March 4, 2025 • 20 mins
Ever wondered how global logistics companies keep track of millions of postal codes, city divisions, and ports worldwide? In this episode of Everything is Logistics, we sit down with Simon Vandemoortele, CEO of GeoPostCodes, to discuss how structured, AI-powered location data is revolutionizing freight, sustainability tracking, and supply chain efficiency.
🔹 How GeoPostCodes maintains the most comprehensive location data set in the world
🔹 Why U.S. companies struggle with international postal systems
🔹 The massive role location data plays in carbon emissions tracking
🔹 How DB Schenker, MSC, and other global giants use GeoPostCodes for freight planning
LINKS:
Feedback? Ideas for a future episode? Shoot us a text here to let us know.
-----------------------------------------
THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!
Are you experienced in freight sales or already an independent freight agent? Listen to our Freight Agent Trenches interview series powered by SPI Logistics to hear from the company's agents on how they took the leap and found a home with SPI freight agent program.
CloneOps AI-powered phone operations for inbound and outbound calls with speed, scale, and efficiency. Our virtual agents handle high-volume interactions, automate workflows, and deliver real-time insights, freeing your team to focus on growth. Designed for logistics, retail, and beyond—seamless communication, smarter conversations, faster resolutions.
CargoRex – Your Logistics Hub. Explore, discover, and evolve with the all-in-one platform connecting you to the top logistics tools, services, and industry voices. Whether you're a leader, researcher, or creator, CargoRex helps you stay ahead. Explore Now
Digital Dispatch maximizes your #1 sales tool with a website that establishes trust and builds rock-solid relationships with your leads and customers. Check out our website services her...
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Blythe Brumleve (00:00):
Blythe, welcome into another episode of
(00:06):
everything is logistics, apodcast for the thinkers in
freight. I'm your host, BlytheMilligan, and we are proudly
sponsored by SPI logistics. Andon this episode, we have another
fantastic conversation for youtoday at manifest, the future of
supply chain and logistics. Wehave GEOPostCodes, which is new
to me. It's obviously not new,because they're a global
company. But Simon, welcome intothe show. Please tell tell the
(00:30):
audience a little bit aboutyourself and the company.
Simon Vandeemortele (00:33):
Thank you, Blythe, great to be here. So
GEOPostCodes is a location dataprovider. We've been we just
celebrated our 15th anniversarylast year, and we really, you
want me to start by myself or,yeah, please. How did you get
into the this business? Yeah, soI'm an engineer by training. So
I got into business. I startedmy career in software
(00:55):
engineering, and then I moved toIT consulting with Accenture,
but I always wanted to basicallygrow a tech company. And so I
did a couple of years at a CTOat a Belgian tech company in big
data analytics. And then it wastime for me to basically find my
own tech company. And I waslooking for something that
already existed, but I hadpotential to grow, and I was
(01:16):
GEOPostCodes, right? And so Istarted. I met the founder of
GEOPostCodes code in 2019 andthen we immediately hit it off.
I mean, it was very clear thathe was kind of the genius
creator, and I was more like thescale guy and so and I basically
bought the company from him in2020 middle of COVID. Oh, wow.
And yeah, that was interesting.
Try to do, try to do theleverage buyout in the middle of
(01:37):
a global financial crisis. It'salways a fun moment to do that,
challenging. But what wasinteresting is, I think we're
not the only one in logistics.
We were doing really well inCOVID. Our sales were going
really well because everybodywas focusing a lot of companies
actually got a lot done duringCOVID, and we were one of those,
right? And so, yeah, so I'vebeen the CEO for five years now.
(01:59):
Been growing quite fast. We'relucky to have a very broad
customer base, mostly fortune,500 companies, 60% in the US,
and a lot of them have been withus for a decade. So it's really
cool,
Blythe Brumleve (02:14):
and from like a high level perspective, what
does GEOPostCodes provide?
Unknown (02:18):
So GEOPostCodes, we really bring location data to
most of your use cases. And I'lltry to summarize the product.
You have to imagine that we haveevery single country on the
planet. We have every singleadministrative division, and
that's actually quitecomplicated. I mean, us doesn't
always realize that, but theworld is extremely diverse. We
(02:39):
have every single city, everysingle neighborhood for 80
countries. We have the streets,and we have all of that in one
centralized, normalized format,everything geo located,
everything translated, and wehave the shapes of everything.
So we have the shapes of everypostal code, every
administrative division on theplanet. So that sounds It's a
mouthful. It's a simple product,innocent, but it's extremely
(03:00):
powerful, and it takes a lot ofdata to produce that and keep it
up to date, right? To give youan idea, we we source about 1500
data sources, which means wehave about 1500 data pipelines
that are running at any point intime, and we produce about three
updates per week. And so that'sreally what our customers are
getting with us, right? They'regetting kind of a map of the
world, and it fits on a lot ofuse cases. And we can go into
(03:21):
use cases if you want. So youwant. And so that's basically
what we do. So we're very much ageospatial company and a data
company, so people, most of our,you know, our team, is really
like GIS nerds, spending theirtime in front of a map all day
long, and using, like AI. Itwas, it was called machine
learning. Before it was calledAI, we've been using machine
learning for decades tobasically build the data sets
(03:43):
and improve the quality now,
Blythe Brumleve (03:45):
very like fifth grade level question, what is,
why not GPS? Or what is thedifference, maybe, between
GEOPostCodes and like a GPSlocation or question,
Unknown (03:57):
longitude? Yeah, location intelligence a very
broad is a very broad market.
