A few years ago, I saw that technology had progressed to the point where I felt we could finally solve them affordably, so I decided to go for it.

One of the biggest gaps in an import supply chain is also one of the most elemental ones, which is the purchase order itself. To state the obvious, an import order is the first step in a very lengthy and complex buying process. It takes 4 months on average from order placed to product received, products are made to order, and there a lot of product, supply chain, and regulatory requirements throughout. On average it takes 6 departments and at least 5 entities to get the products to market.

Importers plan and create orders with a lot of care because sales are in the balance. What products they buy, how they buy, and when they buy ultimately is make or break for sales and the profitability of the business as a whole. At minimum, they review things like historical trends, inventory on hand, expected costs, quantity breaks, expected margins, and customer-by-customer sales forecasts. Typically this is all data available and managed in a company's system of record (ERP).

To give you a sense of the impact of an order, I used some publicly available stats from S&P Global (JOC). I estimate that the 98th importer on their list spent roughly $225,000,000 on products and another $38,000,000 on import logistics. Conservatively this importer is expecting to generate at least $500,000,000 in sales from these orders. A quarter of a billion dollars to get their products here, with a half a billion in sales in the balance. Even a relatively small importer is spending tens of millions, and expecting to 2-3X them in sales.

So what is the problem with the order? The entire ordering process is done manually. I know that sounds strange given what I outline above, however it's almost universally the case.

Most commonly, the order which was carefully curated, is exported from the ERP and emailed to suppliers as a PDF.

Managing import orders manually has negative knock on impacts throughout the entire process. Lack of efficiency, the inability to create a connected network, diagnose and resolve product issues before they sail, automate manual steps, and perhaps most importantly the inability to properly forecast sales.

Bottom line is there is a lot of money at stake with a process that makes costly errors and delays inevitable.

Our solution was to build an app which turns the entire ordering and shipping process digital.

The tools we created in the app were purpose built to solve most of the challenges described above. It's been a long journey but it's also been really amazing to have had the opportunity to bring something significant to life, with the incredible support of so many great people.