Empowering growth through innovation and integrity: Day 2 of SMC³’s Jump Start 2025
Authored by SMC³ on February 4, 2025
SMC3 Jump Start 2025 Day 2 continued to inspire and educate as we learned from leaders in all facets of the industry how emerging technology, partnerships, and strategic investments can create growth opportunities for freight companies—and how they can combat fraud and strategic theft in 2025.
Combining tech and people-centric strategies for better outcomes
Mario Harik, CEO of XPO Logistics started the morning with an engaging discussion for our “Leadership Series: In the Fast Lane” session. He discussed how structured feedback from XRO’s frontline employees alongside technological advancements have helped shape their business and led to better outcomes.
“Business is about people,” Harik said. “When you focus on listening to your employees, then take that feedback and create action plans on how to improve your company, it shows your employees, ‘We hear you.’”
That included implementing compensation changes for safe delivery of goods and utilizing new technology to ensure the quality of each loaded trailer. The results have been eye opening.
“We’ve reduced damages by more than 80% in our network in a short two years. Our claims ratio was 1.2%, now it’s down to 0.2%. Our goal is zero percent,” said Harik.
Adopting dimensioner tech as a key strategy for shippers
Part two of our leadership series saw Michelle Livingstone, founder and CEO of M.D. Livingstone Consulting LLC, leading a roundtable discussion with Kevin Huntsman, President of Mastio & Company, and Nick Waters, Director of Logistics at Masco Corporation. They reviewed the logistics challenges they see coming in 2025, and how carriers and shippers must have a collaborative relationship to flourish in this new paradigm.
“It’s not about having 15 or 16 carriers,” said Huntsman. “It’s about having five or six relationships that you can trust. Building that deep relationship with that basket of high-quality, high-value carriers is critical.”
They also touched on freight dimensioner technology, how its accuracy keeps improving as tech improves, and how it will be a crucial tool for all shippers as they prepare for NMFC changes.
“At the end of the day, shippers have so many things they’re dealing with, but this is one less thing they’ll have to deal with because if they know the rules, they can play the game,” said Waters.
Will tariff’s actually hurt business?
In part 3 of our leadership series, Jason Seidl, Managing Director of Industrials – Airfreight & Surface Transportation at TD Cowen, gave his assessment on the current state of the freight economy, including potential tariffs coming from a new administration. It’s something that Seidl has already seen affecting certain areas of the industry.
“One of the things we did see from our survey work was the amount of people pulling forward freight,” said Seidl. “You had just in excess of 25% of shippers on the railroad side say that they had pulled forward freight.”
While the overall volume of early shipments remained low (somewhere between 0-10% for those polled), these could be seen as direct staging in anticipation of tariffs. Seidl believes that we won’t see much more of this, simply because we don’t know what the future holds. Uncertainty in trade policies can make it difficult for businesses to plan accordingly.
“It’s hard to quickly react when you don’t know the specifics,” said Seidl. “We’ll have to see what happens.”
That said, there are reasons for optimism. Seidl pointed to several key indicators that may suggest the freight economy is on the rebound after a longer-than-usual downturn since 2022.
“If you looked at confidence in the overall economy… our third quarter survey was in the 30s for one and the 20s for the other, but both jumped into the 60th percentile, which says to me that we’re more confident in this economy than we were before,” said Seidl. “That gives me hope as we look at 2025.”
How new technology helps businesses fight strategic theft
Chris Burroughs, President and CEO of the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), spoke with Cathy Roberson, Trade Analyst for the Journal of Commerce about industry challenges, government relations, and the industry’s biggest challenge: fraud.
Fraud in the supply chain costs over $1 billion annually, which includes both traditional cargo theft and strategic theft (double brokering, identity fraud, and phishing scams). With a tepid response from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Burroughs spoke about the importance of this issue and how to empower them to enforce these laws.
“We’re putting a lot of pressure on FMCSA to step up and address this problem. They need to enforce regulations that are already on the books,” said Burroughs. “We’re working with congress on legislation to restore some of the FMCSA’s authority.”
In the meantime, technology has become key in the fight against fraud. “AI is being used to scrub databases, flagging suspicious patterns like the same phone number linked to multiple trucking companies.”
Getting a handle on fraud is paramount to the success of the industry.
“If we don’t get it under control, it’s going to erode trust between brokers, carriers, and shippers.”
The three-day SMC3 Jump Start 2025 supply chain conference facilitates meaningful knowledge transfer and collaboration between logistics and transportation professionals from carriers, shippers, logistics service provider and technology verticals. To learn more about SMC³ supply chain conferences, visit https://www.smc3.com/supply-chain-education.htm