[00:00:00] Brett Johnson: You have to measure the performance of your current state. You have to be honest with that evaluation and create truthful metrics and baselines so you are able to measure your improvements in success once you’ve made your choices and moved forward. In addition, you have to have input and you have to address the concerns of your stakeholders, your end users, even down to the person pushing the buttons at the keyboard and putting the labels on the boxes. If you don’t do that, it will come back to haunt you.

[00:00:30] Voice Over: Welcome to Supply Chain Now, the number one voice of supply chain. Join us as we share critical news, key insights, and real supply chain leadership from across the globe. One conversation at a time.

[00:00:43] Scott W. Luton: Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be. Scott Luton here with you on Supply Chain Now. Folks, we have got quite an intriguing case study here today on how a leading toy and novelty distributor has been truly changing the game when it comes to delighting their customers and providing a path forward for more scalable, quality-driven growth. A big part of this successful initiative has been solving big-time shipping challenges. Hey, we all face shipping challenges, right? As we try to answer that question, “Where’s my stuff?” Leveraging innovative technology and leadership muscles, what this organization has done, you’re going to see how it’s been able to cut freight and labor costs, speed up order fulfillment, boost customer satisfaction, all that and more without adding more staff to the payroll. How about that? So stay tuned as we learn how and why from two industry leaders here today, very actionable conversation teed up.

[00:01:37] Scott W. Luton: So I want to get to work and we’ll welcome in our esteemed guest here today starting with Brett Johnson, IT director with A&A Global, an incredible company that started back in 1938 and it’s transformed into a powerhouse of industry where A&A is a leading toy and novelty distributor. Now, Brett brings a ton of technology and leadership experience to the conversation today. And when this Maryland resident has a little free time, you’re going to find Brett enjoying the outdoors biking and camping and many other things. So joining Brett today and back with us once again, 30-year industry veteran and the innovative founder and president of RateLinx, Shannon Lincourt, who provided the powerful tech behind A&A’s transformation. And hey, when Shannon isn’t moving mountains out in the industry, he’s one of the biggest true fans of the sport of golf you’ll ever find. Want to welcome in Shannon and Brett. Hey, hey Brett, how you doing?

[00:02:58] Brett Johnson: Sure. And thank you again for having me on today. Like you said, A&AGlobal started in 1938. It was a one-man operation, a vending machine supplier. And over the years we’ve grown into a large distributor and manufacturer of toys, electronics, games, plush candy and more. And we service the redemption and amusement markets as well as national retail and grocery chains. And our own candy brand Coco’s is actually distributed internationally now. Like you said, we’re headquartered in Maryland. I’ve worked in wholesale distribution for the last 17 years and spent the last seven of those here at A&A as the IT director.

[00:03:42] Scott W. Luton: Outstanding. And as we were talking pre-show, I think I can share this man, y’all have been moving a lot of those rubber duckies that we find in Jeeps everywhere. Is that right Brett?

[00:03:50] Brett Johnson: We sure do. It’s one of our hottest sellers. All sorts of rubber ducks. Yep.

[00:03:55] Scott W. Luton: Outstanding. Well great to have you. I can’t wait to dive into the story. And for folks that may, Shannon, you’ve seen Shannon Vaillancourt with us dozens of episodes over the last few years. It’s incredible what he and the RateLinx team are doing. If you’re new to Shannon Vaillancourt, he’s a recognized innovator in supply chain performance, especially when it comes to logistics, data analytics. In fact, he and the RateLinx team have been reshaping the logistics landscape for years with some of the nation’s largest retailers, CPG manufacturers and many other industrial leaders like A&A Global. So Shannon, great to have you here today.

[00:04:28] Shannon Vaillancourt: It’s always great to be on and talk with you guys about transportation. So exciting.

[00:04:33] Scott W. Luton: I am too. So Brett, we want you to set the stage for us. Can you share what was happening at A&A Global that made you start going down the path looking for a new TMS?

[00:04:44] Brett Johnson: Yes, and you’ve heard it probably before, but it all kind of started with COVID. COVID had a pretty big impact on our industry if you think about the markets we sell to. And fortunately we weathered those storms and we took advantage of some unique opportunities and as a result we came out of COVID with a very rapid increase in our transaction volume as people were still getting back to normal. Our staff was dealing with a two to three increase in our package counts compared to those same time periods pre-COVID 2018, 2019. And so we have added about a hundred thousand square feet of warehouse space in the last couple of years and there’s more on the way. And what we’ve learned pretty early on was the previous TMS solution just couldn’t keep up with us. In fact, the performance actually got worse as things got busier. And when we tried to deal with that, we found that TMS vendors, internal changes, product roadmap, they just didn’t really align with what our needs were anymore.

[00:05:49] Scott W. Luton: That posed significant roadblocks and challenges. I want to dive a little bit deeper before I get Shannon to comment here. Tell us more about the other roadblocks that A&A Global faced with your previous shipping systems that really told you in red blaring lights maybe that you need a much more flexible and integrated TMS.

