Icreon originally consulted the founding management team of UX Logistics, a subsidiary of XPO, to help them stimulate new client growth. Together we arrived at a dire conclusion: in order to differentiate in what was soon to be a competitive logistics market, it was time to build their own IP.
XPO, through hands-on executive leadership, had grown into a highly versatile, distributed company. By pivoting into a wide array of services, the company had expanded across North America rapidly, creating a large need for strong technology systems that speak together to help thousands of employees, drivers and technicians get jobs done quickly and efficiently.
One major hurdle that XPO was facing was the dependency on third-party platforms for key components in the supply chain - warehousing, same day delivery and national assembly. The question then became – what if XPO owned the entire tech stack of the supply chain instead? Icreon and XPO did a deep dive analysis into what a product like that would look like, and what would be required to deliver on it.
Together, we devised a drastic solution: let’s re-think all fulfilment processes from the grounds up. We spent 15 weeks speaking with every core member of the supply chain team – going on trips with contract carriers, spending time in multiple warehouse, talking to sales and marketing teams, and even going through entire order processing – and identified the major breaks and siloes created within the business.
The output was a vision and blueprint for end-to-end integrated platform that would modularize their business, and allow XPO to act as a logistics-as-a-service company. Instead of going the impossible route of creating a one-size-fits-all solution for XPO’s customers, we ideated a ‘universal connector’ software that can be loosely coupled into any business processes for any client. Essentially, the platform would act as a flexible business playbook – anytime they wanted to support a new customer, the platform would seamlessly fit in the business processes at hand.