ISV Talks
ISV Talks
How ShipHawk Helped Brinks Home Streamline Shipping Before Moving to Business Central
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On this episode of the ISV Talks podcast, Carol Livingston, owner of Dynamics Connections, speaks with Alex Kemp from ShipHawk. They discuss how Brinks Home needed a smarter way to manage shipping, increase carrier access, and improve warehouse operations as they prepared to move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Alex shares how the ShipHawk team helped Brinks Home streamline processes, reduce complexity, and build a scalable fulfillment foundation before the ERP transition.
The conversation also explores ShipHawk’s unique roots in the shipping and packing world and how that real world experience shapes their approach to WMS and TMS for mid-market companies.
If your customers manage B2C, B2B, or omnichannel orders, this episode offers practical insights you can use to guide them toward more efficient and scalable operations.
ShipHawk Origins And The Pivot
Tell us how did ShipPock get started? A little bit about their beginnings, a little bit about the company history. So Shippac actually didn't start as a software company. Our CEO, still current CEO, his name is Jeremy. He actually started this as a pack and post. So if you go to any strip mall across the US, there's going to be a pack and post and it's going to have UPS services or FedEx services. So he bought one of those back in the early 2000s. And in 2012, he saw the opportunity to take what a lot of customers are coming in and asking him with the pack and post and move that to the internet because everyone would come in with these very odd items to ship. It wasn't a standard, I just got to ship this from A to B. It was grandma's expensive find china to the grandkids. It was something very specific that would have been really expensive and specific to ship. And so his whole idea was I'm going to try to do this, but on a software scale. The challenge with that was it's very services focused. And grandma isn't the most technology savvy. And so we then shifted, pivoted, and somewhere after you know 2012, 2013, 2014, towards a B2B model and actually selling to companies that own their own warehouses who really want to improve their shipping and fulfillment process. Fast forward a little bit, and around seven years ago, eight years ago, we we moved into Netsuite, then moved into Acumatica. We are newer to dynamics, but we we've been doing this for many, many years now. And a lot of the principles hold, which is customers want to improve their operation, their fulfillment process. And we started out with just a shipping tool. We added a WMS solution. There's now a whole suite of solutions around it. Happy to say now we have a thousand DCs running ship-hock um after you know 14 years of the market now. So big footprint all over North America, especially. Yeah, that's pretty impressive going all the way up to a thousand distribution center from a little postal service. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That entrepreneurial spirit is definitely alive and well driven. Yeah, we're constantly innovating. He's still working there, isn't he? He still is, yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Well, I was like, is he still taking grandma's post and shipping it? Not not anymore. We're really helping serve companies that have you know complex shipping operations and processes. Okay, awesome. So I know you're pretty well known in the NetSuite space and Acumatica, of course. That's actually where you and I met. But since then, it sounds like you've moved into the BC or Microsoft ecosystem. Yep. So is there any other ERPs that you work with? We work with a number of other you know long tail of ERPs. I I think I was looking recently. We've got customers that are running 30 different ERPs. Usually they're connecting through an API connection or some sort of middleware. Um so I wouldn't say those are more you know the focus markets for us. Um, you know, NetSuite, Acumatica, Dynamics, those those are the big focus markets. We can work with any source system basically. We're very reliant on a on an ERP to feed us orders and then we write that information back. We're not a standalone system. But yeah, we we have customers running many different solutions. Our customers are very creative, and we're gonna help them through the implementation process to really kind of tailor the solution to what whatever their end source system is, whatever they need to work with. Yeah,
ERP Connections Plus WMS And TMS
okay. So Alex, tell me, okay, so we kind of dance around this, but what is the basic description of the products that you have for dynamics ERPs and other ERPs? Yep. Yeah. So there's there's a whole suite of solutions, but really at its core, there's the the two main solutions. There's the warehouse management solution, WMS, and then there's the TMS solution, outbound shipping. The best way to think about this is you know, the WMS, the warehouse solution, that's very focused on within the four walls of the warehouse. How am I optimizing goods, you know, inventory, and people, whether that's receiving, put away, picking, cycle counting, you know, some of these very core basic functionality in a warehouse. On the shipping side, TMS side, that's outbound shipping. So how am I packing and shipping this? Am I meeting my customer SLAs? How am I minimizing shipping costs and while still meeting those SLAs? And it also gets involved even upstream and in actual order taking place. So think about an e-comm company, they're shipping from their website. What does the customer want to know? How much is this gonna cost to ship? So we actually sit in the e-comm cart as well. So those are our two main solutions. Most of our WMS customers actually run our shipping solution, our TMS, because the last part of the warehouse management is you actually go pack and ship. But we have a lot of customers that are only running our TMS solution. They need