Freightvine

This week’s guest is  Gonzalo Cordova, Director of Decision Science and Automation at The Home Depot.  Gonzalo has a long history of solving business and supply chain problems using sophisticated analytical methods.  After finishing his MS at GaTech in 2005, he worked for companies as varied as GE Energy, Lafarge, Coca-Cola, and The Home Depot.  His current role is leading the team that is applying AI, and other analytical methods ...

This week’s guest is Chad Kennedy, Group Product Manager of the Rate Benchmark platform at DAT Freight & Analytics. Chad has been in the trucking and transportation space for over two decades now as both a carrier and a shipper.  While originally trained in finance, he joined a small family-owned trucking company in the early 2000s.  He moved on to CHEP (the blue pallet people) where he rose to be Director of Transportation. Finall...

This week’s guest is Keith Brandis, Vice President of Partnerships and System Solutions at Volvo Trucks.  Keith is a 40-plus-year veteran of the trucking industry with a diverse background in truck manufacturing, engineering, sales, and marketing for the Volvo Group. He began his career with Volvo Trucks at its New River Valley manufacturing operations in Dublin, Virginia, where all of the brands’ Class 8 trucks for the North Ameri...

This week’s guest is David Landau, currently Advisor at Moguntia Capital in Atlanta.  David has  25 years of experience in the Supply chain software space - mainly focused on the creation and delivery of product strategies and M&A. He spent almost 20 years at Manhattan Associates - culminating in being VP of Product Management, and has also served in leadership roles at E2Open, Cloud Logistics, BluJay, and Transporeon.  In our conv...

This week’s guest is Matt Waller from New Roads Capital Partners and the University of Arkansas.  He has held various positions, including Dean, and taught for 30 years at the University of Arkansas, where he currently holds the William Dillard II Leadership Chair at the Sam M. Walton College of Business.  He is also a Strategic Advisor at NewRoad Capital Partners.  In our conversation, we talk mainly about the always evolving Reta...

This week’s guest is Mike Bassani, Partner and Product Leader at Microsoft. Despite starting in Finance, Mike is no stranger to supply chains having worked in supply chain roles for Best Buy, Nike, Amazon, Convoy, and currently, Microsoft where he was the General Manager of the Supply Chain Platform. His role has changed over the last year to lead the integration of Copilot and other LLMs into the  Power Platform. In our conversati...

This week’s guest is Woody Richardson, former executive at Schneider. Woody was in the trucking industry for 40 years - all at Schneider.  Before retiring in 2021, he had held multiple leadership roles including Revenue Management/Pricing, Sales, Logistics Transportation Procurement, and many others. He recently published his book, Roads Rarely Traveled: Avoiding the Biggest Mistakes in Truckload Purchasing. Based on his decades of...

This week’s guest is Dr. Callie Federer, Senior Data Science Manager at DAT Freight & Analytics. Callie comes to the freight and transportation industry from a pretty non-traditional path - a Ph.D. in Computational Bioscience from the University of Colorado-Denver.  After earning her PhD, she went straight into industry holding various data science roles in the medical, education, and advertising domains. She joined DAT about 18 mo...

This week’s guest is Dylan Alperin, VP of Professional Services at Keelvar.  Founded in Ireland in 2012, Keelvar is a software company specializing in procurement automation and optimization solutions.  The word Keelvar can be loosely translated from Irish as “sensible” or having “better intelligence.” Dylan joined Keelvar about 3 years ago after having spent the previous fifteen years in logistics procurement at a number of shippe...

This week’s guest is Jeff Short, Vice President, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).  ATRI publishes a wide variety of reports on all aspects of freight and trucking from costs to bottlenecks and everything in between.  Jeff is the author of the December 2022 ATRI Report entitled “Charging Infrastructure Challenges for the US Electric Vehicle Fleet”.  The report identifies and quantifies three major challenges as...

This week’s guest is Ann Marie Jonkman, Senior Director, Global Industry Strategies for Blue Yonder.  Ann Marie has had extensive experience in the logistics and supply chain space working for carriers, brokers, and shippers before joining Blue Yonder about 2 years ago.  In her current role she is helping Logistics Service Providers, or LSPs, solve their supply chain challenges.  In our conversation, we discuss how the supply chain...

This week’s guest is Rob Kelly SVP of Business Development for Forum Mobility. Forum Mobility provides accessible zero-emission trucking solutions for drayage in California. Their services range from building and operating charging infrastructure to offering class 8 zero-emission electric trucks. They are currently developing a network of charging depots around the Oakland and Los Angeles/Long Beach ports, and along common trucking...

This week’s guest is Dr. Erez Agmoni, Global Head of Innovation at Maersk. Erez has been in the global freight industry for over 30 years and at Maersk for over a decade. In the newly created role of Global Head of Innovation he is charged with changing the status quo rather than providing incremental improvements to the movement of freight. In our conversation, we discuss the challenges associated with introducing change, the need...

This week’s guests are my two DAT iQ colleagues: Ken Adamo, Chief of Analytics, and Dean Croke, Principal Analyst. This is our annual end-of-the-year podcast where we revisit our predictions from last year, discuss the major issues of the current year, and take our best guesses as to what will happen next year. Our conversation ranged widely - from changes in ocean shipping patterns to the challenge of EVs and ETs and the ability (...

This week’s guest is Bill Driegert, EVP and head of North America for Flexport. Bill has over 20 years in the industry with key roles at Coyote Logistics, Amazon, UberFreight, and now Flexport. With the recent acquisition of Convoy’s technology stack, Bill is back in the familiar position of starting up brokerage operations from scratch - something he did at UberFreight and before that at Convoy. We talk about how technology has ch...

This week’s guests are John Stauffer and Brian Cristol, co-founders of Isometric Technologies. ISO is a performance management solution that centralizes service data between business partners and connects costs from chargebacks and service-level failures to the responsible parties. Anyone in the industry knows how hard it is to reconcile the root cause of service failures, that is the problem that Iso addresses. John and Brian have...

This week’s guest is Dr. Zac Rogers, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management at Colorado State University.  In addition to his academic duties at CSU, Zac also co-developed and currently leads the publishing of the Logistics Manager Index or LMI.  Fashioned in the same way as the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) which has been around for over 50 years, the LMI is a diffusion metric that captures whether an activity is expandi...

This week’s guest is  Jim Filter, EVP, Group President Transportation & Logistics. The conversation centers on Schneider’s adoption of electric vehicles within their California drayage operations. This is a highly relevant topic for all shippers and carriers as we see the electrification of transportation - both freight and passenger - continue to be promoted and subsidized by the government at the local, state, and federal levels....