Greg Price Of Shipwell On What We Must Do To Create Nationally Secure And Resilient Supply Chains

An Interview With David Leichner

Technology investment can play a big part in creating a more secure national supply chain. First, streamlining communication for when issues do arise makes resolving those issues faster. With the right level of data and analytics on the supply chain, you can get a clear view into its status from the manufacturers to the customers, providing transparency at every step to ensure any issues do not slip through the cracks.

The cascading logistical problems caused by the pandemic and the war in Eastern Europe, have made securing a reliable supply chain a national imperative. In addition, severe cyberattacks like the highly publicized Colonial pipeline attack, have brought supply chain cybersecurity into the limelight. So what must manufacturers and policymakers do to ensure that we have secure and resilient supply chains?

Greg Price is an amalgam of business and technology acumen focused on solving one of the most daunting challenges of our time — resilience and efficiency of the supply chain. He founded Shipwell in 2016, which is now a recognized innovator of transportation solutions specifically directed at the midmarket shipper, to equal the playing field and bring automation, visibility, and artificial intelligence to the underserved and challenged midmarket. Since its founding, Shipwell has been a trusted ally of many medium sized companies and has been recognized as one of the most valuable platforms shippers can leverage to remain competitive. Greg’s love of applied technology did not start with Shipwell. While a consultant at McKinsey & Co, Greg leveraged advanced analytics and machine learning to solve crucial challenges facing Fortune 100 supply chains across CPG, Retail, Oil & Gas, and Manufacturing. He also spent 7 years working at MIT’s Lincoln Labs creating hardware, software, and algorithms for the US Department of Defense and holds Masters degrees in Engineering and Business from MIT.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

Thank you, David, for the opportunity to speak with you today. My informative years may not be as extraordinary or aligned with my current entrepreneurial nature as you might think. Simply, I grew up in a blue-collar home in Houston, Texas with the typical dreams of being a “buckaroo banzai” or playing football for the Dallas Cowboys. My early ambition, however, far outweighed my superhero and sports talent, and inevitably brought me to the much more realistic past time of building, coding, and playing video games. Enjoying the nature of this more technical pastime and being good at it, led me to seek a degree in engineering. Toward that end, I went to the University of Texas, Austin where I studied electrical engineering and graduated at the top of my class. My interest in continuing my education and applying it to solve business problems brought me to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I completed degrees in both engineering and business. My love of both technology and solving business problems spurred my motivation to solve some of the hardest challenges around the supply chain by leveraging the best technology advancements.

You are a successful leader. Which character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I have found that grit and resilience, work ethic and motivation are the factors most important to my career success.

First, I value grit and resilience. Grit is about sustained, consistent effort toward a goal even when we struggle, falter, or temporarily fail. Resilience is our ability to bounce back after we have struggled, faltered, or failed. Throughout my life, I’ve had to deal with situations that have created significant challenges to goals, motivation, and personal well-being. Grit and resilience is how I overcame these obstacles. Something to remember is that most narratives focus on only the successes and minimize the challenges and failures that were a necessary part of those journeys. As a leader, you will face adversity and the way that you respond will be the leading indicator of your success. I admire those that learn and persevere through challenges.

Second, I value work ethic. Hard work and commitment constitute the recipe for success, whether it be on an athletic field playing a sport, at home in a relationship, or at work finishing an assignment. I may not be the smartest, fastest, or luckiest person, but I will leverage the best of my talents and efforts to ensure that I meet or exceed my goals and commitments. I find this level of work ethic important in one’s career as it builds trust. My work ethic is important to my employees, my customers, and myself. I would go as far to say that my work ethic and that of my employees are the reason why Shipwell does well against many of its competitors, is able to delight its customers every day, and is a trusted and valued partner.

Lastly, I value motivation. Motivation is the energy and desire one puts in service of a goal. It’s not only important for individual success but also a critical character trait for being a strong leader. Motivation fuels excellence, it allows you to out-compete, and it sparks social connection, inspiration, and comradery with others to join you on your mission. Good leaders help people understand what motivates them and get them to tap into that to fuel success. Motivation has endowed me the drive and direction needed to overcome any obstacle and to take on the hardest of problems. I expect and seek to encourage motivation in others.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. In order to ensure that we are all on the same page let’s begin with some simple definitions. What does the term “supply chain” encompass?