just help with their packing and shipping. Okay. And so they can be used standalone. Bunch of other add-on solutions. We have an audit solution, which goes back to carriers and says, what did I pay? What should I have paid? We have a handheld dimensioner, which can actually get weights and dimensions of items within the warehouse. We have an analytics tool, we have an AI tool. There's a bunch of other solutions that add on top of that as well. But those are the two kind of core solutions that customers ask us to help them with. Yeah, the analytics that must be really useful to kind of dive into like how much are we spending with this carrier or that carrier? Could we get a little bit better rates and things like that that use useful for negotiating? Absolutely. Yep. Yeah, exactly. And we're not we're not contract negotiating experts, but we're gonna give you all that data, and we're not gonna go to actual conversation with you. And ultimately, yeah, we want carry our uh customers to bring their own carrier rates because they're gonna get great rates. And so we want them to make sure they're leveraging those rates. And that's yeah, kind of like the frequent flyer mile you get for the airline. When you travel for work, you get still the frequent flyer miles, essentially. Yeah. So they negotiate a rate, make sure they're using those carrier rates, right? Yeah. So it's been a big solution for us too, the audit tool, because a lot of carriers they they will accidentally or you know. Maybe on purpose, they will actually there's a a charge that shouldn't be on there. Um it's it's a revenue center for these companies. How do you get different charges to add on top? And and is that true? Is that correct? Sometimes it is, of course, but if the item was damaged or lost, or there's many, many different things can be audited from a carrier standpoint. Right. Yeah, that that's gonna be huge for a lot of companies. I
Audit Analytics And Ideal Customers
are the companies you work with in the industries, are they mostly shipping from a warehouse or getting orders through like their sales reps, or are there other types of businesses you work with? There's really no single industry that ship hawk serves because the solution can be used across many different industries. There's some industries that we we are not a great fit for, heavily regulated or complex manufacturing that is trying to use chip-hock to actually do the manufacturing. Where we really thrive is a customer that has a warehouse that they own that they are trying to ship or you know maximize the the warehouse efficiency and ship. Um, so that could be everyone that's just an e-com company to a wholesaler distributor, fulfilling B2B orders, Amazon orders. Honestly, the the more order channels, the better. You know, sales rep's actually picking up the phone and receiving orders because all these people want the same thing, which is they want to know how much is it gonna cost a ship, when is it going to arrive? And then all the company cares about is how do we make this whole process as efficient as possible so that costs don't go sky high. And so, yeah, it really we're we're industry agnostic, the different industries that are gonna be a better fit overall, but really kind of could work across a broad set of customers. I look around my office or the house, and and there's a lot of customers that you'd recognize a lot of brands because they're they're probably using everything from uh even parts that go into something else that you'll never you'll never actually be able to buy online. Okay. Interesting.
Brinks Home ERP Cutover Story
So tell me, tell me a little bit. Maybe it'd be fun to kind of hear a story about a customer that's been successful with your product and why they've been successful. Yeah, maybe um I'll choose on Brinks Home. Uh, we just did a a webinar with them a couple weeks ago. And it's also a good story to tell just because it's very closely linked to the the dynamics market. Their biggest thing, and we have a case study on them as well, the their biggest thing was they were actually transitioning from Net Suite to dynamics and to BC. And they wanted to actually cut over to the fulfillment solution prior to doing the ERP transition. Most companies would say, Oh, we're just gonna do this big bang, we're just going to you know push a new warehouse management and shipping solution and ERP live at the same time. What can go wrong, of course? So they said, we want to actually get this settled sooner than later. And that's the good part about our TMS solution and NRWMS to a certain extent as well. Time to value. And so they they went live with ShipHock about six months before moving ERPs. And from their warehouse worker perspective, they switched ERPs over the weekend. The warehouse associate had no idea basically that the ERP underlying this actually changed. And so they just kept logging to ShipHock essentially. And their whole thing was that brings home was we do about a thousand shipments per day from our two warehouses. We can't mess that up. We can't have any downtime, we can't have any operational inefficiencies. The stakes are too high. If the brand, well, I think everyone probably knows the brand, you've seen their trucks and their home security. They have not only their end consumers that need items, they have also service reps that are installing. You can't you know reschedule the appointment. Oh, we didn't get that part. It's critically important they just keep sending out the warehouse, you know, the everything out of the warehouse on on time at SLAs so everyone knows when to expect an item so that the whole ship can keep moving forward, basically. So there were a lot of benefits. But one thing I always call out is we also along the way, not only in this ERP transition, but we did end up saving them by offering more flexibility in their shipping options, about $400,000 in their first three months. Wow. Um, and reduce the order fulfillment time equally to 30 seconds per order. So very clear