Name: Flexport Fall Technology Release Live Broadcast
Uploaded: 2025-10-29T20:23:06.230Z
Duration: 33 min 35 s
Description: Flexport Fall Technology Release Live Broadcast

Transcript for "Flexport Fall Technology Release Live Broadcast": I'm actually most excited for the technology products that we do that really get to the foundational root of customer problems. It's less about the flashy things, the stuff that's gonna get media attention. I'm much more like, what are the actual problems that our customers tell me about all the time and which ones of those have we solved? So we've built a whole suite of tools. Our customers are gonna love it. The software that we're building is to get insight and control over your supply chain. Obviously, we're moving the goods for you. We're taking care of all the transportation needs. But where the real value sits is in the data, and the data empowers you to make better decisions and, ultimately, lower cost. Our products are really focused at enabling our customers to manage their supply chain on an exception basis. We are keeping track of everything that's happening. You don't have to worry about it. If you need to take steps to mitigate risk of incurring additional cost on your shipment, we'll let you know very proactively. We'll also provide you with a really clear workflow for what you can do to actually go proactively. We'll also provide you with a really clear workflow for what you can do to actually go and manage and reduce the risk that you're dealing with. Our tech is definitely our biggest differentiator. Our technology that's most impacted our clients lately has been our tariff simulator. It's really, helped clients understand what HTS they should apply at a given time. I'm not a tech guy, so it's very user friendly, very easy to navigate, very intuitive. I don't know what I'm going to need hour to hour, even minute to minute. So it's just nice to be able to have such a wide reaching platform that I can jump from inventory to orders to tracking to billing, all in one nice platform. We were on our technology journey, and we were really working to navigate through some data challenges with other logistics providers. As we partnered with Flexport, we knew that they were able to bring something different and unique to Trec. Flexport's really been integral in helping support Trec's technology initiative and getting quality data so that we can drive our business forward and make great business decisions using that data. Technology is the cure to volatility. When we say the word volatile, what we're usually talking about is lots of information and the difficulty understanding how to make sense of it. AI tools, machine learning tools, make sense of massive amounts of data. We believe technology is the cure to the volatility that we have today. Our future is very bright in our industry. We see tremendous upside in technology, in the human potential that we have at Flexport and also at our customers. I believe trade will be fundamental to who we are for millennia to come. Come. Good morning. So Flexport's mission has always been to make global trade easy. We wanna make global trade so easy there will be more trade. And I guess, must be real, it's been a lot harder the last few years, the last few days even. And it's not just the tariffs. We've had disruptions to the Red Sea where you can't ship through there. We had a port strike. We're probably gonna check the news later today and find out if something else has happened. And our approach to this has always been pretty simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's we wanna take the best technology in the world, the latest in artificial intelligence and data modeling, and pair it with a team of experts who are willing to roll up their sleeve, apply some elbow grease and solve customers' logistics problems. And when the tariffs hit back in April, we asked ourselves the simple question of if we're building the right things for this moment, for right now, for our customers. And we find out in many cases actually we had to replan quite a few things. And so today is the culmination of, yes, the last six months since that happened, you're gonna see a whole bunch of new AI and technology products that we've been developing. Some of which were developed just in the last six months. A lot of this actually is though been building for over a decade. Some some stuff I'm really proud to share with you today. And we break these into four major categories or themes. The first is, of course, managing customs. Probably the thing that's on most people in logistics mind right now. And we believe we have the best technology and we'll continue to have the best technology for getting control over this and helping you understand what your duty rates are going to be and look for opportunities to save money. The second piece is around enhancing visibility and control of your inventory over your cargo, improving things like on time performance but also reducing some of the fees that we all hate at the ports and elsewhere. The third, related, what can we do to save you money? Yeah. We want to get we want to put real dollars on your bottom line, save you money. That's what you think about probably the most when you think about logistics and we're not blind to that. But the part that I like the most is helping you grow. We want to be a real partner for you on growth. Our fulfillment business can help you with customer experience, conversion rate optimization, and and ultimately Flexport wants to be a partner for taking companies global. So those are the big themes. Let's get right into it. And starting with our customs platform, we today we're introducing the Flexport customs technology suite. It's a