[00:06:09] Brett Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. I use this example a lot, but it really comes down to off the shelf versus a toolkit. The previous TMS was off the shelf, it was not flexible. You get what you get and we frankly outgrew what it offered. That’s a lot different than RateLinx, which is more of a toolkit that you use to build the product that you need. And RateLinx has a fantastic staff that knows how to use those tools to accomplish that. Like I said, as our business continued to grow, the annoyances that we’ve lived with for the last few years really became real problems because we weren’t really able to get the support and help that we needed. We knew that we had to move on.

[00:06:55] Scott W. Luton: That support and care, which we’re going to talk about in a second. But it sounds like to me, Shannon, this is a big common theme from some of our other conversations, finding the right partners that can help you scale. As you heard there from Brett, man, they’re growing and delighting their customers at the same time. Shannon, do you hear stories like A&A Global’s often where companies are dealing with a really rigid and non-flexible TMS that has data and integration issues as well?

[00:07:20] Shannon Vaillancourt: Yeah, I mean it’s not unusual to run into that in our space. There’s a lot of different levels of TMS out there and what they had before was great until they grew. That’s where you’ve got to make sure that you’re with a provider that can continue to grow with you. And that’s where when we put together a solution, I put this together 23 years ago, that was what I was always thinking about is how can we get with a customer that maybe has a need today that maybe isn’t too much and we can put ourselves in there and then they can grow with it as they need to. That way they never have to make a change because we find that changing out your TMS is very disruptive and it can really throw some companies back a bit on their growth curve if they can’t keep up. So that’s why we built it this way. It’s not unusual that we run into it a lot with other customers.

[00:08:19] Scott W. Luton: And a software perspective. And we’re going to talk more about how you all managed to make implementation a lot less disruptive. So stick around folks as you get tips on that. Okay, let’s keep driving. Let’s talk about speed, Brett and Shannon. Speed man, organizational velocity, supply chain velocity is of the essence to keep your customers happy, really delighted while driving revenue. Right. Brett, what else was slowing down your shipping operations in that previous state?

[00:08:46] Brett Johnson: Well, I’ve mentioned off the shelf before and what that really means is a sort of a net consensus of what the TMS vendor decides everyone needs the most rather than what we need specifically. And so what you get is you get a lot of features that are crammed into a product that results in too many clicks, keystrokes per order. We found that our shippers were forced to enter too much data manually and that of course opens room for user error. Our previous system had a real-time connection to our ERP. It was a live connection and if it froze or we had some type of communication problem interruption, we could lose the data for the entire shipment. And if you can imagine on your busiest day in the warehouse having to stop and repack a 30, a 40, a 50 package shipment in your system, it was a real-time killer.

[00:09:39] Brett Johnson: And like I said before, as transaction volume increased, the instability just became a bigger problem and it kept slowing down. And we were at a point in some of our busiest days when we’ve got shipping processors that are waiting sometimes a minute or more for data to transmit. I’m not talking about the process of weighing the boxes and putting the labels on, I’m talking about they would click the button and stand there for a minute waiting for something to load on the screen and you just multiply that across all of those shipments every day. And it was a terrible time sink. It wasn’t all just technical issues. The previous system did have some limited reporting tools. Again, what it felt everyone needed the most, not what we needed specifically. So most reporting came to it as custom SQL reports that we would have to invest time to do. And the sales team had rate quoting tools, but the rate quoting tools produced inaccurate results and that caused issues. And another issue we had with the previous TMS was that they would charge you per LTL carrier to rate shop. So let’s say we’re shipping to someplace where you could potentially have 10 or 15 different LTL carrier options to choose from. We didn’t have access to see those. We could only see the options we paid to see. And so that was an issue as well.

[00:11:03] Scott W. Luton: Alright, so Shannon, I was trying to keep up with all that Brett laid out there and that’s a lot, but manual data entry, which we’ve talked about lots and lots of times, all the rework man who likes rework, no one, the waiting may not be the hardest part as Tom Petty used to sing about, but it’s not fun to have everybody waiting around doing stuff. And of course lack of visibility, Shannon, which you have made a career of finding innovative ways of providing visibility to supply chain teams out there. But I want to ask you this, Shannon, how much do issues like slow carrier onboarding and manual invoice reviews impact a company’s ability to ship efficiently and protect margins?

[00:11:42] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’ve seen this from day one. I remember back in the early nineties, I remember one of the very first installs I ever did, so this was back when this will date me, but this is back when UPS and FedEx made a change. Actually it was UPS, it made a change. So back in the day you never had to capture ship to address or anything. Believe it or not, when you were doing your UPS because there was no such thing as PLD uploads or anything like that. And we had to add the three-digit zip code we had to capture. And I’ll never forget, I was on site and we make the upgrade and the customer’s out there with this stopwatch, God, he’s got stopwatch and he’s like timing it. And that’s just from the shipping side. So my whole life, it’s been burned into my brain.

[00:12:28] Shannon Vaillancourt: It’s all about speed and efficiency. Whether it’s they scan the order, it’s got to come in now and then when they hit ship it’s got to print the label. Now nobody likes to wait for anything. And when you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to get things done in a warehouse, the last thing you want to do is slow everybody down. Whether it’s the shipping piece, adding additional options, the whole point of the system, it’s a multi-carrier system from our perspective, why would you not allow the customer to make it a true multi-carrier system? It’s like that’s the whole point of why they bought this thing. It’s not only to transact the freight so they can get their product out the door so they can do it as efficiently as possible and run their business. So that’s why we’ve created the solution the way we did. But it’s mind-boggling to me. But then again we celebrate it because that helps us tremendously. Very different.