ROI. Those are always the easy, very clear savings, very clear order processing savings. Um, especially given that what could be a very messy process with an ERP transition along the way as well. So just great, great team, also, by the way, too. That always helps on their customer side. Yeah, that that's uh yeah. So they switched ERPs and took Shippak, but they if it was Shippock before they went live on their ERP. That's interesting. Correct, yeah. You'd think more customers would do it, but I ERP goes first, then we do everything else. But I think part of this was what's the quickest time to value? And we're we're having these shipping issues, and we can get you know shiphock live in 60 to 90 days. The ERP, it's gonna be you know nine to 12 months. So let's let's do it now. Let's see that ROI and see that benefit. Uh, a lot of companies will say, hey, we're gonna do new ERP, so we don't want to go adjust our process. But one of the parts of them which worked really well for this was we have a Net Suite connector, we have a BC connector, they just you know stopped receiving orders from Net Suite, they started receiving orders from BC, they made that transition over the course of a weekend, and it worked. Of course, there's testing, and we have to make sure everything different ERP systems, different source systems. But at the end of the day, that's that's the ideal scenario, honestly. Yeah, honestly, like yeah, stop shipping on Friday and then Monday morning, business as usual. That's what you want to hear. And they already gone through the learning curve with their employees because yeah, new system, chip-hocks here, here's the here's the training process. They didn't have to, oh, they they have the back office saying we need ERP training, and also the warehouse associates saying we need chip-hock training at the same time. That's a recipe for robot challenges. Yeah, I think that's a really good tip in general, right? Let's do one piece of the big operations and then get that out of the way. Yeah, that's a great story. What are
Rules Engine For Warehouse Efficiency
what are some of the new things that Shiphock is looking to introduce to add value and really help those customers that are trying to improve their efficiencies? I think if if I think about each of our customers, they're they're all on their own stage of the journey and maturity. And if you think about even just uh the the physical limitations of warehouse, some some of our customers have warehouses they've been in for hundreds of years, and and some companies, you know, brand new warehouse they just built for their operation. So that's like the physical layout, and then the the capability of their team, the technology they have in place. What does their you know racking in the warehouse look like? What are what are some of the physical limitations they have within the warehouse? So every company's kind of on their own journey. And some customers come to us with very specific, you know, very acute, very big issues that there's just one or two things they have to improve. For example, their picking process is super inefficient, or that they're just bleeding money on shipping, and they just cannot figure out why things are costing so much to ship. Um very specific pain point. A lot of customers though come to us with I know there's a lot of pain all over. We've got a legacy system in place, we have a point solution in place, and we just know we can raise the bar overall on our warehouse fulfillment process. So we're we're seeing those two camps, you know, one very specific pain point. Like Brinks is a good example. They had a couple of very specific pain points around hazmat orders and USPS orders that we could meet, yeah. Versus another customer who we don't know where the pain is exactly. We just know our team isn't using the warehouse management system, they're they're working outside the system. So we don't even know how how bad you know the operation is or what's going on. Yeah. So that's where every customer is really on their own journey or maturity, I guess you could call it. Two very similar companies might have completely different processes, completely different maturity. And so our goal is to just try to level set and say, okay, where can we improve? What's what's the new benchmark? And then keep improving on top of that. And then our job as the software company is to go add new solutions, and our audit solution is a good example of that, or AI solution is a good example of that. What can we keep releasing to customers that's just going to keep improving the operation over time? Yeah, I just think about clients. I when I was a consultant, they'd have sticky notes all over their computer and little like cheat sheets. So, like, well, if it has this kind of scenario, then you have to print this label and do this special paperwork. So, like exactly all being system driven and they don't have to think about it. That's amazing. A hundred percent. Yeah, and it's you see that the passwords pasted up there, the oh, it's a plasmatic order, so you need to follow this. Our our goal is somebody can start a new warehouse associate, and they get a morning training, they watch a few orders take place, and then they can jump to the system because and not because we don't trust that warehouse worker, but it it's it's relying on this like hero work in the warehouse of oh, that person's been here forever, they know how to process these more complex orders. Yeah, it's a it's a pallet order that's hazmat, so it's got these very special requirements. ShipOff can actually put that in the rules engine to actually automate the process so that it looks like the same process for that individual warehouse associate. It doesn't make sense to it's not fair to anyone involved to say, you know, good luck and and you need to jump through all these hoops. Yeah, exactly. What can go wrong basically? And there's a lot of examples we see of, you know, just the the and you probably received this at your house too. You get the the