictive data, right? Is what are some things that we can do that are going to help us proactively address an issue, a challenge, be ready for something that we would, again, not see down the road without the data. And so, for example, a lot of our customers that use our mobile and our transflow, e l d, there's so much data coming off the ECM of the truck, right? So they, can, quickly start seeing same kind of example you gave where whether it's battery life or brake wear, oil temperature, right? The whole diagnostics of the engine. So not only is it you know, insightful in terms of that condition of the truck, but then they can start pulling that data together and it could actually be powerful in how they do across their entire fleet maintenance, how they, their cycles for buying trucks and assets, things like that. And it, just leads to more and more as you mentioned. And, and I think, you know, the big thing with data is don't get overly paralyzed with thinking about big data and all the things start with some smaller data projects. It might be something on someone might have a very basic question on how to improve the life of a truck of one of their employees, meaning, A, a truck driver, what data are we getting and what is it showing us about things that we might be able to do to help improve that person's work life, for example. There may be some things related to customers are, are we delivering as timely as we think? Is the quality of our service at the level that we think it is? So there's what about, I wouldn't call basic, but more graspable, if that's a word, data that you can start with, that doesn't seem so overwhelming. And then you can build your expertise in data. And of course at some point, companies start looking to that data expertise, whether it's data scientists or data engineers that can even take 'em to the next step as they kind of slice and dice that data.

Tom Raftery: 17:35

Cool. Cool. Do you Don have any customer use cases, you can speak to kind of successful wins that you can talk about?

Don Burke: 17:46

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that I think Transflo kind of prides itself on is, this ecosystem that we built. And I mentioned earlier some of the statistics with the, the number of, of customers that we have. And some of those customers take advantage of our full suite of solutions and others have particular needs. Right. So, you know, we've just recently had some customers that had some interesting use cases, and I'll talk about one. One of the things that we've invested heavily is our intelligent automation platform. And this is the, the kind of those, those techno technologies that you read more and more about. But, you know, it's, it's artificial intelligence to help in decision making. It's deep learning models. Machine learning, maybe the use of rpa. There's a lot of technology out there that can really help this digital workflow that allows you then to, to kind of go into some specific areas that you might not have done because it wasn't cost effective. So one quick one for example, that we just worked with was a company that was a reefer company, refrigerated carrier that had some issues with some claims and some had some issues with some damaged product, meaning overheated Pro products in terms of the refrigeration. And so we applied that intelligent automation kind of in two levels. One was to be able to get readings off the documents that the driver was recording, so they, they had real time data on being able to kind of track that temperature across the entire load or the trip, if you will. But more importantly, be able to kind of tie it back to a particular kind of going back to what we talked about, a particular unit a particular driver, things like that. Was there something about any kind of insurance claims or any kind of issues with a particular D load that they could identify? Some. Some areas that were, were maybe a cause of that, right? So, so we were able with some of our machine learning models to be, extract that data off of those documents. And some of it is handwritten by some carriers. So it's a, it's a re relatively challenging endeavor to be able to pull that data off and then in a timely basis, make it operational. In other words, get that data quickly. Back to them in, in near real time. So that's kind of one of the things that the technology allows. As far as, you know, being able to take some of these, what I would call, were kind of outlier cases in the year, in, in years past, but now specific problem areas can be applied. And of course we have a lot of use cases where, quite honestly, where we've put in our solutions that have literally taken days and sometimes weeks off of Dsso, the ability to get documents and data in quicker and be able to, for example at some large, top 10 carriers, to be able to take millions of dollars off of their D S O is hugely, powerful to, to those type of organizations. So being able to, get the documents, get the data same day. Being able to process and be able to invoice same day or pay driver same day is a monumental advantage in the industry, both for driver retention and your cash flow as well.

Tom Raftery: 21:22

Okay. Superb. Great. Where to next for Transflo? I mean, what are your plans for product development for the next five 10 years?