set of tools for customs compliance, for customs teams to get you a better hold over what's going on in your tariff and your trade compliance departments. Starting with the tariff simulator, so back in April this was the first thing we had to replan. When April 2 liberation day hit and we had all these new tariffs, we went and talked to our customers and what we realized was that they badly needed help understanding what duties were owed. And all of a sudden it became way harder to calculate your duties. There were new things like the components and what valuation what, the value of those components, the composition was, the date of arrival, all sorts of new factors came into play. So we actually launched the tariff simulator for free for all customers, for everyone on the web, at tariffs.flexport.com back in June. So that was the first real pivot. We couldn't wait until today to launch that. We got it out there quickly. It's become the defacto standard not just for our customers and others but I'm told even competitors are using it every day to figure out what the duty rates for their customers should be. But today we're introducing the pro version. It's still free but but it's only for our customers and it includes some of the most requested features. So first off, you can do all of your tariff codes at once rather than one at a time on the online version. So just upload a CSV file, we'll calculate all the duties for you. Second, we've introduced email alerts. So if one of your customs codes, one of your HS codes is subject to new duties in The United States, we will alert you immediately when that happens. And when it actually goes live, not when the president posts about it on true social. But when it's real, you will find out. As well as a few other features like, USDA and FDA, requirements, partner government agencies that help you with that. The next piece of the customs technology suite is our customs analysis product. Now the problem we're solving here is if you haven't worked with Flexport or you're new to Flexport, your customs data likely lives in many places. Both within your company, it can be on different people's hard drives, in their email inboxes, maybe across multiple providers, disparate systems, kind of that classic problem. Well, the good news is in The United States, your customs data, it is your data and you have a right to it. The Freedom of Information Act gives you the right to your own data and you can go back five years and get this. So we've built technology to extract that data from customs and border protection for you, organize it for you, create nice visuals, help you get a sense of what has happened. This is really good if you're new in a role by the way and want to know what happened before you got there. But it can really help any company see every transaction that's come in and out. This is how CBP sees you. So you wanna see what they're seeing. And this becomes our shared road map for our team of experts of technology and trade experts to sit with you and develop a plan to we can usually find ways to unlock savings, cost savings, reduce risk, we'll find some compliance opportunities and in many cases get you refunds, get you money back and go back five years and apply for those. So if you haven't done that with us it's free, we've really upgraded it here in this release. Okay, the next piece of the custom suite is our compliance audit technology. The problem that we're solving with this is that in most customs brokerages around the industry, the compliance teams only review about 10% of customs entries for accuracy and they do it after the fact. And we also do that kind of statistical sampling but with this new AI driven compliance toolkit we're reviewing 100% of entries for accuracy and we're doing it before we file the entry not after the fact. So let me take you through a couple of examples of why this this technology really matters. We had a customer come to us recently who had been working with another broker and when they filed, they were importing t shirts that had pictures of horses on them And they filed their broker accidentally filed these as live horses, as livestock. Now, as you can imagine, these do not have the same treatment at CBP, different duty rates and all sorts of problems ensued, including probably some some fees, but some awkward conversations. And another example of a mistake that can be made is each, you have these two digit codes. So Taiwan's two digit code is TW. Flexport's one of the largest freight providers in Taiwan, by the way. And you have this two digit code of TW, which can be easily mistaken for a different one, TV, let's say, that's Tuvalu. Tuvalu is a string of islands in the South Pacific. I don't think they are known for making semiconductors, and it's an easy mistake to make if you accidentally just make one letter off. Or one that mystifies me, maybe we can talk about this after somebody can explain to me, but the European Union and The United States use the period and the comma in very different ways. Which is fine. I love the cultural difference here, but CBP does not love that and their software will read this the wrong way. So if you submit a commercial invoice that has a comma instead of a period, your valuation is gonna be off, right, by maybe two orders of magnitude. And that is a simple mistake that can be made and a very common one in the industry. So So you can think of our AI compliance toolkit as sort of like a real time spell check, AI powered, spell check, fine tuned on the world's customs data. Still have experts, we're still doing that really hard work of getting accurate filings but we empower our experts to be much better. So you'll see this is already live with our teams