small item in the big box, they shipped a bunch of air. That's that's probably one of the easiest examples of we have a cartization algorithm that can sell them this item goes in this box, this box goes in this palette and does the Tetris for them. You don't have to make it up anymore on the gun. Yeah, you're right. Everybody probably has that experience of getting the big box and that's got lots of bubble wrap and a little tiny item in the corner. It's not cheap. And and do that at scale, and it it's just super inefficient. Any perspective on just customers themselves and trying to improve their efficiencies? Like, what are what are the things that customers are struggling with that you see? Yeah, I I kind of alluded to this earlier, but take the order channel. It could be B2C, it could be D D C, it could be B2B, an Amazon order, an EDI order, a sales rep, you know, receiving the order. Um, but what doesn't change through all that is who doesn't want the item you know faster, cheaper, without errors and issues, the the Amazon effect, even though Amazon doesn't always get it right, of course. So I I think that that truly doesn't change, even if you're uh shipping out of a garage or you're a Fortune 500 company that's got this warehouse where everything's robotics and completely automated. What what obviously that just doesn't change? I think what really does start to change, and this is where we are really trying to help, is call it this kind of messy middle where you've outgrown the point solutions. You can't, it just doesn't make sense. There, there isn't a you know clear ROI, the total cost of ownership is just way too big to get a tier one solution solution. We're really trying to be that next stopping ground with which is you now do a few thousand orders per month. You do five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand orders per month. There's a lot of scale and efficiency, but you can't go write a check for you know millions of dollars to a tier one provider. So I I think um the the fundamental driver doesn't really change faster, cheaper, no errors, no issues. But it gets really hard when you've outgrown the point solutions. You now have a ton of scale, and the expectation is you're gonna compete with you know the Amazons of the world who have way more resources, way more expertise in this. Can you kind of compete on the level of the playing field? And there are a lot of ways to get 80, 90 percent there and have an equal footing against some of these companies and and and thrive. Yeah, but I think the other is that it is opened up the opportunity, right? Maybe they couldn't do it before because they just didn't have the skills or the system. So absolutely, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, great. Any
3PL Returns AI Insights Robotics Reality
new trends on the horizon that you're seeing, or maybe new things that are being developed? So I think one thing we saw during, you know, especially during COVID too, where orders volume spiked overnight, especially for direct-to-consumer and B2B orders or B2C orders, excuse me. Um, these e-comm companies just took off and their volume spiked. And I think they really struggled to keep up because if you go from, okay, we're doing 10 orders per day and now we're doing a thousand orders per day, there's just a completely different ballgame, basically. It's a completely different problem. And so a lot of companies said, but uh we're not gonna work on this anymore, we're gonna go to 3PL, we're gonna just give our inventory over to a 3PL and we're gonna we're gonna outsource it to a third-party logistics company. They specialize in this, you know, what can go wrong? And there are some good 3PLs, there's some great matches out there, but I think one trend we are seeing is we there were customers that were saying, Oh, we're moving to 3PL, we're moving to 3PL. Uh companies are actually coming back and saying, but uh it didn't work for for various reasons. And I think the way that I see it is you know, if fulfillment in the warehouse is a strategic uh thing for this company, uh, should you really be outsourcing something? It's a company strategy that's a there's this a differentiator, it's a moat that you built. Okay, we're we're going to make sure we need to keep this really close to our operation. And so, especially over the last few years, now that we're well past COVID, too, is this this kind of boomerang back towards okay, that didn't meet the need. Um, we're gonna manage our own warehouse and fulfillment. And not to say, too, that 3PL can't be a very strategic lever. For example, in a market where you don't have a direct warehouse presence, it's not cost effective to do that. You can put a 3PL and that can help kind of supplement. But at the end of the day, if it's a core competency for you and you are a wholesale distributor or an e-com company, and your delivery experience is critical, you need to make sure you've got eyes on that. You've you're managing that. It's it's yeah, it can be expensive. There, there's a lot of labor is not cheap, it's it's hard to find talent, real estate is not cheap, etc. But that's where I think ship hop can really help and and on the warehouse side of it as well, and it's the fulfillment side of actually software tools that are gonna help automate and improve that process. So yeah, I think that's a trend we're seeing, especially over the last few years, is companies coming back and saying, yeah, but that didn't that didn't meet the uh goods that was really so and yeah, working at 3PL and integrating with them and yeah, giving information between those two entities is hard enough, right? Yeah, exactly. The carriers in the company. So exactly. Yeah. And then on your your second question too, just the you know, what's good in the pipeline as far as the the product. Yeah. Part of our goal is always always how do we keep improving the warehouse management solution and the the transportation management solution, the out-bound shipping? There are still a lot of