EasyPost Insider: Solving Complex Shipping Challenges With John Wharff From EasyPost - Ep. 35
In This Episode
In this EasyPost Insider episode, John Wharff introduces us to EasyPost Enterprise and explains how it helps businesses solve their most pressing shipping challenges.
What is EasyPost Enterprise?
John explains that EasyPost Enterprise is “software that is geared towards … really high performance, high complexity [shippers]. It opens the door to things like routing logic, business rules, [and] custom labels.”
Lori raises a question that might be on listeners’ minds: who should be using EasyPost Enterprise? John mentions that Enterprise is perfect for businesses in complex industries like pharmaceuticals or food. But any company that ships high volumes “can benefit from the type of processing speeds that EasyPost Enterprise can offer, as well as that business rule and logic layer.”
The importance of custom business logic
Custom business logic is one of EasyPost Enterprise’s most important features. “One of the core components of the EasyPost Enterprise software is this idea of working with you to build business logic,” John explains.
“[When] an order comes in from one of your customers, it's running through all of our logic gates. We are picking the best possible service that meets all of your different commitments and then getting you that label so that you can get the box out the door.”
He continues, “The idea is really understanding what's important to you as a shipper and then building the system custom for you so that we're accomplishing those goals.”
A system that grows with your business
Unlike software providers that nickel-and-dime their customers, EasyPost Enterprise works to understand your business needs so you pay for exactly what you need, with no surprise fees. John says, “We want you to have a full understanding of what you're getting. And through [the] discovery process … we can give you an all-in idea of exactly what we think you need to solve [your] problem[s] so that you can avoid fees in the future.”
The model is designed to scale with your business. As John puts it, “You always have to be planning for what comes next, because the idea and the goal is always growth. You want to be shipping more. You want to be moving more things. And it's really important to anticipate that so that you can think toward the future.”
Links
- Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-wharff-7423403a/
- Visit EasyPost’s website: https://www.easypost.com/
Transcript
Lori Boyer 00:00
Welcome back everyone to a special edition of Unboxing Logistics. I'm here in the studio. I'm Lori Boyer from EasyPost and we are having an episode dedicated especially to our high volume, high complexity, high performance shippers. I have brought in my dear friend and colleague and guru of EasyPost, John Wharff.
And he's gonna talk us through, we've been receiving a lot of questions lately around a new product that we've had come out called EasyPost Enterprise. It is for those exact shippers I was just mentioning. And there's a lot of questions about how it works and, and really some general overall questions when you're getting into that, you know, high performance era of your, your shipping product, what, what you need to do. And so I brought John. John, can you introduce yourself to our wonderful audience here at Unboxing Logistics?
John Wharff 00:55
Yeah. Hey everyone. My name is John Wharff. I've worked here at EasyPost for about five and a half years. Always in technical roles. I currently lead up our sales engineering team that helps with new oncoming prospects to understand our entire product suite and the best way that we can kind of work with them in order to solve all of their shipping problems.
Lori Boyer 01:12
That's right, community. I brought in a sales engineer. Huh. Massive, massive nerd appeal here, here. My, my audience loves nerds.
John Wharff 01:21
Oh, perfect.
Lori Boyer 01:22
I'm the biggest nerd. So, all right, John, one of our favorite things of our community is to kind of get to know our guests. He's a real person, even if he is a nerd, right? Right. So I have a quick question for you. If you were going to have your favorite comfort food, okay, it's going to get you by on some night when you just need some comfort food. What would you, what do you go for?
John Wharff 01:47
Easy answer. Biscuits and gravy. 100 percent of the time. Oh yeah.
Lori Boyer 01:50
Are you from the South?
John Wharff 01:52
No, I'm not. I'm from Colorado, but there's just something about it. It's the perfect food in my opinion. It's always good. Doesn't matter, day or night. It hits the spot.