There's players like that, likehere, who's here, you know? And
there's many different usecases, right? We can talk, I
mean, logistically. Talk a lotabout tracking and GPS. So it's
very much about knowing, Okay,where is my asset, right? Where
is my container? Where is mytrack? Very important. We're not
actually in that space. We're inthe space where, where is where?
(04:18):
Meaning, look at my city. I comefrom Brussels. So where is
Brussels? Oh, it's in Belgium.
Where? Exactly, what region? Howis it spelled? Brussels is the
English name. Actually, it alsohas a French name. My country
has two languages, so it has aDutch name as well. So are you
going to recognize the city nameif I say Bruxelles or Brussel?
(04:41):
So being able to have a clearmap of the world before you
start tracking GPS coordinates,you get lat longitude, okay, you
know, but usually, a lot of ourcustomers, for example, they use
us for geofencing. They have thelatitude and longitude of their
truck, but they'd like to knowwhat postal area is it, what
city is it in? And thattranslation requires. Is an
actual correct map of the world.
And it sounds simple, if you doit just for us, because you live
(05:03):
in one of the countries whereyou have, like, the highest data
quality on the planet. Andthere's a couple of, it's about
10 to 15 countries, you know,with the old name, like Canada
or Australia or UK. What aboutthe 235 other countries on the
planet where you don't havethat, where you if you were
operating in Baltimore, youwould like to know, okay, my
truck and what region is it andwhat province is it? So that's
(05:24):
why you need us to translate. Wedo have latitude and longitude,
but our data is fixed, right?
It's, it's a latitude andlongitude of Las Vegas. It's the
shape of Las Vegas. It's thepostal code of Las Vegas. So
that's what we provide. And youneed both to actually make sense
of the data. And so
Blythe Brumleve (05:43):
are you sourcing it? You mentioned, you
know, 1000s of different datasources that you're working
with. What about some of theother you know, I read in one of
your press releases that there'schallenging countries such as
China, Brazil, Russia and theUnited Kingdom. What makes these
countries challenging to findthat data source?
Unknown (05:59):
Yep, so just maybe to start with the data sources, you
have to imagine that everypostal operator on the planet is
one of the data source. DataSources, every National
Geographic Institute, a lot ofthe landmark institutes. So we
really go very deep looking forsources. A lot of them are
public, but need a lot of workto be usable. And we double
(06:19):
check even with text of law,right? When Australia merged 10
administrative divisions intoone, this is something that's
always happening somewhere onthe planet. Yeah, we get our
sources tell us, Oh, something'schanged, and then we double
check. We actually go to thetext of law. So you just make
sure that we understand thischange well, because once we
deploy to our customers, that'sone of the values we bring,
right? Really, like thechecking, the double checking.
(06:41):
So to your point, yes, a lot ofour customers have trouble
finding right data for becausethey find data for easy
countries like the US, and thenthey go to more complex
countries. Okay, we can't findgood sources of data. So we
really are constantly we have ateam that's constantly doing
data watch. It's constantlymonitoring new sources, all of
the public sources, a lot ofinferred sources. So yeah, we've
(07:01):
constantly been renewing thisfor 15 years. So we also have
one thing that people don't knowis public data also disappears,
meaning the government might bepublishing it, and then one day
out of the blue, six monthslater, the data is gone. And so
it's public, but it's notavailable anymore. We have 15
years of built up data, so italso allows us to really
(07:22):
triangulate some missing pointsof the data and really enrich
it. Typically, you need fivedata sources for a country, if
you have a, again, an easycountry that us, you maybe would
one or two. You might be mighthave enough. But even a country
like Portugal, we were having tomatch a good data source for
demographic, for, I'm sorry, forurban and another one for rural
areas, and we need to mix bothto get right, good quality data,
Blythe Brumleve (07:44):
because a lot of especially in South America,
you know, just just roadconstruction in general, is
rapidly evolving. Yes, so
Unknown (07:51):
that's a good point. So the data changes faster than
people think. A lot of countrieshave also micro postal code
system, like Canada, UK,Netherlands, Israel, yeah. So
they have a postal code that'sthe size of a street or street
corner. So that has twoconsequences. First of all,
there's not 1000s of them,there's millions of them, and
they change not every couple ofmonths, but every couple of
(08:12):
weeks. Wow, right? So there,your update rate is much faster.
Blythe Brumleve (08:15):
So what are some of the use cases for a lot
of your customers? Once they buythis data set, it's consistently
updated. They just plug it into,maybe an API connection, into
their tech stack. That's a
Unknown (08:26):
good question. So they plug it in, into the tech stack.