A supply chain is a network of individuals and companies involved in creating a product and delivering it to the consumer. Links on the chain begin with the producers of the raw materials and end when the final transport delivers the finished product to the customer.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the handling of the entire production flow of a good or service — starting from the raw components all the way to delivering the final product to the consumer. SCM is a crucial process because an optimized supply chain results in lower costs and a more efficient production cycle. Shipwell addresses the movement part, known ascalled logistics of the supply chain, which is a critical part of the entire process. It is also the place that can make a huge impact on both cost, efficiency, and performance expectations.

Can you help articulate what the weaknesses are in our current supply chain systems?

That is the challenge for supply chain companies today. There are an infinite number of things that can go wrong in your supply chain that can be considered weaknesses. Weather, delayed materials, labor disputes and equipment failure are traditional supply chain disruptors. But you also need to consider broader issues such as communication disruptions, geopolitical upheaval, terrorism and even currency exchange volatility.

Unexpected events and supply chain disruptions are inevitable, but having visibility into potential disruptions along a route and ability to pivot to another route are critical to combating these issues.

There are very few companies that have multi-echelon supply chain visibility that assists their immediate products and components but also creates functionality down one or two levels into their suppliers.

As for planning, there will always be variability in demand forecasting, supply lead time and disruptions that create a lot of waste and inefficiencies in the supply chain.

This can impact critical supply efforts like those we’ve seen as we emerge from COVID-19, especially in terms of circuitry, components for vehicles, etc.

Can you help define what a nationally secure and resilient supply chain would look like?

A resilient supply chain is one that can adapt to disruptions. A secure supply chain is one that is impervious to a type of disruption caused by maleficence from nefarious parties looking to do harm. Both factors are important as it is challenging, if not impossible, to completely lock down unanticipated and unknown security threats before they occur. As a result, you should be able to say that if a disruptive event, like a security incident, happens, your stakeholders can trust your organization and systems to respond quickly and recover your supply chain operation to deliver goods on time and in full as expected.

My particular expertise is in cybersecurity so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. Can you share some examples of recent and notable cyber-attacks against our supply chain? Why do you think these attacks were so significant?

Supply chain attacks ranked among the top three types of cyberattacks, alongside phishing and malware attacks. A very public example would be the Colonial Pipeline attack that shut down oil distribution across large areas of the country or the attack against JBS that saw the world’s biggest meat supplier shut down for days just a few weeks later.

Events like these have made it vital to ensure that the supply chain is secure and prepared to adapt in the wake of a potential attack. Disruptions can have a trickle-down effect prompting weeks of further disruption after even a short shutdown. And with more of the supply of certain products controlled by a smaller number of companies like we saw with the pipeline and JBS attacks, the effects of those shutdowns are even more pronounced.

Many businesses already can’t find enough truckers or containers in the case of overseas shipments. The significance here is not only the importance of a secure supply chain but also the need to be adaptable and ensure secure operations in the face of known and unknown disruptions.

What would you recommend for the government or for tech leaders to do to improve supply chain cybersecurity?

First, it is critical to understand the areas of lack of visibility, connectivity, and security in different supply chains. For example, the US must manufacture and distribute enough vaccines for COVID-19 and other pandemics from the sourcing of raw materials to supplier manufacturing and end state production — all of which should be graphed and understood. You can then identify where it makes sense to dual source or manufacture and reduce that risk. Tech leaders can help if they have specific solutions that provide visibility, simulation, and prediction of supply chains.

Ok, thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. What are the “5 Things We Must Do to Create Nationally Secure and Resilient Supply Chains” and why?

First, you need to understand what supply chains are critical: where will the US be most impacted? The food and oil supply chains have been attacked recently, shutting those down for days and causing supply issues that lasted weeks longer, but in terms of risks to the national economy and widespread disruption, a shutdown in other supply chains would cause an even more significant impact. More than likely, it is High Tech Electronics and Sub Components, Precious Metals such as Lithium, Nickel, and others. The supply chains for these components and materials are vital to a huge number of industries across the country, and if they were to be impacted, the fallout would be huge. We can see that just through the effect of the chip shortage caused by COVID-19 related disruptions and its effect on everything from auto manufacturing to refrigerator production. You’ve also got to be especially careful at identifying the supply chains that could impact national security. Things like defense components must be considered first and foremost, but also, there are infrastructure components that the country relies on to maintain safety and security at a national level.