and helping us do a better job. And this is all powered by Flexport Intelligence. This is our AI platform that's getting increasingly smart and intelligent, trained on the world's customs data and global logistics data to keep getting helping us make better and better decisions. The first product that we launched powered by Flexport Intelligence is our insights builder. This went live a few months ago. Today we're updating it with access to customs data so that you can generate reports off your customs data. You no longer you don't need a data scientist, just start asking questions. You'll generate graphs, tables, charts. It's it's that it's as easy to use as you can imagine and I know you're gonna love it. It's live. You can just start using this in your account. Important to note, we do not share your data with the Frontier model providers underlying this. We only share the query and then it's generating a SQL query back to us that we use to generate the reports. So we're not sharing your data outside of the Flexport platform. Very easy to use. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. Now I know you'll find some insights there that'll save you money. I'm confident you'll find ways to make better decisions as we empower you with your data. But probably nothing gets customers more money back than duty drawback And so as part of our custom suite, we've got the world's best duty drawback technology. Duty drawback is just if you import something, you later export a product with the same HS code, you're owed a refund on the duty you paid on the way in. Every year over $7,000,000,000 that people are owed, that businesses are owed goes unclaimed. People don't file 7,000,000,000 and that was before the tariffs went way up. So it's probably much higher now. That's just a huge amount of waste and we're on a mission to get you this money back from the government. In fact, in the last few years we generated $700,000,000 of refunds for our customers, duty drawbacks and other customs refunds that we put into your pockets. I'm so proud of that. And we've done that we've done that for over 300 customers which is great, but we have thousands of customers at Flexport and there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of customers that are eligible for these refunds. And you know we we are on a mission to put all of that money back in your pocket. So what we've done, first off, one of the reasons that people don't apply for this is maybe they don't know about it, we're helping with that, but just they think it's gonna be really hard to gather the data that's required. Well, with our customs analysis product we'll help you. We'll pull this data back in from CBP, we do this in other countries as well, pull the data in. We'll also work with your other providers where this data might be sitting and get it the right format required for CBP. And then we've filled algorithms that do the matching. So you've got to match all your imports with your exports and by connecting those together in the right quantities you generate a refund. We're generating over two times the refund of our competitors. In some cases higher than that. So if you've got a different duty drawbacks provider, let us run your past data through our algorithms and you'll see we would have got you more money. So come talk to us. This is a big deal. Free money in your pocket raining down from Uncle Sam. It's a rare thing in this world. And, okay, so, alright, the next set of fees that people hate. Obviously tariffs are a big problem for you all, but the next one that really gets on everybody's nerves in this industry is detention and demurrage. And these are the fees that you pay if you're late in picking up a container at the port or late in returning it to the port. Very, very annoying. And so today we're introducing the Flexport Detention and Demerge Defender, the D and D Defender. What this does, it's a suite of technology tools that puts you in control and gives you a centralized place to view all your containers that are coming in and the tasks that need to be completed with deadlines and assignments of who needs to do what to get this container out of the port on time. It's free. It's live. It's in the Flexport platform. It includes this estimator here that'll show you when you'll owe, what amount of duty, sometimes just sorry, what amount of fees. Sometimes just putting the money front and center in front of your face will help you wake up and realize we gotta solve this problem. It is a multiplayer game. Your factory might have to release the cargo, the port, the customs broker, Flexport, we all gotta be this together. But I I want you to rest assured we are on a mission alongside with you to get D and D to $0 and this is a big part of our path to getting there. And we've coupled it with new technology for warehouses. Today the number one cause of demurrage at Flexport is inability to get an appointment at a customer's warehouse to deliver the container. And so we've built a really nice module for those warehouses to manage these appointments. Calendar view to help you see labor planning and dock planning. Nice process for creating those appointments, making it easy. Combined, these two pieces of technology are gonna just transform the way that containers are picked up at the port and delivered to warehouses. And again, it's all about reducing D and D and also I think this is gonna have a big impact on on time performance. So just really, really exciting. And they're both live now in the Flexport platform which is a good transition for me to talk about the Flexport platform and aggregate and what we've done. This is maybe the most impactful part of today's launch. For many of you, this screen will