[00:13:25] Scott W. Luton: I like that man. We could dial in your response there in so many different ways, but speed, speed, speed and the market and the requirement for speed is like never before and it will continue to grow up. And then secondly, paying a penalty to optimize your supply chain, that’s no fun. I’ve got to do away with that out in the marketplace. Alright, so Brett, let’s get to the selection process. I always love diving into selection process because while selection of due diligence has been around since the caveman days, still there are ways we can do it better. What were your non-negotiables during the selection process as you were looking for a TMS solution?

[00:14:00] Brett Johnson: Well, not to oversimplify things, but we needed a solution that could keep up with us and remain stable and we needed a partner that was there when we needed help. And by the way, Shannon, we did stopwatch you too. We just used iPhones, not a manual stopwatch.

[00:14:16] Shannon Vaillancourt: Manual, it wasn’t the manual anymore, it was the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, love minutes.

[00:14:21] Scott W. Luton: Moving from analog. So you threw me off with the stopwatch moving from analog to digital. I like that. I like props. What specifically though, Brett? What specifically needed to be faster and easier? Two of my favorite words.

[00:14:34] Brett Johnson: Well, I mean stability and reliability in the sense that I talked to you about those delays, that was a big impact, right? The LTL and the parcel teams we have in our warehouse have significantly different workflows. Both of those workflows needed fewer manual steps, less user entry, less room for user error. The sales team needed a rate quoting tool that produced results they can trust that were accurate. The reporting and the dashboarding tools we use now are faster, more user-friendly because not everything is custom. And obviously getting technical support going from a provider that had sort of the traditional help desk queue where you get stuck at tier one, the TMS software equivalent of have you tried turning it off and back on again? Where with RateLinx, we have a dedicated account team. I’m always speaking to the same people every time. They are super accessible and responsive and they know my environment, which saves a ton of time when there’s an issue you have to troubleshoot.

[00:15:39] Scott W. Luton: That’s quite a laundry list there I love. It’s really important for sales professionals to have information and quotes that they can trust and use out in those conversations. Just like technology needs to be focused with user experience in mind. I love you mentioned about the dashboards and the reporting. They’ve got to be approachable so folks can do things with it, but technical support. So Shannon, I want to focus in there with all of your countless conversations with business leaders, customers, perspective customers out there, how often do companies mention technical support as a key factor when choosing a TMS?

[00:16:11] Shannon Vaillancourt: Yeah, that’s often the leading reason why they’re talking to us. It’s either about support, making sure that they get what they need or the fact that they’re not getting what they need and that’s causing them to now look for another solution out there. This is a mission critical application. If A&A Global can’t ship their product out the door, if this system stops them from doing that, they can’t invoice their customer, they can’t collect and then it’s going to ruin their reputation with the customer, which has a large impact. So if anything does go wrong, whether it’s just a question about something, you got to be able to respond to it very quickly. And that’s why we’ve really made sure that we keep a real dense amount of expertise in the area with the type of ERP that Brett has because his ERP has some little nuances to it that you have to understand and that’s where from the integration perspective to provide the speed, we’re doing things for A&A and that ERP that we don’t have to do for any other ERP. I mean it just, it’s not needed. But again, we have that capability so we can provide what looks to be a very seamless, very quick interface. And then if there’s any questions, he’s got the same team that he talks to that understands, you have to understand because it’s just different how we have to deal with it.

[00:17:42] Scott W. Luton: Shannon, helpful perspective and I want to go back to Brett getting past level one. Have you restarted the system? How often have we all gotten that as we call in help desk, right? We got to get past that. Hands-on savvy help that can go far deeper and meet ’em where the customers are. Brett, Shannon touched on integration. You’ve touched on integration a couple of times. Having a TMS that was better integrated was a non-negotiable. What made integration so critical for A&AGlobal?

[00:18:11] Brett Johnson: I mean it’s absolutely critical and we needed a system that could plug into the existing tech stack. We didn’t want the tail to wag the dog here and replace a bunch of components that were working well for us just to fix something that wasn’t working well for us. Right In 2024 and 2025, the whole organization took on the process of Lean Six Sigma training and process review. A lot of people are familiar with, it’s fantastic. And we wanted to resolve workflow problems by exploring integrations such as the Cubiscan tools, the rate estimating tools in our e-comm store, a mobile shipping label printing project, and many more projects currently in queue. And that opens a lot of doors for us.

[00:19:01] Scott W. Luton: And we’re going to walk right through some of those open doors and I’ve got my eye on you in case you have any more props. Brett Johnson, it looks like you got a lot of options behind you.

[00:19:09] Brett Johnson: Got some great stuff.

[00:19:11] Scott W. Luton: You sure do. Alright, so speaking of your last response there, Brett, this is I think a really important question. Walk us through what ScanForce, Cubiscan, and mobile printing do and how tying them along with Salesforce into your TMS made your shipping workflow even more efficient.