Second, you need to have a good understanding of the current state of the supply chain as a whole. The supply chain is a complex global enterprise, and it’s been made even more complex over the past two years with the pandemic hampering production around the world, highlighting a need for resiliency in the world’s supply chains. Across many verticals, the bottleneck that we’re currently experiencing starts as far back as a raw material shortage as with lumber or microchips, which delays finished goods production, which delays shipping and so on down the supply chain. These concerns arise at nearly every point in the chain, from congested ports, to a driver shortage and reduced warehousing capacity, weakening other links in the chain. Having a clear view into those issues is critical to creating a more resilient supply chain.

Following from that, you also need to keep a pulse on external factors that can impact supply chains. Things like extreme weather events like we saw during the big snow storm that hit Texas in early 2021 or more recently with Hurricane Ian and the disruption that those events caused in getting essential products onto shelves. You need to be able to track these types of events and adapt around them to keep goods moving as smoothly as possible. Likewise there are infrastructure issues as we saw with the Memphis bridge closure. Delays navigating around that cost the trucking industry $2.4 million every day. And these external factors aren’t necessarily ones you can always see clearly from the outside looking in. You’ve also got to keep a pulse on social or political issues. Things like labor disputes might slip under the radar when it’s a single company, but we’re at a level where a small number of organizations control a large swath of the nation’s supply network. We saw that just recently with the narrowly averted rail strike. Railroads are responsible for moving between 28 and 43% of all freight in the country, and if that had moved forward, it would have cost as much as $2 billion a day. Understanding and tracking all of these external factors that could disrupt supply chains and create plans in advance to prevent or adapt to them should be the first step to building resiliency.

Businesses also need to work to enable rapid shipments of critical products and materials. Preparedness tactics such as expanding distribution networks or establishing strategic emergency stockpiles have become more common since 2020. We saw that at the national level early on during the pandemic when the country’s medical supplies began running short, prompting the government to step in to reform and strengthen these and other vital strategic stockpiles. The same practice employed at the national level can be leveraged by others in the supply chain as well. By having stock available in more locations across the country rather than in one central hub, if any distribution location experiences disruption, a business can quickly react by diverting supplies from nearby locations until it is resolved. And they can provide benefits that go beyond security, allowing them to leverage these fully stocked locations to provide more localized distribution, reducing the cost of shipment while improving the speed of delivery.

Finally, technology investment can play a big part in creating a more secure national supply chain. First, streamlining communication for when issues do arise makes resolving those issues faster. With the right level of data and analytics on the supply chain, you can get a clear view into its status from the manufacturers to the customers, providing transparency at every step to ensure any issues do not slip through the cracks.

Consider the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chain companies with only manual processes faced the hardest transition at the start of the pandemic into the increased demand and variability through the years of the pandemic. Other interruptions include changes in terms of hours of service for drivers and driver age requirements, another concern streamlined communication can mitigate.

Are there other ideas or considerations that should encourage us to reimagine our supply chain?

As we look to reimagine the supply chain, it is important to be able to identify risks — including geo-political, lead time variability and other factors — to work toward simulating these scenarios and then find ways through dual sourcing and manufacturing to reduce our overall risk score.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I think our next generation will face health, climate, energy, and water crises that will require a multi-generational approach to leaving the world in a better place. Transportation is the highest emitting sector of CO2 in the U.S. With such a significant impact comes the opportunity to create real change for the planet. I believe we need to shift to a more sustainable economy and technology. Shipwell and others are developing technology that can help get us closer through visibility and input into the decision-making processes. Comprehensive transportation data can help companies measure their transportation sustainability impact and reduce their carbon footprint. Eventually with advances in electric and alternative transportation energy sources, a shipper can make concerted decisions to choose energy that freight carriers are using at every point in the transportation journey of your product. Across the board, shippers will need to incorporate reliable and timely data into their daily processes. And with technology like Shipwell’s that provides accurate and meaningful data visualizations at any time, companies can manage their costs and emissions proactively and differentiate themselves from the competition and more importantly leave our world in a better place.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I am on LinkedIn and can be found here. I also recommend checking out shipwell.com and asking my team to demonstrate our technology. We would love to hear about shipper’s challenges and partner with them on how to make a difference.

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.