So one of the things we do is webring the expertise with the
data, right? So you work withus, you will get top experts
that will deploy that with you,because it's not always easy,
and we're specialists in thoseuse cases. So we've done them
multiple times. Some of ourcustomers, it's the first time
they do it. So that assistanceis important, because we kind of
know the roadblocks, and youknow the how you set us up for
(08:47):
success. Then you look at usecases, we have, I would say, a
bit, three families ofcustomers. We have data
partnerships, like people, likelocate our partners with us. We
provide the data they use insome of the API calls. We have
product builders, people thatbuild products on top of our
data, and then we have peoplethat use it internally, right?
So those all, it all fits intothe infrastructure. And so use
(09:11):
case, one product use case wouldbe carbon care. So carbon care
pin joins us as a customer lastyear, and they do, as you can
imagine, a carbon computation,which is a big topic in
logistics. And yeah, for them todo that accurately, they
actually need to measure thedistances correctly. And there's
some countries where theycouldn't source the data right.
So I think we work with them onTurkey, maybe China, and so
(09:34):
being sure, like, what are this?
Now, it's getting a bittechnical, but the lat long of
the center of the postal code.
That's typically how you workwith carbon emissions. You just
want an approximate distance, asthe corona flies. For many use
cases, you just want to seewhat's the distance between that
postal area and that postalarea. So that's one use case,
another use case. One of our bigcustomers is dB Shanker was a
(09:57):
big sponsor last year, and. Do acouple of things with us. They
do visualization. So whenthey're showing their delivery
areas to their own teams andtheir customers, actually
putting that on a map, andhaving all the postal areas
clearly marked, or all theadministrative divisions clearly
marked, makes it much easier tocommunicate to their customers.
They also do postal codevalidation, and I mean, we have
(10:18):
some testimonials on ourwebsite. This is 300 times
faster doing it with us thanbasically having a clutch of
solutions that are tapedtogether. And that's not
audited, because our data isconstantly audited, constantly
verified, so they get muchbetter quality than if they do
this in house. So
Blythe Brumleve (10:33):
it's not as simple as just, you know, buying
a data set and integrating intoyour, you know, software
provider, and then you can kindof wipe your hands,
Unknown (10:40):
no, no. You typically have to understand what you're
doing. And use cases are, thereare some hidden complexities in
use cases that our customersalways think about. For example,
is we work with MSC. MS is alsoone of our large customers. They
were designing their terminalinterfaces to ship containers
from point A to point B, butit's worldwide, right? And so
say they're quite advanced,because in the terminal they
(11:02):
have the two languages. Theywill say, OK, I will have the
language. I will have theEnglish version of the
addresses, but I will also havethe local version. Maybe it's in
Greek. Maybe the terminaloperator is in Greece, and
they're speaking Greek to thecustomer, and you have the Greek
alphabet there, but the personwho's going to receive the order
also needs to be able to readthey might not read Greek
alphabet, so they might want theEnglish version next to it.
(11:23):
That's one of the things we do.
We do the translation I gaveyou. The example of my city,
Brussels. You will get Brusselsin the local language and in
English for internalizationpurposes. So it's one of the
things we provide and tellingour customers up front. Have you
thought about the languageissue? How are you looking at
this? Are you going to manageyour interfaces? Your Chinese
colleagues might not, might wantto see the address in Chinese.
So how are you going to do this?
(11:45):
We have all the data to do it,but you need to provide in your
solution. Need to build it intoit.
Blythe Brumleve (11:50):
So you had mentioned earlier that 60% of
your customers are US based. I'mjust curious if there's any sort
of location information that'sunique to the United States
versus the rest of the world?
Yes, there is.
Unknown (12:02):
So one of the things USPS does is, when a city, when
a postal code has several citiesor several localities, they
designate a primary one. Justokay, there's many localities
that switches postal code, butwe USPS formally decide this is
the core one. That's a conceptthat does not exist in the rest
(12:23):
of the world. And we know thisbecause when we worked on, I
think again, so Expeditors isone of our customers, and
expediters has worked with us onthat. They said, oh, we need
this for the rest of the world.
And we said, yeah, it doesn'texist. So yeah, but we need it
anyway. And this is a goodexample of the complexities,
because our TMS system requiresit. The field is mandatory. It
was in one box. Okay, this is agood example of how we
(12:45):
collaborate with customers.
Okay, we will find a solutionfor you. We have the technology
and the knowledge to run theheuristics worldwide to
basically find a primary cityworldwide. It's not a formal
concept, but we can useheuristics to approximate the
primary city for every postalcode. And that's something we
developed, I think, five yearsago with them, and it's now part
(13:06):
of our standard product. So it'sso it's funny that we have
primary cities, which is a USconcept exported to the rest of
the world, because it's a usefulconcept. Wow,
Blythe Brumleve (13:15):
that's it. So maybe we are doing a couple
things, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Unknown (13:18):
Again. I mean, us has fantastic data. So it's a world
run country.
Blythe Brumleve (13:23):
So what are some other maybe important
things that you think areimportant to mention that we
haven't already talked aboutwith GEOPostCodes?
Unknown (13:31):
I think two things, maybe is first to understand.