Lori Boyer 02:00
Okay. Our, our foreign viewers, I've, I've heard, I have some friends who are from England who were shocked at the idea of biscuits being with gravy, but it is delicious, so give it a try.
Awesome. This is a special edition. I like to say of EasyPost Insider, because we are going to be talking a little bit about EasyPost today. So I have curated a bunch of questions people have submitted wanting to know more about what this EasyPost Enterprise is. So, question right off the bat, John. Everyone knows, you know, EasyPost does the API. We've been around forever. Amazing reliability. What the heck is EasyPost Enterprise?
John Wharff 02:40
Yeah, so EasyPost Enterprise is a specific software that is geared towards those exact shippers that you mentioned before. The really high performance, high complexity. It allows and opens the door to a bunch of things like routing logic, business rules, custom labels. And it's basically the idea is it's a full suite that can communicate directly with an ERP system or a WMS system to pull in order information, process things, go through whatever logic you've established is kind of the, the key for your specific company. Get you labels, get you tracking data, and push that all back into the relevant systems.
Lori Boyer 03:14
Are there any kind of flags our audience should know that maybe they want this kind of enterprise type solution? You know, how much they're shipping or the types of things they're shipping that maybe would indicate that this might be something they'd need?
John Wharff 03:26
Yeah, I would say that if you are in any industry that is inherently complex, pharmaceutical, food, anything that's perishable, stuff like that, or if you're just really high volume, you're moving a lot of boxes, you can really benefit from the type of processing speeds that EasyPost Enterprise can offer, as well as that business rule and logic layer that I talked about before.
With our API, it was really nice because it's easy to write into. It gets you a lot of data, gets you a lot of information, but all of the decision making is, it lives in your four walls. You have to code it, you have to understand it, and you have to tweak it, adjust it as you grow. With EasyPost Enterprise, we can actually kind of be the custodians of those rules, understand your shipping processes, get them loaded in, and anytime you want to make a change on the fly, we can help you do that.
Lori Boyer 04:07
I love that. So, hopefully that helps everyone understand a little bit about what EasyPost Enterprise is. And now we're going to jump straight into our questions that people are asking, putting John on the hot seat. Question number one, I'm experiencing rapidly rising shipping volumes, but it's leading to some system bottlenecks and, you know, costs and everything else that comes with that. Any tips for me, and how could EasyPost Enterprise help?
John Wharff 04:33
Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's the perfect problem to have, right? Our goal with every customer, no matter how big or small is we want to grow with them. That's the idea. So once you start getting to this spot where you're starting to get natural bottlenecks, just because your volume has increased so much, first of all, celebrate a little bit.
That's an awesome benchmark to hit. The second thing that you need to think about is exactly which systems that you're plugged into and kind of pinpointing latency issues. Two of the main things that we've kind of built into the idea of EasyPost Enterprise is we need to be able to process shipments really, really quickly. Being within the sub second range is incredibly important. Because you're going to have a ton of throughput.
Lori Boyer 05:10
At this scale, right?
John Wharff 05:11
A hundred percent. And that's the other issue is the scale, right? Is how many shipments a day are you processing? So you need to look for a partner who can do things really, really quickly.
And they can also do really, really high volume. And the way that we've built EasyPost Enterprise is this idea of kind of a hybrid carrier approach, because typically the biggest latency is reaching out to a carrier, waiting for them to respond and getting stuff back. So through blending API integrations, on premise integrations, and everything else, we can tweak all those speeds and we can also do things kind of in parallel so that we can do a lot of processing really, really quickly and make sure that you get the responses that you need.
Lori Boyer 05:45
I love that. Cause at this high performance, high volume type level, a second or a penny, or a, those can add up to massive numbers.
John Wharff 05:54
Yeah, nothing ever gives me more heartache than walking into a warehouse, looking at their conveyor and they're like, within the last foot, we need to validate addresses and rate shop and get a label. Because usually then there's a process issue and we can look at that and we can also help you to overcome those issues as well.