[00:19:29] Brett Johnson: Well, ScanForce is our WMS system and it’s fantastic. We’re very happy with it. It runs on the Android handheld scanners that the order pullers in the warehouse use. It runs on touchscreen monitors at our packing stations, on our packing lanes. And as an order moves from our ERP into ScanForce for the picking and packing processes, it will then move into RateLinx for shipping. So the mobile printing I mentioned, the mobile label printing I mentioned, was actually a partner project between ScanForce and RateLinx. It was something that was actually inspired— it was actually inspired by the company that gave us our RateLinx reference call before we signed the deal. And we said, man, we’ve never thought about that before. And what that means is our parcel department has just this year shipped probably over a hundred thousand full case items, meaning they come straight off of the truck onto a shelf in the warehouse, straight off the shelf and put a FedEx label on and get it out the door.

[00:20:31] Brett Johnson: And we’ve always loaded those full case items onto the packing lanes, not because they need to be packed, but they needed to be on lanes to make their way to the shipping stations to be processed. We don’t even need to weigh them. That data is already recorded, but they need to be on those lanes, the mobile print project lets us bypass those lanes. We have Zebra mobile battery powered wireless label printers. And so now our order pullers can go straight to the shelf, scan an item, it’s going to print a FedEx label and they put it straight on the box, they take it right to the FedEx truck and it stays off the lane entirely. It makes the order processing faster and it’s going to free up a ton of space on the lanes and reduce traffic jams. So that’s the mobile printing. And I mentioned Cubiscan last winter.

[00:21:25] Brett Johnson: We invested in our first CBIS Scan S9 and that’s a piece of equipment that’s a pallet dimensioner and it ties in with a pallet wrapper and a pallet scale. So as you are wrapping and weighing your pallets, the CBIS Scan is capturing the dimensions and then we store that data and we use that data to calculate the appropriate freight rates for any given LTL shipment. And our RateLinx team used the RateLinx toolkit to build an integration that can pull all of that detail that the Cubiscan is capturing into their ShipLinx shipping client software. And we just transmit that and pass it right onto the carriers. And not only that, we worked with RateLinx on a very highly customized bill of lading to show all this data that we’ve been capturing to put it right in the carrier’s faces, but we also needed to make sure that the customers could see the data that they need on the bill of lading for their sign off.

[00:22:26] Brett Johnson: The project is brand new, it’s only been live for a few weeks, but we’ve already seen a pretty significant reduction in carrier reclassification due to choosing the wrong freight class, 25, 30% reduction in those reclassifications so far. Another cool thing about the Cubiscan is it also takes photos of the pallets as they’re being wrapped and it’s taking the dimensions. So we internally developed an automated process to create LTL shipment notification emails and send those out to our customers. And those photos, the CBIS Scan takes are included attachments, of course, but those tracking emails are also able to bring in PDF copies of the BOL. And that’s only possible because we can leverage the RateLinx API to get that data automatically as we need it before RateLinx those LTL tracking emails were being composed manually by our customer service staff every day.

[00:23:25] Scott W. Luton: Wow.

[00:23:26] Brett Johnson: And it was on busy days, it could take hours. So when you free up that staff time and they can spend that time doing other things, we are reallocating just today anywhere between 15 to 20 thousand dollars of staff time a year and that is going to continue to grow as time goes on and the data we’re sending to the customers is better as well. One of the biggest issues that we face today with our current e-commerce platform is the ability to give accurate rates for really anything other than straight basic FedEx parcel. It’s one of many reasons we are implementing Salesforce Commerce Cloud as our new e-commerce platform and that new platform is also going to be able to leverage the RateLinx API to do the shipping estimates for the customers live as they’re shopping online. And it’s going to be a much improved estimate as well, a lot more accurate. And the reason that’s important is because many of our web customers place large orders online and those orders might need to go out LTL, it might be more practical to send them out parcel ground,

[00:24:41] Brett Johnson: But those customers need to be presented with all the possible options and they can choose the best option for them based on their delivery needs. Another thing that makes our rate estimate process a little more complicated is how we calculate the amount that we’re going to bill a customer. There are a lot of conditions in there and RateLinx has to be able to acknowledge and apply them. And we know that all of this is going to work in e-comm because everything I just described has already been built out as a rate quoting tool internally for our sales staff when they’re putting orders into the ERP, it already exists. We’ve been using it for months, it’s fantastic. So we were able to transpose much of that work and logic into Salesforce relatively quickly.

[00:25:22] Scott W. Luton: I’ll tell you what, Shannon, Brett has just shined a big old light in a moving tech ecosystem, tech stack that’s delivering goodness in so many different ways. So I got to ask you this, how do you handle that kind of complex integration? Especially as I’ve mentioned, all these different business applications are really important and delighted in customers.

[00:25:42] Shannon Vaillancourt: I guess it sounds like before us they used to have to ship uphill both ways I guess or something careful just like that. What’s interesting is because our solution is cloud-based, but we’re doing all of this integration inside their firewall, so we’re not opening up any ports or anything like that in their firewall, but we’re still leveraging the cloud part of our system, but we have these integration toolkits that sit inside the firewall to do all of this stuff and just like the mobile printing, the other customer that he saw that, they have a completely different ERP, right? So it’s not like it was another customer with the exact same ERP and that’s where we’re able to take those components and kind of almost copy them over into the environment that A&A needs and they can almost use it out of the box.