Well, three things, let's playthis one. Couple of things why
you should consider working withus. First, location data, as I
described it, just having acorrect understanding of the
world. It's an extremely complexproblems, and when I'm in the
logistics sector, I usuallydon't need to explain that,
because people know they feelthe pain, but just don't do it
(13:53):
yourself. Right? If you're doinga couple of countries, that's
fine, but as soon as you go morethan 15 countries, you probably
want to work with a player likeus, right? You don't want to do
all this in houses. It's toocomplicated. It's one thing. The
other thing would be, we reallyspecialize in logistics, in the
sense that we have been buildingfor over five years, actually
(14:13):
six years now, a logisticspecific data set. So we have a
data set that is more plug andplay, as you say, because it
solves all the things. I don'twant to go too much in detail,
because you can get technical.
It'll give you an idea. Otherfreight, ocean freight, or
railroad will know unload codes,which is a public data set. It's
very much used in freight work.
(14:33):
But actually, unfortunately, thepublic source is actually not a
very high quality. So we haveactually an enhanced version
where all the problems aresolved. It also connects to the
postal code so you want to dointermodal transport, so fixed,
so the whole package of datasets that you need to do,
correct addressing, correctshipping, whether it's for what
(14:54):
you call it terrorist, for yourwhether you want to do your
rate. Cards, or you want to justcorrectly do intermodal, or do
you want to do carboncompensation? We have all of
that basically out of the boxand ready to integrate with your
system, and we have a teamthat's done it many times.
Blythe Brumleve (15:11):
Wow. So what is the scope of your team? It
sounds like it's massive. Oh,no,
Unknown (15:14):
we just, I think this year we're hiring recruiting a
lot right now, I guess we mustbe around 35 now. 35 people?
Blythe Brumleve (15:21):
Yeah, that's all of them are managing all of
this information, yeah.
Unknown (15:25):
So we have, but a big part of our team is we have a
very small commercial team.
Actually, most of our team isactually, like I said, products
and customer facing, because wehave a lot of big customers, and
we work on complex cases. Well,that's amazing.
Blythe Brumleve (15:41):
So you are also last question, or last couple
questions I have here making abig announcement at manifest. I
believe maybe the press releasedropped today. Can you share
some of that?
Unknown (15:50):
Yeah, so it is about the logistic Data Suite. One
element we added this year isport terminals. So to complement
your no code, and again, I'msorry, I'm going technical
there. It's unlo codes are onlythat granular because they tell
you, for example, Brussels is agood example as well. So it has
one unlo codes for the ports,the railroads, the truck and
(16:10):
terminal and airports, which isa bit laughable for people
living in Brussels, becausethose are completely unrelated
places have nothing to do witheach other, but just one unlock
codes. So it shows that youactually do need to go one level
more granular. And when it comesto ports, we've actually
released, again, an enhanceddata set that gives you much
more structured, normalizedinformation about the
(16:32):
capabilities of each port, whichis important because you, when
you're planning, basicallyyou're shipping. You want to
know what terminal has thecapabilities I need. Is this a
cold terminal? Is this a deepterminal? Can I shift that kind
of shift towards, you know, whatkind of k is this? And so we
have all that information,again, normalized, just to take
that work away from people likeMSC or freight forwarders that
need that data anyway. Andotherwise, I have in house teams
(16:54):
trying to build that data andclean it themselves. It's just
IT skills much better if you doit with us. Absolutely.
Blythe Brumleve (16:59):
It sounds like a massive problem that they
would have to undertake. And sowhy not just go to the other
Unknown (17:03):
sexy problem? By the way, it's a boring problem, but
we have people working on thatevery day, so so you don't, so
our customers don't have to. But
Blythe Brumleve (17:09):
that's what I love about this industry's
supply chain, global logistics,is that it's, it's one of those
things. Every time you peel backa layer on the onion, there's so
many more layers exactly thatare there to discover. And this
was a, this was a conversationthat was something that I had no
idea about, and now I have,hopefully the audience will find
it, you know, as valuable aswell. Because this sounds like
something that you know, everytech provider in United States,
(17:31):
logistics companies, you know,needs and maybe global as well.
Unknown (17:34):
Yeah, everybody's going abroad, probably should think
about this.
Blythe Brumleve (17:37):
Yes, absolutely. Well, where can
folks get in touch with you? Getin touch with GEOPostCodes.
Unknown (17:41):
Yeah, just our website is GEOPostCodes.com we're easy
to find. You can reach out, youknow, either to me, I don't know
if there's any details gonna beshared, or directly to our
teams, and we'd be very happy tohelp you and just also meet you
and hear, you know, if you don'twant to work with us today, it's
fine that maybe couple of yearsdown the road, it's great to
meet people in logisticsindustry. Thank you so much.
