Enterprise logistics and freight brokerage firm Transportation Insight Holding Co. said Tuesday morning that it named Ken Beyer, a top executive at distribution giant Ingram Micro Inc., to the newly created CEO position, effective immediately.
Beyer will oversee Transportation Insight, LLC (TI), an enterprise logistics firm based in Hickory, North Carolina, and Nolan Transportation Group, LLC (NTG), an Atlanta-based freight broker. The two TI Holding Co. units have combined annual revenue of about $3.2 billion.
Beyer spent seven years at Irvine, California-based Ingram Micro, a $50 billion company and the world’s largest distributor of IT products, handling one out of every three cellphones in the U.S. market. His last position there was executive vice president and president of commerce and lifecycle services, responsible for more than 15,000 employees in 39 countries.
Before that, Beyer was co-founder and CEO of CloudBlue Technologies, a provider of electronics reverse logistics services that was eventually acquired by Ingram Micro.
There will be no change in top management at the units now under Beyer’s supervision. Rennie Faulkner will remain CEO of TI, while Geoff Kelley remains president of NTG.
In a statement announcing Beyer’s appointment, Paul Thompson, TI’s founder and chairman of the holding company, said Beyer “understands how customers want to leverage technology to support growth and scale, and how to build e-commerce systems that are friendly to traditional retailers and small brands.”
Beyer, along with Prologis Inc. (NYSE:PLD) COO Gary Anderson, keynoted FreightWaves’ The Future of Real Estate Logistics virtual summit late last month. During the session, Beyer said the logistics warehouse of the future will be highly automated, purpose-built for e-commerce, and ready for tenants, largely small to midsize businesses, to “plug in” and go live. Few warehouses today are dedicated to the unique needs of online fulfillment and distribution, despite the phenomenal spike in e-commerce demand.
Warehouse developers, Beyer said at the time, would be well served to follow the data-center design model where businesses outsource their information needs to third parties, which store their data in the cloud for easy, secure access.
The TI holding company is owned by Gryphon Investors, a mid-market private equity firm focused on companies with enterprise values of between $100 million and $500 million. Gryphon acquired a controlling stake in TI in September 2018. Later that year, Gryphon and TI acquired a controlling stake in Nolan.
Separately, Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services, the unit that Beyer had led, said Tuesday it will hire more than 4,000 seasonal and regular employees before the end of 2020. The new roles will support the unit’s e-commerce fulfillment operations, retail replenishment activities, and online returns services, it said in a statement.
(This story was updated to include the additional hiring by the Ingram Micro unit).
