Day One Recap: Unlocking Hidden Opportunities at Connections 2024

Connections 2024 kicked off June 24 with a host of incredible talks and conversations about the state of the logistics industry––and where it’s headed. It’s always exciting to jump into these dynamic issues and pick the brains of the industry’s top minds, and this conference was no exception.

Day one centered around familiar problems and potential solutions. Attendees got some deeply insightful answers to the industry’s evergreen questions: What’s on the horizon for supply chain management? How can I better leverage technology within my organization? And how does this all fit in with everything else that’s going on in the world?

The day kicked off with a keynote from Dr. Frank Luntz, Founder and President, Luntz Global. Luntz has worked as a political pollster and consultant on some of the most high-profile issues of the past few decades. He spent his keynote underscoring the degree of political division America is experiencing today, and the implications of this division for how we collectively think about progress and opportunity.

“It’s so American to believe in intergenerational improvement,” Luntz noted. “It’s so American to sacrifice so your kids can have a better life than you. And yet that’s not something we’re so sure about anymore.”

He continued: “Two-thirds of Americans consider themselves invested in the country’s success, in its future. But only a third of Americans think America is invested in them. If you don’t think your country is invested in you, you stop paying attention, you stop voting. You start yelling. You disengage.”

Armada Corporate Intelligence managing director Keith Prather also took the stage to ask an important question: Have we reached the freight inflection? In other words, now that the global destocking period seems to have ended, what can we expect from the changing global supply chain cycle? And how might the global operating environment change for better or worse over the next 18 months?

To situate the conversation, Prather zoomed in on how macroeconomic trends are having distributed and varying effects throughout the economy. Lower income households are being hit harder by inflation and seeing a more immediate negative impact on their day-to-day financial lives. Higher income households––which are more likely to hold investments––are in a much more comfortable position. In Prather’s terms: if you’re living in a $75,000-and-under household, this is the worst economy you’ve ever been in. $75,000 and up, you’re booming.”

So how will this affect the way freight moves? For an answer to this question, Prather urged the audience to pay attention to discretionary income.

“Think about a trip to Walmart. If I’m from a higher income household, I’m able to go to other parts of the store than just the food and pharmacy areas––I get to check out clothing and electronics, etc., because I’ve got that disposable income. But if I’m one of the 62% of Americans living check to check, I’m not making it out of the grocery and pharmacy sections.”

And Walmart’s data backs up Prather’s analysis:

“If you look at Walmart’s data, you see that sales at the same store are up year over year––you see them up 2-3%. But when you really look at the supply chain and look at what’s moving, it’s only certain categories of the store where we actually see merchandise flying off the shelves. The actual number of units leaving the store is a little bit less than it was last year, even though the total dollars of spending are the same. It’s an inflation factor, sure, but it goes all the way across the economy.”

Jay Silberkleit, Chief Information Officer at XPO, led a leadership session aimed at nailing down the key factors shaping the future of logistics and supply chain management.

Silberkleit was careful to note the importance of aligning your organization’s IT strategy with its overall business objectives: “It’s important to build strong feedback loops within the business. Being able to communicate––daily, ideally––about what they’re seeing in the field keeps us close to the problems they’re dealing with and the potential optimizations that could resolve them.”

Crucially, that communication needs to go both ways: “When you look at the industry, there are just so many opportunities for us to leverage technology. But at the same time, we need to be intentional about educating the business on what is possible. Because we need that imagination––we need everyone to have that imagination to be able to understand how we can solve things differently.”

He also touched on AI––a hot topic in logistics, and in every industry. Silberkleit is bullish on AI’s potential to support the logistics industry’s continued drive toward higher levels of efficiency.

“We leverage a lot of forecasting models. We look at changes and trends in volume at the service center level, and we’re able to leverage that information to match labor to what we’re expecting to see on a daily and weekly basis––and even further out than that,” Silberkleit said. “And it’s had a positive effect: In the last couple of quarters, we’ve been able to handle an influx of shipments with less labor hours per shipment.”