(18:04):
Blythe,
Blythe Brumleve (18:08):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of
everything is logistics, apodcast for the thinkers in
freight, telling the storiesbehind how your favorite stuff
and people get from point A toB. Subscribe to the show. Sign
up for our newsletter and followour socials over at everything
is logistics.com and in additionto the podcast, I also wanted to
let you all know about anothercompany I operate, and that's
(18:29):
digital dispatch, where we helpyou build a better website. Now,
a lot of the times, we hand thistask of building a new website
or refreshing a current one offto a co worker's child, a
neighbor down the street or astranger around the world, where
you probably spend more timeexplaining the freight industry
than it takes to actually buildthe dang website. Well, that
(18:49):
doesn't happen at Digitaldispatch. We've been building
online since 2009 but we're alsoearly adopters of AI automation
and other website tactics thathelp your company to be a
central place to pull in all ofyour social media posts, recruit
new employees and give potentialcustomers a glimpse into how you
operate your business. Our newwebsite builds start as low as
(19:11):
$1,500 along with ongoingwebsite management, maintenance
and updates starting at $90 amonth, plus some bonus freight,
marketing and sales contentsimilar to what you hear on the
podcast. You can watch a quickexplainer video over on digital
dispatch.io, just check out thepricing page once you arrive,
and you can see how we can buildyour digital ecosystem on a
(19:34):
strong foundation. Until then, Ihope you enjoyed this episode.
I'll see you all real soon andgo Jags you.
Blythe, welcome into another episode of
(00:06):
everything is logistics, apodcast for the thinkers in
freight. I'm your host, BlytheMilligan, and we are proudly
sponsored by SPI logistics. Andon this episode, we have another
fantastic conversation for youtoday at manifest, the future of
supply chain and logistics. Wehave GEOPostCodes, which is new
to me. It's obviously not new,because they're a global
company. But Simon, welcome intothe show. Please tell tell the
(00:30):
audience a little bit aboutyourself and the company.
Simon Vandeemortele (00:33):
Thank you, Blythe, great to be here. So
GEOPostCodes is a location dataprovider. We've been we just
celebrated our 15th anniversarylast year, and we really, you
want me to start by myself or,yeah, please. How did you get
into the this business? Yeah, soI'm an engineer by training. So
I got into business. I startedmy career in software
(00:55):
engineering, and then I moved toIT consulting with Accenture,
but I always wanted to basicallygrow a tech company. And so I
did a couple of years at a CTOat a Belgian tech company in big
data analytics. And then it wastime for me to basically find my
own tech company. And I waslooking for something that
already existed, but I hadpotential to grow, and I was
(01:16):
GEOPostCodes, right? And so Istarted. I met the founder of
GEOPostCodes code in 2019 andthen we immediately hit it off.
I mean, it was very clear thathe was kind of the genius
creator, and I was more like thescale guy and so and I basically
bought the company from him in2020 middle of COVID. Oh, wow.
And yeah, that was interesting.
Try to do, try to do theleverage buyout in the middle of
(01:37):
a global financial crisis. It'salways a fun moment to do that,
challenging. But what wasinteresting is, I think we're
not the only one in logistics.
We were doing really well inCOVID. Our sales were going
really well because everybodywas focusing a lot of companies
actually got a lot done duringCOVID, and we were one of those,
right? And so, yeah, so I'vebeen the CEO for five years now.
(01:59):
Been growing quite fast. We'relucky to have a very broad
customer base, mostly fortune,500 companies, 60% in the US,
and a lot of them have been withus for a decade. So it's really
cool,
Blythe Brumleve (02:14):
and from like a high level perspective, what
does GEOPostCodes provide?
Unknown (02:18):
So GEOPostCodes, we really bring location data to
most of your use cases. And I'lltry to summarize the product.
You have to imagine that we haveevery single country on the
planet. We have every singleadministrative division, and
that's actually quitecomplicated. I mean, us doesn't
always realize that, but theworld is extremely diverse. We
(02:39):
have every single city, everysingle neighborhood for 80
countries. We have the streets,and we have all of that in one
centralized, normalized format,everything geo located,
everything translated, and wehave the shapes of everything.
So we have the shapes of everypostal code, every
administrative division on theplanet. So that sounds It's a
mouthful. It's a simple product,innocent, but it's extremely
(03:00):
powerful, and it takes a lot ofdata to produce that and keep it
up to date, right? To give youan idea, we we source about 1500
data sources, which means wehave about 1500 data pipelines
that are running at any point intime, and we produce about three
updates per week. And so that'sreally what our customers are
getting with us, right? They'regetting kind of a map of the
world, and it fits on a lot ofuse cases. And we can go into
(03:21):
use cases if you want. So youwant. And so that's basically
what we do. So we're very much ageospatial company and a data
company, so people, most of our,you know, our team, is really
like GIS nerds, spending theirtime in front of a map all day
long, and using, like AI. Itwas, it was called machine
learning. Before it was calledAI, we've been using machine
learning for decades tobasically build the data sets
(03:43):
and improve the quality now,
Blythe Brumleve (03:45):
very like fifth grade level question, what is,
why not GPS? Or what is thedifference, maybe, between
GEOPostCodes and like a GPSlocation or question,
Unknown (03:57):
longitude? Yeah, location intelligence a very
broad is a very broad market.
There's players like that, likehere, who's here, you know? And
there's many different usecases, right? We can talk, I
mean, logistically. Talk a lotabout tracking and GPS. So it's
very much about knowing, Okay,where is my asset, right? Where
is my container? Where is mytrack? Very important. We're not
actually in that space. We're inthe space where, where is where?
(04:18):
Meaning, look at my city. I comefrom Brussels. So where is
Brussels? Oh, it's in Belgium.