look familiar. This is the homepage of the Flexport application. And as I talked to hundreds of customers this year, one thing became pretty obvious that this wasn't pulling its weight. The thing that people kept pushing on was just gotta show me what I need to know. Tell me what to do right now to run a better supply chain. So with that, we took that feedback to heart and we went to work. We totally revamped the process, the the home page, the the main platform for Flexport, still built around a map, but now making it much more actionable and much more action oriented. Right at the top here, you can see we're just calling out. These are your tasks that need to get done now. This is what's overdue and give you ingresses to go take action. On the left side here, you have sort of your command center. It's all of your shipments, your purchase orders, the products that are moving, a list of your containers for that D and D workflow, as well as customs declarations are now a first class citizen here on the platform. So you can see what's happening with your customs entries. Moving over, the map is still got a really nice search interface here and you can search natural language so you can search of course by tracking number but you can also search for purchase orders, product names, other entities in the database and it'll help you zoom in on that shipment, double click to go get more info. The filters on the left side of the map are allowing you to drill in and see priority shipments, shipments you bookmark, those with exceptions, maybe need extra attention, as well as custom grouping. So if you have a product launch, you can tag, all the shipments that contain that product and help you at a glance see what's going on with that big launch. You can also look at shipments by milestone. So get a sense of where everything is in the supply chain and we've grouped over 600 types of exceptions by category and then priority, so low, medium, high. Logistics are world of exceptions. There's always things that are happening. We want to give you a handle on that. Now these are not just pretty graphs, all of these are ingresses. They're ways for you to drill in. So if you take for example on this screen right here, the high priority customs issues and you click that, it's going to take you straight to a list of shipments that have high priority customs issues. From there, the next module that's gonna be really, really upgraded here is our analytics. And we wanna give you out of the box the world's best analytics for an inbound team, for a global logistics team I should say. For on time performance metrics, consolidation opportunities to generate savings, what's going on with your customs duties, etcetera. And then below that you have our tools. So the tariff simulator, carbon calculator, the insights builder I mentioned, as well as lists to your links to your saved reports and other helpful kind of what's going on in the world of logistics. This is just the surface. In the coming hours, days and weeks, we're gonna get you lots of opportunities to go learn more. It's live, you can start playing with it yourself in your account. But, rest assured our vision here is very much we want to build a command center for you to put you in control. Visibility and control are kind of the two key words of what's happening with your global logistics. So next, let's hear from Trek, great Flexport customer, Trek Bicycle on how the Flexport platform is making a difference in managing their logistics. Trek's mission is to get more people on bikes, and Flexport is integral to that goal. Trek uses Flexport for ocean freight, air freight, booking management, and also data integration. Flexport is able to deliver a combination of technology, expertise, and customer obsession, and that customer obsession really comes through in our dedication to solve problems for our customers. On time delivery is a huge focus for us. We operate both in manufacturing and on the finished goods side. And being able to have a partner that can provide quality data so that we can inform our customers when product is gonna become available to them is absolutely critical, and it's really the core expectation of customers today. My team manages the import operations into The U. S, and so daily, we are working within that, chatting with our resources on our Flexport team, getting detailed information about when the container is going to arrive, when it's gonna be discharged, and then, additionally, we use booking management in the control tower. You can see how carriers are performing in terms of allocation. You can see are they abiding to the contractual agreements we have with them, and that's super awesome that you don't have to go to a third party system to figure that out. Growing up, my first job ever at 13 was working in a bike store and coming full circle twenty five years later, being able to partner with Trek, a brand that I know well and respect, has been extremely rewarding for me. Flexport is truly forward thinking. Absolutely thinking about data quality and how we move the industry forward as a whole, and that's really important to truck. It makes us better. It makes our partners better. It makes the industry better, and that's really what we're looking for in partnership. Thank you, Becca, Cassidy, the whole the whole track team. We love working with you. Okay. So back to our earlier theme of saving you money with our platform. Obviously one of the biggest expenses here is just freight itself. Air and ocean freight are costly and and they're a moving target, very volatile prices. So we want Flexport to be the easiest place to get access to the best rates on air and ocean freight. And the spot market is, like I said, always