use cases, a lot of very specific things. And it's really the customer led saying, we we now need this new carrier, we need this new service. We want to be able to do this within our workflow and our warehouse process. That's a constant evolution of the solution is always going to keep improving. That's the really the core of what we do. But I already started to mention this to you know, we're not we're not immune to the uh the AI solutions that are out there in the market, and especially if you think about data and visualization and being able to interact with your data and say, hey, system, what do you think is going to happen next month with our orders? And actually being able to pull in all that information and data and have a legible response that comes back with, hey, here's here's what happened, not only last year, but also factoring in recent trends and other data that we've seen. Um AI is perfect for this. And this is where we really focused our AI strategy and and really having it drive towards a system of action and saying, you should be careful about this, this is upcoming. Um, so we have our first AI tool in market, and it's really got good feedback from customers too around actually helping them shine a light on some part of their operation where they might have had a blind spot and just being able to in natural language query the data and get back information. So that's the the first step. There's a lot more in the works, and obviously internally too, we're using you know AI tools. There's there's a lot of really good use cases as well. But that's that's first the hotbend issue and and you know the focus. But there really is clear value. And that you know, combined with we're always going to improve our solutions, keep adding not only depth to the solutions, but also breadth as well. And and again, we brought probably you know three or four different solutions in the market in the last few months alone, just focused on what our customers needed and wanted. Are you seeing a lot of trends even like going to automation, like robotics and things in the warehouse and logistics? Yes, but I I would say it kind of in our part of the market, which is mid-market, lower enterprise, um, robotics are still just really expensive. And they will remain. I mean, you just think about the the cost. The materials it is that these are you know complex machines that have a lot of moving pieces. Um, we do have some customers, of course, that are using robotics and and that's a trend, and especially not a full lights-out warehouse. You know, you only have robotics in the warehouse, it's it's really meant to help kind of assist the the warehouse worker in their process, everything from okay parts that will follow you around to cobots that you can interact with that are gonna help you in your process. So, yes, we are seeing those, but I think this this um completely lights out warehouse, it's it's just gonna be 24 by 7. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and again, some some companies are gonna go there, Fortune 500 is the company of the world. They they can afford to do that because there's enough inventory moving around their warehouse that it justifies it. But for customers in the mid-market, lower enterprise, yeah, yeah, okay. It's just it's cost prohibitive. But again, we're we're gonna, you know, whatever our customers need, if they start to move this direction, we're gonna help support them. Great. So any other last thoughts before I ask my conclusion question here or anything we didn't cover? No? I I think we hit it all. Yeah. Okay. Well,
Buyer Pain Signals And How To Reach
in conclusion, so Alex, what what's the trend that you're seeing that's driving customers or partners to come talk to you? Yeah, I I think I already started it on this, but I'll just kind of double down on it, which is there's two camps and two schools of that come to us. One is uh very specific pain points that's so painful, and everyone can put their finger on it. We we we can't ship a hazmat order. It just takes literally an hour and a half. Or loading a pallet, it literally takes a team of three people all day to get that pallet ready. There has to be a better way to do this, and that's because you're relying on tribal knowledge and just warehouse expertise, warehouse worker expertise. So very specific one point, and we have a number of different tools that can help with whatever those pain points are, or just the broader set of we can't even begin to unpack what the problems are because costs are skyrocketing, we have warehouse turnover, there's just so many issues that we need to just hit a reset within the warehouse and start to look at solutions for how do we improve the overall? Like we can't even measure some of these basic metrics, core metrics. So I think that's like my my biggest. It could be one very specific thing, it could be a number of things. At the end of the day, our job is to help kind of like a doctor and say, okay, where's the pain? Where is it coming from? What's the root cause? Ask the five whys, get to the deeper root cause. A lot of times we'll talk to a company, and the first time we talk to them, now's not the right time. Totally understand. The just as much as we are invested in this, the the customer and the partner need to be invested as well. It's not a it's not a one-way street, it's gotta be a two-way street for successful implementation and successful. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, great. Well, it was great hearing about shiphock and everything that you have going on. Well, thank you, Alex, for joining me today on ISV Talks. And it was great hearing about uh Shiphock Solutions. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It's a good good conversation. Um yeah, feel free to reach out uh shiphock.com and alex.kemp at shiphock.com, and uh we will see if we can help the operation. Great. Well, thank you, Alex and friends. I'll see you on the next episode of ISV Talks. All right, bye-bye, friends. Thanks, Caroline.