Where? Exactly, what region? Howis it spelled? Brussels is the
English name. Actually, it alsohas a French name. My country
has two languages, so it has aDutch name as well. So are you
going to recognize the city nameif I say Bruxelles or Brussel?
(04:41):
So being able to have a clearmap of the world before you
start tracking GPS coordinates,you get lat longitude, okay, you
know, but usually, a lot of ourcustomers, for example, they use
us for geofencing. They have thelatitude and longitude of their
truck, but they'd like to knowwhat postal area is it, what
city is it in? And thattranslation requires. Is an
actual correct map of the world.
And it sounds simple, if you doit just for us, because you live
(05:03):
in one of the countries whereyou have, like, the highest data
quality on the planet. Andthere's a couple of, it's about
10 to 15 countries, you know,with the old name, like Canada
or Australia or UK. What aboutthe 235 other countries on the
planet where you don't havethat, where you if you were
operating in Baltimore, youwould like to know, okay, my
truck and what region is it andwhat province is it? So that's
(05:24):
why you need us to translate. Wedo have latitude and longitude,
but our data is fixed, right?
It's, it's a latitude andlongitude of Las Vegas. It's the
shape of Las Vegas. It's thepostal code of Las Vegas. So
that's what we provide. And youneed both to actually make sense
of the data. And so
Blythe Brumleve (05:43):
are you sourcing it? You mentioned, you
know, 1000s of different datasources that you're working
with. What about some of theother you know, I read in one of
your press releases that there'schallenging countries such as
China, Brazil, Russia and theUnited Kingdom. What makes these
countries challenging to findthat data source?
Unknown (05:59):
Yep, so just maybe to start with the data sources, you
have to imagine that everypostal operator on the planet is
one of the data source. DataSources, every National
Geographic Institute, a lot ofthe landmark institutes. So we
really go very deep looking forsources. A lot of them are
public, but need a lot of workto be usable. And we double
(06:19):
check even with text of law,right? When Australia merged 10
administrative divisions intoone, this is something that's
always happening somewhere onthe planet. Yeah, we get our
sources tell us, Oh, something'schanged, and then we double
check. We actually go to thetext of law. So you just make
sure that we understand thischange well, because once we
deploy to our customers, that'sone of the values we bring,
right? Really, like thechecking, the double checking.
(06:41):
So to your point, yes, a lot ofour customers have trouble
finding right data for becausethey find data for easy
countries like the US, and thenthey go to more complex
countries. Okay, we can't findgood sources of data. So we
really are constantly we have ateam that's constantly doing
data watch. It's constantlymonitoring new sources, all of
the public sources, a lot ofinferred sources. So yeah, we've
(07:01):
constantly been renewing thisfor 15 years. So we also have
one thing that people don't knowis public data also disappears,
meaning the government might bepublishing it, and then one day
out of the blue, six monthslater, the data is gone. And so
it's public, but it's notavailable anymore. We have 15
years of built up data, so italso allows us to really
(07:22):
triangulate some missing pointsof the data and really enrich
it. Typically, you need fivedata sources for a country, if
you have a, again, an easycountry that us, you maybe would
one or two. You might be mighthave enough. But even a country
like Portugal, we were having tomatch a good data source for
demographic, for, I'm sorry, forurban and another one for rural
areas, and we need to mix bothto get right, good quality data,
Blythe Brumleve (07:44):
because a lot of especially in South America,
you know, just just roadconstruction in general, is
rapidly evolving. Yes, so
Unknown (07:51):
that's a good point. So the data changes faster than
people think. A lot of countrieshave also micro postal code
system, like Canada, UK,Netherlands, Israel, yeah. So
they have a postal code that'sthe size of a street or street
corner. So that has twoconsequences. First of all,
there's not 1000s of them,there's millions of them, and
they change not every couple ofmonths, but every couple of
(08:12):
weeks. Wow, right? So there,your update rate is much faster.
Blythe Brumleve (08:15):
So what are some of the use cases for a lot
of your customers? Once they buythis data set, it's consistently
updated. They just plug it into,maybe an API connection, into
their tech stack. That's a
Unknown (08:26):
good question. So they plug it in, into the tech stack.
So one of the things we do is webring the expertise with the
data, right? So you work withus, you will get top experts
that will deploy that with you,because it's not always easy,
and we're specialists in thoseuse cases. So we've done them
multiple times. Some of ourcustomers, it's the first time
they do it. So that assistanceis important, because we kind of
know the roadblocks, and youknow the how you set us up for
(08:47):
success. Then you look at usecases, we have, I would say, a
bit, three families ofcustomers. We have data
partnerships, like people, likelocate our partners with us. We
provide the data they use insome of the API calls. We have
product builders, people thatbuild products on top of our
data, and then we have peoplethat use it internally, right?
So those all, it all fits intothe infrastructure. And so use
(09:11):
case, one product use case wouldbe carbon care. So carbon care
pin joins us as a customer lastyear, and they do, as you can
imagine, a carbon computation,which is a big topic in
logistics. And yeah, for them todo that accurately, they
actually need to measure thedistances correctly. And there's
some countries where theycouldn't source the data right.
So I think we work with them onTurkey, maybe China, and so
(09:34):
being sure, like, what are this?