Lori Boyer 06:08
Okay. Oh, so that brings up a question for me. So let's say that they are experiencing bottlenecks. You said that we can help them. Is that through our customer support? How do we help them identify bottlenecks?
John Wharff 06:19
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a whole consultative wing that is completely geared towards these really high volume shippers. They can come into your warehouses, they can tour your spaces, they're going to have a lot of, you know questions to kind of dive and delve into your processes, exactly what you're doing so that they can understand it.
But they can also see, if there are issues that don't need to exist, if maybe there are things that hey, we've always done it this way, this is the way we want to do it and they can kind of help you with an outside pair of eyes, look at exactly what you're doing and help to really speed up and modify that so that as you grow. Either those bottlenecks don't exist because we've already eliminated them, or we can help get rid of them, smooth them over, and get you to where you need to be.
Lori Boyer 06:59
I, that outside set of eyes is so critical, so I love that. Alright, next question. We, another good problem, are currently expanding our warehouse network. And we have multiple systems that we're gonna have to work with, integrate. What can I do to manage that more efficiently? How does your, your software fit into that?
John Wharff 07:18
Yeah I agree. It is a good problem to have. And it's something that we see a lot, right? Either through acquisition or through growth or anything else like that. You usually end up having kind of this hodgepodge of mismatched systems that maybe they communicate, maybe they don't. One warehouse does things one way, another warehouse does another thing another way. And I think that it's two fold. Once again, it goes back to kind of that consultative nature of having someone take a look at it, understand what your processes are and then kind of recommend ways to unify your approach.
But then also it's always really beneficial if you can get into one system. Luckily, the way that EasyPost Enterprise was built is we can integrate into a whole host of different ERPs, WMSs, whatever host system you might be using. So the idea is we can kind of be that crutch that gets you along while you all are operating on multiple systems, but we can also help you to really pare down, modify and change so that hopefully we get you to a place where you're only working out of one system. The process is the same across all your distribution centers, and you're going to see a lot more success that way.
Lori Boyer 08:20
I love how you said, you mentioned basically the people and the processes and the technology. There's like kind of the, the three keys to making sure, especially as you mentioned when you're expanding warehouses, the processes may be totally different from one to the next, getting that all aligned is critical.
So, all right, my current shipping system has so many fees. It feels really expensive. What are the fees associated with EasyPost Enterprise? What can I do about tons of fees?
John Wharff 08:51
Yeah. I would say that we try to handle that in two discrete ways. The first way is through that very early scoping process that I talked about earlier. Where we want to come in and we want to understand exactly where you're at, where you want to be, and we're going to build a system that can do that.
As part of that process, we're going to figure out exactly what you need. And we're going to give you upfront, transparent pricing. We have no desire to nickel and dime people, to try to add things in later that you won't benefit from. We really want to make something that solves all of your pain points and accomplishes exactly what you're trying to get done.
The second part of it really is through that fee structure and through the way that we've set up EasyPost Enterprise, we want you to have a full understanding of what you're getting. And through that discovery process, through understanding exactly what we want to get, we can give you kind of an all in idea of exactly what we think you need in order to solve that problem so that you can avoid fees in the future.
Let's look at what your shipping is going to look like in the next six months, year, two years, so that we can get ahead of the curve and we can get a full understanding of exactly the system that you need.
Lori Boyer 09:56
I think that at this level of shipping, having a proactive system that's built customized specifically to your needs is so critical.
John Wharff 10:05
Yeah, you always have to be planning for what comes next because once again, the idea and the goal is always growth. You want to be shipping more. You want to be moving more things. And it's really important to anticipate that so that you can think toward the future. And what will I need in a year or two years?
Lori Boyer 10:19
Perfect. Okay. So, this person said, with my current shipping solution, support sometimes takes months to fulfill. I feel frustrated. Tell me honestly, how does support work with EasyPost?