[00:26:36] Shannon Vaillancourt: We have to make a few little tweaks just based on their specific data, but again, that’s how we’re built. The real term is extensibility is what our system is. Okay, so we talk about it being custom, but it’s really we’re extending our own capabilities and the solution was built that way. So we have a layer where we’re able to just add on a little bit so that way the scope of it is pretty small from our perspective, so it’s very easy to support and we can do it very quickly and we can deliver something that looks very complex and you can’t really tell that it’s not part of standard product because of how it just fits all together and that gives any one of our customers pretty much, I mean any kind of capability we’ve ever done and then some. So that’s where a lot of our installs are. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I’m going to take a little bit from this one and then now for Brett, I’m going to add two more fields to it because that’s what they need, but the basic logic is there and that also helps you get the new functionality in place and live faster because you’re reusing more code.

[00:27:52] Shannon Vaillancourt: In this industry, what makes us always different, and I always joke about this but it’s true, is you think about when you go buy a new car, everybody’s excited, right? It’s a new car, everything’s going to be great. Finally get rid of that old car where I just wasn’t sure if it was going to make it anymore. You get the brand new car, it’s always going to start. You never worry about it. With software, it’s the opposite. Nobody wants the new software, new software is not great, it’s not tried and true, the bugs haven’t been worn out. It’s this physical thing and I got to ring out the bugs out of that new software and it’s like that’s why our reusability and kind of putting these pieces together allow Brett and his team to really be confident with whatever they dream up because we probably have come across something like it. So we’re not doing that much really new code and that allows us to deliver very fast as well.

[00:28:53] Scott W. Luton: Shannon, that’s an interesting perspective and whether it’s an automotive analogy you mentioned, which is a good one, or jeans, no one wants a nice crisp pair of jeans, they all want to be stone-washed. I guess that was a nineties throwback or just beaten up well-worn. So they’re real comfortable and they work well. I got to ask you this though, Shannon, these integrations we’re talking about that you and the RateLinx team did for Brett, how long did that take? I’m curious.

[00:29:17] Shannon Vaillancourt: I mean we’re talking anywhere from days to a few weeks depending on the scope of the project. I mean the actual integration itself doesn’t take very long. You’re probably looking at a few days and then it just comes down to the testing and the training and then the go-live. So we’re able to deploy a lot of this stuff in weeks.

[00:29:35] Scott W. Luton: Man.

[00:29:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: Not months.

[00:29:37] Scott W. Luton: You’re moving. That’s a common theme in our previous conversations. And Brett, I got to ask you this and I bet our audience wants to know too. How long would the same project have taken with your previous TMS?

[00:29:47] Brett Johnson: Maybe that’s a trick question because I think the short answer is all of the projects I mentioned if they weren’t impractical would be completely impossible. With the previous TMS, that off the shelf approach means that it’s really hard to get new features put into standard product for general release. It can take anywhere from months to years and sometimes you have to pay to play. So yeah, I would say probably not even doable.

[00:30:16] Scott W. Luton: Shannon, that’s got to bring a smile to your face, talks about the differentiating factor out there. Alright Brett, let’s keep driving. There’s a tidal wave of market noise and technologies and options these days, some proven and some of the new sparkling vehicles that Shannon was talking about a minute ago that don’t have all the bugs and defects worked out just yet. What made RateLinx and the ShipLinx TMS really stand out as you were evaluating that tidal wave of vendors?

[00:30:44] Brett Johnson: Well right off the bat we knew why we needed to leave the previous TMS. It was time to tear up to a bigger product, to something that was more powerful and more flexible and in our ERP’s ecosystem there really weren’t a lot of options. So we knew that we were going to be building an integration that probably didn’t exist yet. And as we spoke to many software providers out there, including some very, very large ones, we were pretty disappointed in the lack of flexibility from some of these enterprise-tier TMS offerings and many of the products were disqualified during the initial discovery calls. We’d hit a technological or design impasse or often we’d ask really specific technical questions and bring up specific concerns and we’d be met with somewhat generic pre-sales responses that didn’t give us a lot of trust. Now with RateLinxs, Shannon himself was involved in the conversations from day one and I mean that in itself is a big positive considering the level of support that we were coming from at the time. To have Shannon in there himself, I felt like he approached the project with an engineer’s mindset trying to solve a problem. He was not approaching it as a salesman trying to close a deal and ultimately RateLinx came to the table with a plan that was the best fit for us and what we needed and gave us the highest level of confidence to move forward by far. Not taking anything away from folks out there trying to make a deal happen, y’all know that, but I love that peer into Shannon’s mindset because it has been a common thread through our conversations here over the last few years. Shannon, let’s talk implementation for a minute. It’s one of my favorite parts of our previous conversations. Could you keep it real? What’s your philosophy on implementation? Because we all know a lot of these projects, TMS projects or others, they stall out or take forever or oftentimes they never deliver.

[00:32:46] Shannon Vaillancourt: Yeah, I mean we’ve always taken the same approach and it’s about, again, I’m an engineer so that’s why you get the engineer fuel when you talk to me, I have an electrical engineering degree, you can’t get that out of me. And on the implementation side, the approach we take, it’s really about gathering the requirements correctly, being very transparent in those requirements and that’s why we have the documents that we fill out. Our functional specs have screenshots, have step-by-step direction that way we’re all talking about the same thing. It’s always funny when we, I’ve done this in the past years ago at previous jobs that I’ve had where you describe what it’s going to look like and then you finally show them the screen and it doesn’t match what they thought in their head. And that’s why we do things the way we do it. It just speeds everything up and it makes it easy.