Now, it's getting a bittechnical, but the lat long of
the center of the postal code.
That's typically how you workwith carbon emissions. You just
want an approximate distance, asthe corona flies. For many use
cases, you just want to seewhat's the distance between that
postal area and that postalarea. So that's one use case,
another use case. One of our bigcustomers is dB Shanker was a
(09:57):
big sponsor last year, and. Do acouple of things with us. They
do visualization. So whenthey're showing their delivery
areas to their own teams andtheir customers, actually
putting that on a map, andhaving all the postal areas
clearly marked, or all theadministrative divisions clearly
marked, makes it much easier tocommunicate to their customers.
They also do postal codevalidation, and I mean, we have
(10:18):
some testimonials on ourwebsite. This is 300 times
faster doing it with us thanbasically having a clutch of
solutions that are tapedtogether. And that's not
audited, because our data isconstantly audited, constantly
verified, so they get muchbetter quality than if they do
this in house. So
Blythe Brumleve (10:33):
it's not as simple as just, you know, buying
a data set and integrating intoyour, you know, software
provider, and then you can kindof wipe your hands,
Unknown (10:40):
no, no. You typically have to understand what you're
doing. And use cases are, thereare some hidden complexities in
use cases that our customersalways think about. For example,
is we work with MSC. MS is alsoone of our large customers. They
were designing their terminalinterfaces to ship containers
from point A to point B, butit's worldwide, right? And so
say they're quite advanced,because in the terminal they
(11:02):
have the two languages. Theywill say, OK, I will have the
language. I will have theEnglish version of the
addresses, but I will also havethe local version. Maybe it's in
Greek. Maybe the terminaloperator is in Greece, and
they're speaking Greek to thecustomer, and you have the Greek
alphabet there, but the personwho's going to receive the order
also needs to be able to readthey might not read Greek
alphabet, so they might want theEnglish version next to it.
(11:23):
That's one of the things we do.
We do the translation I gaveyou. The example of my city,
Brussels. You will get Brusselsin the local language and in
English for internalizationpurposes. So it's one of the
things we provide and tellingour customers up front. Have you
thought about the languageissue? How are you looking at
this? Are you going to manageyour interfaces? Your Chinese
colleagues might not, might wantto see the address in Chinese.
So how are you going to do this?
(11:45):
We have all the data to do it,but you need to provide in your
solution. Need to build it intoit.
Blythe Brumleve (11:50):
So you had mentioned earlier that 60% of
your customers are US based. I'mjust curious if there's any sort
of location information that'sunique to the United States
versus the rest of the world?
Yes, there is.
Unknown (12:02):
So one of the things USPS does is, when a city, when
a postal code has several citiesor several localities, they
designate a primary one. Justokay, there's many localities
that switches postal code, butwe USPS formally decide this is
the core one. That's a conceptthat does not exist in the rest
(12:23):
of the world. And we know thisbecause when we worked on, I
think again, so Expeditors isone of our customers, and
expediters has worked with us onthat. They said, oh, we need
this for the rest of the world.
And we said, yeah, it doesn'texist. So yeah, but we need it
anyway. And this is a goodexample of the complexities,
because our TMS system requiresit. The field is mandatory. It
was in one box. Okay, this is agood example of how we
(12:45):
collaborate with customers.
Okay, we will find a solutionfor you. We have the technology
and the knowledge to run theheuristics worldwide to
basically find a primary cityworldwide. It's not a formal
concept, but we can useheuristics to approximate the
primary city for every postalcode. And that's something we
developed, I think, five yearsago with them, and it's now part
(13:06):
of our standard product. So it'sso it's funny that we have
primary cities, which is a USconcept exported to the rest of
the world, because it's a usefulconcept. Wow,
Blythe Brumleve (13:15):
that's it. So maybe we are doing a couple
things, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Unknown (13:18):
Again. I mean, us has fantastic data. So it's a world
run country.
Blythe Brumleve (13:23):
So what are some other maybe important
things that you think areimportant to mention that we
haven't already talked aboutwith GEOPostCodes?
Unknown (13:31):
I think two things, maybe is first to understand.
Well, three things, let's playthis one. Couple of things why
you should consider working withus. First, location data, as I
described it, just having acorrect understanding of the
world. It's an extremely complexproblems, and when I'm in the
logistics sector, I usuallydon't need to explain that,
because people know they feelthe pain, but just don't do it
(13:53):
yourself. Right? If you're doinga couple of countries, that's
fine, but as soon as you go morethan 15 countries, you probably
want to work with a player likeus, right? You don't want to do
all this in houses. It's toocomplicated. It's one thing. The
other thing would be, we reallyspecialize in logistics, in the
sense that we have been buildingfor over five years, actually
(14:13):
six years now, a logisticspecific data set. So we have a
data set that is more plug andplay, as you say, because it
solves all the things. I don'twant to go too much in detail,
because you can get technical.
It'll give you an idea. Otherfreight, ocean freight, or
railroad will know unload codes,which is a public data set. It's
very much used in freight work.