up and down. So today we're launching the Flexport Rate Explorer and this is now live as well. It's right in the platform. You just go up there to that top right and click get a quote. And we've built it to be as easy as booking an airline ticket because, well, if you're buying air freight you are for airline ticket for your cargo. Just give us a few details and we'll give you some options. These are not just like prices, they're good prices. We're trying to be very competitive here on the rates for air and ocean freight. Couple more clicks and you're you're booked. You're checked out. So if you're not working with Flexport for freight yet, you might as well check our rates. Keep your other provider honest. And a pro tip, by the way, if you just say the word Flexport four four or five times to another freight forwarder, your prices will come down. I don't have to do anything. So easiest way easiest way to create value. No more waiting for a quote. Just go ahead and try us out. Okay. Now I mentioned earlier the Insights Builder in the context of customs, but it's worth double clicking here because we've done a lot more here with our reporting platform. We've hooked it up to customs data, of course, but we've also linked up your purchase orders, your, your booking management. If you're booking, like Treck said, with other carriers, you can manage that through Flexport. We'll give you access to this data and feed it into this model. And then for fulfillment customers that are using our e commerce fulfillment services, it's now linked to that as well. So you can ask questions like that, show me my Amazon and TikTok orders, ask all sorts of questions, you'll be amazed at what it can do and it's gonna keep getting smarter almost every day. So this is just an incredibly powerful feature for all of our customers. And then speaking of 3PL services, we have, the omnichannel world, the e commerce world has been maybe the most disrupted because so many companies were using De Minimis, which went away for China in May and then for rest of world August 29. I know some people in this room have been feeling this pain, hitting the bottom line. And a lot of those companies, not only they have these unexpected costs, which are very, very extreme, but also they've many have felt they need to reposition their fulfillment domestically instead of doing it overseas in order to get the customer experience where they want. So Flexport really answered the call. We have 5,000,000 square feet of fulfillment capabilities in The United States. We doubled our volumes through that network this year, which was a Herculean feat. We had to go vertical in many cases. We're still investing here. This was, this was done on behalf of some great customers that have been with us for a long time that really needed support. We did it in many cases in a matter of weeks when competitors said it would take months and we did it while maintaining some really good, KPIs. So 98% on time delivery, 99% on time shipping. That means if we get the order by 2PM, it goes out the same day 99% of the time. And I wanna say, don't just take it from me, let's hear from Everlane, another great Flexport customer that onboarded to our fulfillment services in the midst of all this chaos this year. Everlane is a high quality apparel manufacturer. We rely on Flexport a lot. The average customer doesn't know what it takes to get a t shirt to somebody. You gotta contract with a factory. You gotta get material, ticket it, ship. There's so many steps. Their expectation is they click and it shows up at their house. Moving to Flexport logistics and fulfillment has really helped speed the customer at a price point that is really, really was attractive to us. Flexport's been handling Everlane's freight forwarding and customs brokerage for quite some time. Our supply chain has gotten more complicated, and our business processes have gotten more complicated, and we've needed that partnership to be able to evolve. The greatest challenge is always striving to improve the customer experience, which, you know, frankly, in logistics really comes down to speed and quality. So how do we get faster to our customer? Being an end to end customer with Flexport, really helps out because it removes a lot of silos. The management becomes a lot easier. You're not refereeing sometimes between different partners and handoff of duties and freight. It's fewer touch points. It's more streamlined. You can keep all the data in house, feed it directly to us, and use it. We can produce something in a factory overseas. Flexport can pick it up, bring it here, contract with a last mile carrier, and hand it off to our customer. We use a ton of data from Flexport to make strategic decisions, the support that we get, the ability to solve problems. None of what we do at Everlane would be possible without a partner like Flexport. Big thank you to Jim, Chris, Janine. I think you're all here for the from the Everlane team. Great working with you. Nice sweaters. You guys make amazing clothes. I'm gonna decide to start throwing all my clothes away that aren't made by a Flexport customer. So you guys it's only possible because you all make such nice stuff. And so, yeah, the the seller portal is our technology platform for e commerce merchants that we use for customers that are using us for fulfillment and distribution into retail networks. And we got into this business a few years ago with our acquisition of Shopify Logistics and we've been investing like crazy. The reason we're doing this is twofold. One, we wanna be part of your growth story. Ecom fulfillment is the front and center to your customer experiences. It's where you drive conversion rate and other parts of the customer