[00:33:39] Shannon Vaillancourt: I always have to tell people here when they’re doing the specs, I said, look, it’s not about you being right in the spec, it’s putting down what you think they said and what you think we are going to deliver. And then you got to collaborate with the customer and they’re going to look at it and go, oh yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted here, but that part I need this little change made. And then you make the change so that way when we implement, it’s just faster and I think that’s what we’ve learned and then it’s supportable because now I’ve got all this documentation so it’s like I don’t have to crack the code open to look at anything. I just look at the spec and it pretty much tells me how this whole thing is supposed to work and then you can pull the technical stuff out of it and make it a user guide for the end user. It’s a two for one. I learned this a long time ago. That’s where being an implementer I think really helped me. I used to be the one that would go on site, do the install and then have to support it. And it’s hard to do without the proper documentation.

[00:34:44] Shannon Vaillancourt: And I think that’s what makes the support so good as well. There’s no guesswork here. I know that he’s got his team that he deals with, but when that team takes vacation, which every once in a while we have to let them do, the next person can stand in and it’s not a big drop off at all. We’ve got all the documentation and support here to handle it.

[00:35:06] Scott W. Luton: I like it. No guesswork and no switcheroos. And Shannon speaks about that with passion and quite a track record. Brett, again, I love the no switcheroos keeping it real. What you set out to build is what ultimately is delivered that’s so important across the technology space. But freight audit, I understand you added freight audit just a few months into the overall journey here. What drove that decision and better yet, what changed?

[00:35:32] Brett Johnson: Yeah, we added it after we initially went live with RateLinx. I mentioned before, we have a pretty complex rate shopping process, particularly when it comes to LTL and as anyone who ships LTL knows those accessorial and delivery fees can get you. We’ve always disputed fees with LTL carriers, but often we didn’t have the data we needed to keep up with the fight manually. Reviewing and disputing freight invoices really was almost a full-time position with our volume that we ship. And freight audit isn’t going to magically fix those problems. Freight audit is going to give you the tools you need to identify and deal with them and address ’em to the carriers effectively. When the vendor’s invoice matches to the expected shipping charges, great, perfect. The data automatically goes into our ERP, it’s queued up for payment. Nobody has to enter anything manually and that saves us a ton of time and we automate that majority and now we just deal with the exceptions that don’t go in and with the data RateLinx has provided, we’ve been able to identify that by far the majority of invoice exceptions came from those carrier reclassification scenarios I mentioned before, match pay revealed the scope of that issue for us and that helps justify that investment in that Cubiscan pallet dimension I mentioned previously and that makes that problem go away.

[00:37:02] Brett Johnson: The second most common scenario is when the carriers were ignoring accessorials that we were clearly submitting on the shipment and that was a little bit more complicated. RateLinx had to work behind the scenes with each carrier to correct those data mapping issues. And now we’ve resolved most of that. Again, we’re seeing a lot more automation and fewer exceptions as we go forward.

[00:37:29] Scott W. Luton: That is music to my ears and I bet that’s very tangible, big truckloads of friction you’re taking out of the operation for your teammates. I love that. Shannon, we’ve talked about a lot about this particular topic over the years. We got to act like it’s 2025, not like it’s 1995. Just how often do you hear about shippers manually reviewing invoices and surprisingly really large enterprises and why do you think they don’t take advantage of an automated invoice reconciliation?

[00:37:58] Shannon Vaillancourt: I think it really just comes down to belief. Unfortunately in the freight industry, what I’ve seen historically is everyone just feels like that’s just the way it is. That there is no better way and there absolutely is a better way. I wish I had a better answer for it. It’s like why are they doing it? I mean there’s no good answer that I could think of, but I think they just feel like that’s just what they have to do. And the other thing that Brett said that’s interesting is a lot of times you kind of get caught up in what you’re doing and you lose track of is it valuable or not? I’ve had discussions with customers where they tell me about the manual that they’re doing and then I start asking them questions about, well, how often does that happen? And they’re like, oh, that happens 30% of the time.

[00:38:46] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’m like, okay. And then how often are you successful? And they’re like, half the time I’m like, okay, so 15% of the invoices you’re successful on and how much are those invoices off by? And they’re like, oh, they’re off by about 10%. I’m like, okay, so that’s one and a half percent of your spend that you just impacted and how much did that cost you to do? And then their heads just blow up at that point because it’s like one, how’d you do math in your head? And then two, it’s like they’re doing all the math in their head at that point. They’re like, oh my God, I’m totally wasting my time on stuff. It’s like, yep, you are with the computer in there. Let it do it and then figure out what’s the root cause rather than fighting the reclass fix the problem. That’s why they put the Cubiscan in and they could easily justify it or not. What if it wasn’t that big of a problem and it was costing ’em a thousand dollars a year? Leave it. Right? Congratulations. Keep doing it. We legit had a customer that used to do that where they would on purpose, put the wrong weights and they’re like, whatever. If the carrier catches all of them, well that would’ve been the weight anyways. Who cares if they don’t catch some of them? I just got away with it. These are real conversations I’ve had and I’m like, wow, that’s amazing. But they measured it. That’s the magic. Shannon,

