Flexport Blog

I am in a very similar situation, working for a mid-sized logistics (300 employees with small offices around the globe, 400-500M annual revenue), but with a completely different side, we do practically everything in-house with a very old software that does everything, (Multivalue D3).

My experience on your points:

>We're having to resort to a separate low-code platform to fill in the gaps. Our business operates in a specific niche and there are no other providers who cater specifically to our industry.

We also use low-code applications like Talend and TIBCO, to fill some gaps, the older folks that don't want to deal with our ERP prefer using them this way for example.

Have you tried taking a look to https://www.flexport.com/ or https://www.shipbob.com/? Afaik, these are 2 of the most overrall used in the logistics industry.

We are very slowly migrating our system in different departments to more modern solutions, but always keep in mind that as soon as you start migrating, you will need to keep both systems up for a long period of time while this happens, and that means money and workers.

>On the other hand, while our current solution seems like a straightforward CRUD app, I fear the devil is in the details. Will we get stuck at 80% completion? We do a lot of data exchange via EDIFACT, for instance, with various government institutions all over Europe. This feels like a quagmire in which development can quickly stall.

Europe is slowly moving outside of the EDIFACT…

>And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.

This is an established business play for VC backed startups.

A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional.

The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money.

Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.

I'm an industrial engineer, more manufacturing focused than specifically logistics. From what I've seen and heard from talking with other IE's at other companies, we're probably looking at a couple years before things are "normal" again, and they'll continue to be a mess in a way that's transparent to the consumer longer than that.

As long as there are areas of the world with significant trade that are being hit hard by COVID there will be disruptions. In the last few weeks, Southeast Asia has had reduced port capacity due to a COVID surge.

Heck, even in US production it's tough to get production and warehouse employees right now! Weird times for sure, even if you're paying a strong wage.

If you're curious about general global shipping, in 2017 Flexport put out a great podcast about cargo ships. I really wish they would do an additional podcast about the current happenings, though their blog posts are quite interesting.

https://www.flexport.com/blog/alexis-madrigal-containers-podcast/

Odd Lots (a Bloomberg podcast) also had a great interview from earlier this month.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-02/gene-seroka-on-the-logistical-logjam-at-the-port-of-la

Flexport - https://www.flexport.com - San Francisco, CA - Engineering

Flexport is a platform for global trade. We make it easier for companies to ship products between any two places in the world.

Paul Graham says, "Flexport is one of those rare startups that will not merely satisfy its market, but grow it. There will be more international trade because of Flexport, and international trade is a very big thing for there to be more of."

We have a tight-knit team of 7 engineers lead by our CTO Amos Elliston, who was previously co-founder of Geni, where he helped lead the engineering team that built and spun out Yammer.

Our business is working: We grew revenues 94x in the last 12-months, including 115% from March over February of this year.

We're looking for a senior front-end engineer to help create great user experiences for our clients, for our team and for our logistics partners around the world.

Check out our job posting for more information on the tech stack and engineering culture: https://www.flexport.com/careers

And please email jobs@flexport.com with your resume to apply.

Thanks!

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, Amsterdam, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chicago | Onsite, VISA | https://www.flexport.com

Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport

View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1

Tech Stack:

Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme

Mobile: React Native, Apollo

Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec

CI: GitHub, Buildkite

Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, CA - Chicago, IL - Bellevue, WA | Onsite | https://www.flexport.com

Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport

View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1

Tech Stack:

* Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme

* Mobile: React Native, Apollo

* Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec

* CI: GitHub, Buildkite

*Infrastructure: AWS, Python