John Wharff 10:34
Yeah, so, we actually have multiple tiered support that we can again, custom tailor to whatever your specific needs are. The key kind of takeaways are, we have 24 by 7 support that is always available via email, that you can immediately reach out to and get a response. We're also going to assign you some dedicated internal representatives, like a customer success manager, a solutions engineer, both on the business side and on the technical side, so that you always have someone that you can talk to a real person who is going to respond and get back to you with answers.
One of the things that I always say is we can't always solve problems within five minutes, but we're always going to listen to you within five minutes so that we can understand what's going on. And we can get to work right away on a solution.
Lori Boyer 11:15
My poor listener, whoever submitted this question. I don't know where you've been, but I feel so sorry if that's the kind of support you're getting. I would bet my last dollar on the support at EasyPost. The customer success team is unbelievably dedicated here. So that, that is one I, I just tip my hat to them. They are incredible. Data. We're getting data questions and we talk quite often about data on this show because analytics and data are so critical to success.
But a lot of people get overwhelmed. A lot of people feel like, oh yeah, I've got a lot of data. Great. Now what? How doEasyPostlse Enterprise help them actually create actionable business moves and, and create those opportunities to make a good decision with the data?
John Wharff 12:02
Yeah. So I think that one of the most important things about data is you have to have an understanding of where you're at. You have to kind of take an open, honest look at where are we succeeding? Where are we failing? And that's the type of data that we're going to immediately start getting as we work with you. We're going to be able to look up things like how you're doing rate shopping, how you're routing packages, what your carrier selection is like. And then and we can immediately point out potential issues with that part of the process so that we can say, maybe think about these other carriers in this region, look at why you're determining what service levels you're going to buy, what type of commitments are you making to deliverability to your customers?
Because we have levers and we have products that can help you really accomplish a lot on the rate shopping side of it. On the back side of every package journey, there's obviously a ton of data around tracking. We live in a very consumer focused shipping world. And I, it's one of those really interesting industries to work in too because we all obviously are on this side of the fence where we work in shipping, but we're also all consumers.
I order stuff online. Everyone I work with orders stuff online. And I think understanding exactly what your customer expectations are and being able to meet those expectations are huge. And the way that we do that is by gathering a ton of tracking data in every region, in every carrier, in every service level, so that we can take a look at how you're performing and then also offer suggestions.
We work with customers that kind of run the gamut between they have their own internal, you know, really amazing data analytics team that is going to be looking at these things, all the way down to the people who have never opened a spreadsheet or looked at anything like this. And we have different services that can help throughout all of that.
Once again, we have consultants that can help if you don't have your own data analytics team, that can tell you what to look for, that can help you make proactive changes before they become a problem. And if you just want us to push you the raw data because you already have really great experts who know how to analyze it. We can do that as well, and everything in between.
Lori Boyer 13:57
Oh, that is so neat. You know, we just recently put out a little survey asking some of the people in our industry what kind of tools they felt like were most critical during peak season. And the number one answer was rate shopping tools. And so I'm really glad that you brought that up because rate shopping is so huge, being able to find the right carrier.
When people are using EasyPost or EasyPost enterprise, are they getting? Well, how is the data used? Is it just their data they're comparing so they can look back and say, like, oh, well, when I used FedEx, it was late three times or when I used UPS. I love you FedEx. I wasn't calling you out. Or is it kind of a conglomeration of all the data from all the customers? How does that data kind of work?
John Wharff 14:39
Yeah, I would say we take both approaches, right? It's really important to know your data and what that says about your business. But then we also have specific tools like our SmartRate engine that was built behind being able to make sure we keep a really high customer expectation as well as saving money on shipping.