[00:40:12] Scott W. Luton: First off, I do find your mathematical ability amazing. I was struggling to follow you along there. My lesser math skills, math with two Fs and secondly, kidding aside, majoring in the minors, we’ve got to be really careful about majoring in the minors and know where the juice is worth the big squeeze. It costs so much, especially on return on energy from our workforces and our leadership teams. So Brett, I think these next couple of questions are going to be a couple of my favorites that I want to pose to you. I want to talk about impact, impact, impact. So you wanted your shipping operations, as we’ve established, to be faster, easier, integrated and more agile. With the new TMS integrated into your ERP and your broader tech stack that you were speaking to earlier, were you able to handle the transition without increasing your IT or operations staff?

[00:41:02] Brett Johnson: Yeah. Keep in mind, we implemented RateLinx at a time when our shipping department was breaking each month’s previous shipment total month after month. We were just killing it. And the warehouse was forced then to run early shifts, late shifts, some weekend shifts just to keep up. So the performance improvement compared to the previous TMS was felt immediately and even though the shipping volume continues to increase during that period of time, we were able to eliminate the, for the most part, eliminate early shifts and late shifts and weekend shifts. And overtime isn’t just a normal standard occurrence in the warehouse anymore. RateLinx fits very well into our larger Lean Six Sigma process improvement approach. When it comes to the warehouse operations, it is a tool for simplifying and automating processes. And when you keep the processes simple, it allows for more effective cross training of your staff. The better trained that staff is makes for a more effective workforce and fewer walls between those departments in the warehouse means better feedback, suggestion and problem solving from the whole team. And we’ve experienced a lot of that recently.

[00:42:25] Scott W. Luton: Brett. I love it. I love it. I’m really excited about what all this means for your team and the new opportunities for them. And going back to Lean Six Sigma folks, a lot of our audience knows what Brett’s talking about, but at its simplest level, the relentless pursuit of the elimination of waste and the relentless pursuit of the elimination of defects, especially with processes that take place thousands or billions of times, right? Big gains that can be had by picking and choosing your spots. Alright Brett, I want to keep going down the impact before I get Shannon to comment here. I bet this is music that Shannon Vaillancourt’s ears share some examples, a little more examples around your labor cost savings. Brett?

[00:43:03] Brett Johnson: Well, just to continue on with what I was saying before, simplifying those processes, particularly things that had to do with shipping, with RateLinx and replacing the previous TMS and the effective cross-training means a major reduction in the number of temp employees we’ve needed to keep around to keep up with the workflow. We have reduced the number of temporary warehouse employees by about 36% since January. Overall about a 34% reduction in temp labor expense, it’s saving us over 550,000 dollars a year.

[00:43:39] Scott W. Luton: A year. Oh man, Shannon Vaillancourt, that’s incredible. I love when we get down to tangible bottom-line impact and all that seems to be, at least to my ears, to be really big-time cost savings powered, at least in large part by simply finding the right TMS partner for A&A Global. Would you say, Shannon, these results are one-off or are they pretty common?

[00:44:01] Shannon Vaillancourt: Now? They’re pretty common and for us the hard part is because customers are with other systems, it’s hard for them to understand and kind of comprehend how this is possible. Sometimes you got to start small with a customer, that way they can get what we call the “RateLinx Feel” and understand how we can automate a lot of steps. I mean when it came to the freight audit piece, I remember that conversation with Brett when he was asking for some report and I just asked him like, what do you use that for? And then he tells me what they use it for and they use it to audit their freight bills and I’m like, we’ve got a way that we can help with that. And then I showed him how it works and talked about integrating the invoice in and he’s like, oh my god, that’s way better.

[00:44:55] Shannon Vaillancourt: Let me talk to some people here and all that. But it was just, that’s where we talk about don’t work the drive-through with the customer. It’s like when they pull up and they ask for stuff, I’m always curious, what do you use that for? Help me understand. We want to make sure that we’re delivering the right solution and it also helps us as we’re doing it, be the user to make sure that when they get in front of it, it’s going to work the way they’re expecting to. So that’s how I’ve always been taught to do this stuff.

[00:45:26] Scott W. Luton: Love it. And folks, if you don’t know how your organization’s handling freight invoices, you better go check. Could be a massive, massive opportunity. Alright, so Brett, we’re going to kind of flip the tables a bit. I really appreciate you taking time to share this very actionable story. But Brett, putting yourself in other folks’ shoes out there, other IT operations leaders looking at TMS or supply chain upgrades, what advice would you offer to them?

[00:45:51] Brett Johnson: Looking back over the last year or so, which has been a pretty huge year for us, I can say that the Lean Six Sigma process has made just a giant impact on the way that we evaluate processes and projects and measure their success. That’s key, right? You have to measure the performance of your current state. You have to be honest with that evaluation and create truthful metrics and baselines so you are able to measure your improvements in success once you’ve made your choices and moved forward. In addition, you have to have input and you have to address the concerns of your stakeholders, your end users, even down to the person pushing the buttons at the keyboard and putting the labels on the boxes. If you don’t do that, it will come back to haunt you. And Shannon and I actually had more than one conversation like that where I just kind of, as well as some of his staff where I give him the problem and he pulls an ASAP from his back pocket with the solution that I didn’t know he had. And then we cyber high five. But don’t let the limitations of your environment today put any restrictions on the potential of your environment tomorrow. And again, Lean Six Sigma and the tools and processes we learned with that really helped us overcome that.

