Mercado, a SaaS supply chain platform helping importers to connect with their global trading partners, has announced the selection of Chain.io as their preferred integration partner. The addition of Chain.io's leading integration technology to the platform will enable customers to extract data from their existing systems, manage their supply chain orchestration, and exchange data between all parties through the Mercado web portal.

Our guest this week is Mark Ketcham. Mark is a sales and marketing professional with nearly 20 years of executive management experience, growing multinational companies in the engineering, software and technology industries.

Presently the Vice President of the Americas for global freight-forwarding software supplier, Riege Software International, Mark is spearheading the company’s expansion to North America and directing all sales, operations and new business development for the entire territory.

Welcome to Episode 4 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io. 

Our guest this week is John O’Halloran, President of the Fine Arts and Security Group at Masterpiece International Ltd. John brings an interesting twist to the supply chain industry through his experiences moving multimillion dollar, and sometimes priceless fine art.

Accessibility is one of our core principles at Chain.io.

We define accessibility as...

We aim to make our products accessible to our clients with a minimum level of effort. Where we have a choice between a big word and a small one, we use the small one. If we can spend extra time reducing a process from two steps to one, we will. If a one-page contract will suffice, we will deliver it. Our products and services solve real problems for our clients, and they shine on their own. We do not need to use jargon and complexity to make them seem more impressive. 

One of the areas where we've identified an opportunity to be more accessible is with our web site. We're excited to start off 2019 with a fresh and more accessible site for our prospective clients and partners.

This is part 2 in a three part series covering the hot topics in logistics tech for 2018 and a preview of 2019.  Check out part one and part two.

This is part 2 in a three part series covering the hot topics in logistics tech for 2018 and a preview of 2019.  Check out part one here.

(Thanks to Sarah from Let’s Talk Supply Chain for prompting this post.)

In the supply chain industry, we love numbers. We’re completely enamored with them. Statistics, metrics, KPIs… we can’t get enough. We fill our conference slides with data, graphs, and percentage improvements.

When it comes to the human side of our business, we’re a lot less likely to talk. It’s a rare conference that has any time set aside to talk about employee engagement. Rarer still are C-Level executives talking on stages about stress management or the emotional toll of leadership. We don’t acknowledge that burnout is a real thing at all levels of this business.

Welcome to Episode 3 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.

Our guest this week is Bryan Eichenberg of FreightSnap. FreightSnap is a really interesting company that has developed a modern cost effective device for measuring freight, all the way from individual cartons to full sized pallets and irregular shaped products. These devices and apps are all cloud connected and they make freight operations way more efficient with a really fast ROI. As part of the Chain.io network, we can connect FreightSnap's devices directly to your TMS or ERP for a seamless dimensioning experience. One of the things that we found really interesting in this conversation is how Bryan and his family found themselves in the logistics business. So many of us come up directly through operations and it's great to have a fresh outside perspective on the industry.

2018 was a banner year for logistics technology. Whether we were wrangling with the buzz around blockchain, figuring out how we're going to leverage the power of AI, or marveling at the influx of money into tech, everyone in the industry could feel the increased momentum.

I personally haven't seen this much excitement since the first wave of web portals launched almost two decades ago. Like the heady times of the dot-com boom, there are a lo

t of great things being built, and they're surrounded by a lot of meaningless noise.

Here's a list of some of the biggest trends and technologies in the space with some highly subjective commentary on each one.