(14:33):
But actually, unfortunately, thepublic source is actually not a
very high quality. So we haveactually an enhanced version
where all the problems aresolved. It also connects to the
postal code so you want to dointermodal transport, so fixed,
so the whole package of datasets that you need to do,
correct addressing, correctshipping, whether it's for what
(14:54):
you call it terrorist, for yourwhether you want to do your
rate. Cards, or you want to justcorrectly do intermodal, or do
you want to do carboncompensation? We have all of
that basically out of the boxand ready to integrate with your
system, and we have a teamthat's done it many times.
Blythe Brumleve (15:11):
Wow. So what is the scope of your team? It
sounds like it's massive. Oh,no,
Unknown (15:14):
we just, I think this year we're hiring recruiting a
lot right now, I guess we mustbe around 35 now. 35 people?
Blythe Brumleve (15:21):
Yeah, that's all of them are managing all of
this information, yeah.
Unknown (15:25):
So we have, but a big part of our team is we have a
very small commercial team.
Actually, most of our team isactually, like I said, products
and customer facing, because wehave a lot of big customers, and
we work on complex cases. Well,that's amazing.
Blythe Brumleve (15:41):
So you are also last question, or last couple
questions I have here making abig announcement at manifest. I
believe maybe the press releasedropped today. Can you share
some of that?
Unknown (15:50):
Yeah, so it is about the logistic Data Suite. One
element we added this year isport terminals. So to complement
your no code, and again, I'msorry, I'm going technical
there. It's unlo codes are onlythat granular because they tell
you, for example, Brussels is agood example as well. So it has
one unlo codes for the ports,the railroads, the truck and
(16:10):
terminal and airports, which isa bit laughable for people
living in Brussels, becausethose are completely unrelated
places have nothing to do witheach other, but just one unlock
codes. So it shows that youactually do need to go one level
more granular. And when it comesto ports, we've actually
released, again, an enhanceddata set that gives you much
more structured, normalizedinformation about the
(16:32):
capabilities of each port, whichis important because you, when
you're planning, basicallyyou're shipping. You want to
know what terminal has thecapabilities I need. Is this a
cold terminal? Is this a deepterminal? Can I shift that kind
of shift towards, you know, whatkind of k is this? And so we
have all that information,again, normalized, just to take
that work away from people likeMSC or freight forwarders that
need that data anyway. Andotherwise, I have in house teams
(16:54):
trying to build that data andclean it themselves. It's just
IT skills much better if you doit with us. Absolutely.
Blythe Brumleve (16:59):
It sounds like a massive problem that they
would have to undertake. And sowhy not just go to the other
Unknown (17:03):
sexy problem? By the way, it's a boring problem, but
we have people working on thatevery day, so so you don't, so
our customers don't have to. But
Blythe Brumleve (17:09):
that's what I love about this industry's
supply chain, global logistics,is that it's, it's one of those
things. Every time you peel backa layer on the onion, there's so
many more layers exactly thatare there to discover. And this
was a, this was a conversationthat was something that I had no
idea about, and now I have,hopefully the audience will find
it, you know, as valuable aswell. Because this sounds like
something that you know, everytech provider in United States,
(17:31):
logistics companies, you know,needs and maybe global as well.
Unknown (17:34):
Yeah, everybody's going abroad, probably should think
about this.
Blythe Brumleve (17:37):
Yes, absolutely. Well, where can
folks get in touch with you? Getin touch with GEOPostCodes.
Unknown (17:41):
Yeah, just our website is GEOPostCodes.com we're easy
to find. You can reach out, youknow, either to me, I don't know
if there's any details gonna beshared, or directly to our
teams, and we'd be very happy tohelp you and just also meet you
and hear, you know, if you don'twant to work with us today, it's
fine that maybe couple of yearsdown the road, it's great to
meet people in logisticsindustry. Thank you so much.
(18:04):
Blythe,
Blythe Brumleve (18:08):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of
everything is logistics, apodcast for the thinkers in
freight, telling the storiesbehind how your favorite stuff
and people get from point A toB. Subscribe to the show. Sign
up for our newsletter and followour socials over at everything
is logistics.com and in additionto the podcast, I also wanted to
let you all know about anothercompany I operate, and that's
(18:29):
digital dispatch, where we helpyou build a better website. Now,
a lot of the times, we hand thistask of building a new website
or refreshing a current one offto a co worker's child, a
neighbor down the street or astranger around the world, where
you probably spend more timeexplaining the freight industry
than it takes to actually buildthe dang website. Well, that
(18:49):
doesn't happen at Digitaldispatch. We've been building
online since 2009 but we're alsoearly adopters of AI automation
and other website tactics thathelp your company to be a
central place to pull in all ofyour social media posts, recruit
new employees and give potentialcustomers a glimpse into how you
operate your business. Our newwebsite builds start as low as
(19:11):
$1,500 along with ongoingwebsite management, maintenance
and updates starting at $90 amonth, plus some bonus freight,
marketing and sales contentsimilar to what you hear on the
podcast. You can watch a quickexplainer video over on digital
dispatch.io, just check out thepricing page once you arrive,
and you can see how we can buildyour digital ecosystem on a
(19:34):
strong foundation. Until then, Ihope you enjoyed this episode.
I'll see you all real soon andgo Jags you.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com