Don Burke: 21:30

You know, I, I think overall where, you know, where we see things going is still this huge opportunity to connect the dots, if you will. In other words, to provide this kind of trusted, neutral kind of party that can help tide together a lot of disparate systems, a lot of different processes a lot of different timelines amongst all these constituents. So we still see the benefit of what I would call a transflow exchange where this information is safely and securely archived and various constituents and, and partners that we talked about in the past can kind of access this information when needed depending on permissions and access controls and things like that. But it's almost analogous Tom, if you will, to kind of, you know, it's kind of a dirty word a little bit now, but kind of that blockchain thought, right? Where there's this trusted partner that is kind of aggregating the data that is important to a specific financial transaction, and that could be anywhere from a bank and a financial organization or a factor, a broker, a carrier, freight auditor, a lot of different entities at play within this, in a single financial transaction, that can all be connected together in, in a simplified way where they can obviously do what they need to do with that data and documents and, and within that transaction as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So that's one of our big areas. I think the other area is our intelligent automation platform is really leading edge and, and has a ton now. We've been working on it for several years. Some proprietary custom code machine learning models and a ai. So the ability to take some of these, for example, financial transactions, we talk in terms of the, the trip paperwork and things like that. And to build in better decision making better risk analysis those kind of things on behalf of our, our customers is a huge area. So maybe you call that a little bit FinTech. But I think the area, for example, even to be, I'll give you a quick little case here, is we're building in really powerful fraud detection where if things don't add up, right, right. Documents look like they've been manipulated potentially, or data doesn't kind of marry up with some of the other variables that we're looking at. We're able to red flag that and be able to allow a carrier broker factor. To become aware of that and to make certain decisions based on that. So those kind of smart technologies that can be built in this kind of processing platform, I think is, is hugely beneficial for their customers. So I, I see us moving that platform along in the next five to seven years where we're building in more decision making more algorithms to help companies in real time be able to conduct business and allow them to then look at other high opportunity areas within our own company without having to worry about some of those types of things happening in their back office.

Tom Raftery: 24:26

Okay. Very good. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Don. Is there any question that I have not asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this that we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Don Burke: 24:41

Yeah, I think one thing that I was just thinking of you know, I was reminded of is and maybe it's a little bit self-aggrandizing here, but this next year could be a little bit interesting. For transportation, who knows The economy in general, obviously there's, there's talk potentially of, of, of inflation and maybe at least the first half the year being difficult and depending on capacity and there's driver shortages, there's a lot of things going on. I guess what I'd just like to, to, to spend five seconds on if I could, is this is the best time to adopt or adopt technology to be able to shore up some of the areas that can be very helpful. Whether the cycle is up or the cycle's down, meaning when the times are good, there's a lot of high volume, there's a lot of activity. Sometimes you never get around to doing projects that can really benefit your customers because your business is so busy, if that makes sense. Then there's other times where you kind of hunker down a little bit because times are a little tough. There's opportunities, I think for companies that are smart to pick relevant technologies and apply them that can be very cost effective, can compress the kind of order to cash cycle to be able to allow them to, to prosper and grow even in difficult times. So I think that's kind of a relevant, relevant message right now in terms of how you just look at technology given the unknown that might lie ahead in the next year or so.

Tom Raftery: 26:05

Yeah. No, it's a good point. Good point. Okay, Don if people would like to know more about yourself or about Transflo or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Don Burke: 26:16

Yeah. You know, our, our website is, is really informative and, and obviously you can get additional information and, if you wanna speak with somebody about a particular area, or, or me in general. You can certainly go there. It's transflo.com. So that would be a great place to, to start. I'm available on LinkedIn and other areas of, of social media. My email is d burke at transflo.com. Be happy to, to chat with anybody and, discuss anything they might have found interesting during our chat today.

Tom Raftery: 26:45

Okay, and we should clarify that, although I'll, I'll have the, the links in the show notes, but Transflo is without the w at the end of flow. Right. It's just f l o

Don Burke: 26:52

probably right T R A N S F L o.com.

Tom Raftery: 26:57

Perfect. Perfect. Great. Okay, super Don, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Don Burke: 27:03

I appreciate so much. Enjoyed it. Thank you.

Tom Raftery: 27:07

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, simply drop me an email to TomRaftery@outlook.com If you like the show, please don't forget to click Follow on it in your podcast application of choice to be sure to get new episodes as soon as they're published Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find a show. Thanks, catch you all next time.