Lean targeting no disruption to momentum in Kewill integration

The TMS provider was acquired by fellow logistics software firm Kewill in April, and the companies are progressing on merging products and organizations, Lean executives said in a briefing.    2016 has certainly not been an ordinary year, in any sense of the term, for the software-as-a-service multi-tenant transportation management software provider LeanLogistics.
   The company has seen record growth and new highs in average contract length for its customer engagements. But, of course, the biggest impact came from the sale of the company in April to the holding company of fellow logistics software provider Kewill.
   The two companies are headlong into integration discussions, LeanLogistics executives told American Shipper in a late July briefing.
   Over the next nine months, the two companies will operate, in effect, independently as they work through product and organizational integration.
   “The main goal is to be more successful than some of the recent acquisitions,” LeanLogistics Chief Commercial Officer Chris Timmer said. “Our mantra is we’re supposed to be doing all things to move business forward but not disrupt our current momentum.”
   Timmer describes the merging with Kewill – which has wider geographic strength than LeanLogistics, as well as parcel, in-house trade compliance automation, and forwarding tools that LeanLogistics didn’t – as “not your father’s typical M&A.”
   “We’re using this as an opportunity to rationalize their product within the four walls,” he said. “And to shore up best practices. They’re looking at our price book methodologies, to our customer satisfaction surveys, to our well-regarded implementation strategies.”
   LeanLogistics said the past year has seen its customer base grow deeper in the manufacturing, wholesale, retail, and oil and gas verticals.
   “This has been, by far, the most successful year we’ve had in terms of customer acquisition and length of contract,” said Lisa Kerr, LeanLogistics director of commercial intelligence.
   The average length of contract has grown to 48 months, from 42 months a year ago.
   “The confidence level has gone up,” said Timmer. “We’re incenting that (longer length of contract), but there’s more confidence in SaaS.”
   Timmer noted that the company has overcome the notion that SaaS systems are transactional in nature.
   “In an executional environment, we don’t want to have a transactional relationship,” he said. “We’re the oxygen for their execution. And we’re not a deploy-and-walk-away provider. We continue to enhance after the build piece is over.”
   The company also pointed to growth in its managed transportation services offering and said Kewill is looking at whether that model can be applied to other solutions.
   On the functional side, LeanLogistics Chief Technology Officer Chris Johnson talked about the company’s enhanced capability in ocean freight management, fleet and dedicated, and its planned upgrades in parcel management. He said the acquisition by Kewill will speed up the delivery and depth of the parcel offering. Further enhancements around rail and airfreight management are also planned in upcoming system updates.
   Johnson also noted LeanLogistics’ ongoing focus on improved user interface (which he said will be expanded from a handful of interfaces currently to the entire platform by March 2017) and reporting tools that generate data more quickly.
   This last piece, called data discovery, essentially reduces the lag between system queries and report generation. Even if that lag is only 10 to 20 seconds, that severely hampers a user’s ability to hone in on the valuable information it is seeking. Johnson said data discovery makes those progressive iterations of reporting quicker and more useful.
   He also pointed to more integration of real-time telematics and visibility from dedicated and contract carriers (including ocean carriers). He mentioned existing integrations with OmniTRAX, PeopleNet and XRS, but also newer providers like MacroPoint, which connects driver position in real-time through GPS and sends that data to the TMS.
   “We’ve been getting similar or analogous updates through traditional means,” Johnson said. “Historically that information was provided to us by the carrier supplying arrival, ETA, or departure through our web interface. The other way would be through traditional EDI integrations.”
   The interface with Macropoint provides LeanTMS users with updates every five to 10 minutes, instead of a few points along the journey of a load. The average delay in data is six hours, even if the truck has arrived on time. A driver, for instance, might have waited to enter the arrival information even if he arrived on time.
   “EDI and web portals have been imperfect systems,” Johnson said.
   He added LeanLogistics is open to integrating with other third party visibility providers like FourKites or 10-4 Systems.
   Overall, LeanLogistics focus remains on providing a single platform for customers across modes, something the executives said would be enhanced by the Kewill acquisition.
   “The question is, how do we achieve support of the entire customer base through a common platform or the solutions sets available,” Timmer said. “There are two dimensions to this: one is the software application and the other is the ecosystem.”