experience that help you grow. We wanna help you grow your business. And two, I think there's a huge amount that we can do by connecting the international capabilities that Flexport has with our domestic now with our domestic capabilities. So we're gonna talk a little bit about both of those. Obviously, growth is key to business. And we don't I don't wanna be just a cost center. You all are really great, but we wanna also talk to the growth sides of your companies, not just the freight people. And to do that, we've got to be part of that conversation, that strategic conversation that happens when you talk conversion rate and how to and how to help a company grow. And the first problem that we went to tackle this year, one of the first was stockouts. Every year companies lose $1,750,000,000,000 to stock outs, so not having inventory in stock when a customer wanted it. I didn't believe this stat when I saw it. I checked a bunch of places. It's between $1 and $2,000,000,000,000 for sure. It's a mind blowing amount of lost revenue and a hard problem to solve. So we we set about this, the first place to tackle this is in our seller portal. We've allowed now allow you to configure for any given item to accept back orders and presales. So you can capture the sale even when the product's still on the water, even when it's at the port or in a truck on the inbound, you can still capture that sale. So just a really big deal to help solve this problem. Building towards that world of you never being out of stock again as our systems get smarter and smarter here. Another really key part of the customer experience, the end consumer experience is reverse logistics returns. And consumers say that it's just a huge deal of offering free returns and a really nice returns experience, is a key aspect of their buying decisions. So we've made some big investments in our returns offerings. We are, today introducing a new custom workflow engine so that we can match any customer's processes for your returns, as well as introduce some new value added services, things that you might not expect from a technology company like spot removal on on apparel and, steaming, for example. We also are doing refurbishment for electronics companies, dispositioning refurbishment. So our returns product is getting better and better. We think we're gonna have the industry leading, product there to help you with your returns. And then one category that we've been investing particularly for ecom is apparel. We have so many apparel merchants who have been impacted by the loss of de minimis this year that we really went above and beyond. Starting with RFID tracking, now this can benefit any company but we hear a lot from returns, sorry, from apparel customers. We also introduced garment on hanger storage, the ability to buy online and pick up in store. You can now enable this for, for our merchants. And box build. So box build kitting the ability to create really great experiences out of the box for your customers, for your consumers and then smart returns that I was talking about earlier. So those are a set of suite, a set of new tools in the seller portal that are going to help our company, our customers grow faster. And make no mistake, you can expect a lot more from us in the months and years to come. We wanna be the absolute best at helping you grow and helping you go global. And that sort of culminates here our tech release which really starts all the way from the beginning placing orders to your factories all the way through from factory floor to customer's doors as we like to say and into retail stores. We wanna automate that full end to end process, use AI to give you great data about the entire end to end flow of your inventory, helping you make better decisions, helping to lower costs, helping you grow a business in a very chaotic environment. And let's just I wanna be really clear, this is just the beginning as we build towards a vision. We're building together towards a world where logistics is not a barrier to growth and constantly creating problems, but actually a platform that's enabling that growth. And we wanna live in a world, we wanna create a world where logistics can be as easy as flipping a light switch. That it should be as reliable and just as affordable that you could just count on it. Just like the electricity in your office, you don't think about it. It's just there so you can get back to work. And in our context what that will mean is that you can spend all of your time as a business focusing on making the best products, really differentiating on the product quality and on scale and manufacturing and then on connecting with customers and creating a great brand. Everything in between we want to make as reliable as the electric grid. You just flip a light switch and it works and it's affordable and cheap. And that's what we're building towards and over the coming years you'll see this vision come to life in a world that actually can live up to that promise of making global trade easier, of helping you go global, making it so that it's simple and affordable and easy to ship products anywhere on earth, get it into the hands of your customer from any country to any country. It's a big, big project that we've embarked on. It's gonna take us many years and we only get to do it because of you because we have your permission. We don't take it for granted to learn about your problems, to solve them, to get your ideas, figure out how can we solve them. When I started Flexport fifteen years ago my vision was not this grand. We didn't have all these ideas of how we could take things and it's only because of our customers. So, I want to end with just saying a very big thank you to you all. Thank you very much.