[00:47:12] Scott W. Luton: Brett, I want to make sure everyone heard that the limitations of your environment today, you can’t let it limit the potential of your environment tomorrow. Brett Johnson, that is supply chain and technology poetry. My friend Shannon, I want to double dip on here. What’s the biggest myth or misconception buyers have about TMS or freight audit tech?

[00:47:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: I think Brett kind of hit it right on the head there with one, they’re used to working with a provider that in our words, just takes orders. They don’t come up with solutions. And I think a lot of that’s the business model. A lot of the other providers out there, they get paid by the hour, so it behooves them to get some convoluted thought from the customer. And that’s where the customer typically will solution for them. And the provider loves it because it’s a bazillion hours that they’re going to charge ’em for knowing all well that it’s not really going to solve anything, but they don’t care. And then once they get down that path, then they’re going to have to pay them to unwind it all. That’s not how we work. We don’t charge those professional services. So it allows us, I think, to have a different relationship with our customers and it is more solution-focused and it’s very collaborative. That’s what I tell customers for. It’s like, are you looking for a collaborative relationship to help you with solutions? Just like what Brett was able to do with one of our customers where he talked to them and saw that they were doing something even though it was a completely different ERP and he was able to bring that solution in-house to help them as well. And it’s like that’s what we do. We’re not always the expert, but we’ve got a lot of customers that probably are,

[00:48:57] Scott W. Luton: And you’re in it for the long haul, which I really admire about the RateLinx approach. Alright, a lot of good stuff here today I would offer up folks. I’ll tell you, Brett and Shannon brought it a very actionable story and I can’t wait to get updates from ’em, but here’s going to be one big takeaway from the whole conversation. Technology should make your job easier, especially your team members’. Job easier, your customer’s happier, we’ve delighted ’em and your business stronger and more resilient. A&A Global didn’t just implement a TMS. Brett and the team really re-imagined how they worked. There’s a reason they’ve been around for approaching a hundred years and becoming a powerhouse in industry. And Brett Johnson, I really appreciate you sharing, but more importantly, I appreciate you and your team’s approach here. So thanks for being here. Brett Johnson, thank you for having me.

[00:49:44] Brett Johnson: You bet.

[00:49:44] Scott W. Luton: But folks, we got some resources that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share because Shannon and his team are finding more and more ways of informing and helping customers out there. And one of those ways, the Insight Conference hosted by Shannon and RateLinx team is back again better than ever before for 2025, October 14th through the 15th in Scottsdale, Arizona. Brett Johnson is going to be keynoting along. I think his colleague, the VP of operations, Anton Conway is going to be with you, Brett, is that right?

[00:50:30] Shannon Vaillancourt: Well, what I’m focused on right now, when we get into October, it’s football season.

[00:50:34] Scott W. Luton: Football season, okay.

[00:50:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’ve got a SU defending conference champs, and then the bears have a new head coach. And I’ll tell you what, man, after watching on Sunday, we have a NFL caliber offense.

[00:50:50] Scott W. Luton: Okay?

[00:50:51] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’m like, oh my God. And the Pope is from Chicago. This has to be something, right? It has to be a sign.

[00:51:01] Scott W. Luton: The powers are aligning, the forces are aligning out there bit far beyond supply chain. But folks, check out the conference, make sure you connect with Shannon and the team that’s on the move at RateLinx. By the way, you can find Brett and their wealth of products, AAGlobal.com. And what a terrific, terrific story that Brett and Shannon delivered. So folks, first off, I want to thank Brett again. Brett, with the full plate you’ve got all the growth you are driving, the innovation, how you’re delighting the customers. We all know that’s not a nine to five job. Thank you so much for taking time out and sharing and challenging the rest of us to find similar paths for improvement and transformation. Brett Johnson with A&A Global, thanks for being here.

[00:51:47] Brett Johnson: Thank you.

[00:51:48] Scott W. Luton: You bet. Shannon Vaillancourt as always a pleasure. I look forward to reconnecting with you soon, my friend.

[00:51:52] Shannon Vaillancourt: Always. And thank you Brett, really appreciate it as always.

[00:51:55] Brett Johnson: You too, Shannon.

[00:51:57] Scott W. Luton: And I’m pulling for those bears just for you, Shannon. We, we’ll see how the NFL goes. But folks, you heard a great case study here today. What an incredible one. Here’s your homework. You got to take just one thing. Brett and Shannon gave us lots to think about, lots to do, take something to do with. But take just one thing at least and do something with it. It’s all about deeds, not words. That’s how we transform industry. We transform our organizations. And my favorite part about this is we help provide opportunities for our hardworking team members and make their days a lot easier. So with all that said, on behalf of the Supply Chain Now team Scott Luton challenge and you do good, give forward, be the change that’s needed. We’ll see you next time, right back here on Supply Chain Now. Thanks. Bye.

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