We all know that carrier estimates about deliverability can be fairly unreliable. And it just gets worse and worse as you approach peak season because every network is clogged. Everybody's, you know, trying to get everything to where to be on time. So we have a huge amount of data that we can pull from so that we can build models about how long an actual package takes to get from an origin to destination, regardless of what time of year it shipped, because we're going to look at not only that specific week in a vacuum, but we're going to say, how did we perform last year at this time?
How did these specific carriers perform two years ago at this time? So that we are giving you actionable data about specifically what rates you're picking so you can make sure it's going to get there on time and you're going to save some money on the service level decisions.
Lori Boyer 15:35
I think that it makes so much sense when you mentioned that you should be looking at your own data as well. I was speaking with an EasyPost Enterprise customer just the other day and he mentioned that they have four peak seasons, you know, each year. And so you need to be looking, the industry wide may not be as applicable as what yours were during that peak season.
John Wharff 15:54
Yeah. I mean, typically when we hear peak season, we're thinking, you know, November, December, everything like that. But if you're a company that's focused around Mother's Day deliveries, you have a completely different peak season. So it can be really, really dependent on who we're talking to, what their business model is, and making sure that we understand that and can give them those actionable insights.
Lori Boyer 16:13
Perfect. Okay. Speaking of complexity, getting outside of your borders, okay. International shipping obviously has exploded, and projections show it is going to continue to explode. So we have a lot of people who are entering the kind of international shipping arena for the first time and feel completely overwhelmed with regulations. Or those who are simply expanding to additional countries or just basically how does EasyPost Enterprise help with that international shipping regulations?
John Wharff 16:44
Yeah, the first thing I would say is if you're dipping your toe in international for the first time, take a deep breath, it's gonna be okay. We know that it seems really really convoluted but the first step is really understanding the differences between a domestic shipment and an international shipment. And we through our guides, through our documentation, can kind of guide you through what information you need to be gathering ahead of time so that you're not having any trouble clearing into a specific country through customs.
We are going to make sure that we can provide you with all of the documentation you need to clear customs into whatever country you may be shipping into. And we also have a lot of advanced programs with many of our carriers where we can just automatically electronically transmit that information so that you're not dealing with the old paper, plastic slip type things, juggling things in the warehouse.
Putting the wrong sticker on the wrong box and stuff like that. So I would say step one is let's talk about it. Let's have a deep discussion about international shipping so that you can understand what types of data we're going to need from you in order to be successful. And then trust us to make sure that we're getting you everything you need to get it over the border.
Lori Boyer 17:44
I, I just want to, again giving, apparently I want our CS team to, you know, give me extra favors. Cause I love them. But I was just speaking with someone yesterday who said somebody had reached out to them and said, we want to expand for the first time into this other country. What do I do? And so you do, you have that help out there. As John said, take a deep breath and your EasyPost Enterprise CSM, your, your customer support, they're going to help you walk you through it. So.
John Wharff 18:08
Absolutely.
Lori Boyer 18:09
That's great. Okay. Let's talk automation. So with EasyPost Enterprise, am I able to automate custom shipping and handling rules?
John Wharff 18:17
Absolutely. So, I would say that that's actually one of the key components of EasyPost Enterprise. So, there are a lot of customers that make decisions before they're ever actually talking to any type of transportation management system. They already know what rate shopping they're doing. They've been doing this a really long time. They know what service level they want. That's great for the big guys who have been doing it forever.
But there are so many people in the middle who don't really know, how do I set up rules so that I make sure we are getting things there quickly and we are getting things there as cheaply as possible through our carrier mix and everything else like that. One of the core components of the EasyPost Enterprise software is this idea of working with you to build business logic so that all that's happening on the back end is an order comes in from one of your customers, it's running through all of our logic gates. We are picking the best possible service that meets all of your different commitments and then getting you that label so that you can get the box out the door. The idea is really understanding what's important to you as a shipper and then building the system custom for you so that we're accomplishing those goals.
Lori Boyer 19:17
So that kind of ties into my next question. It just says, is that the same then for shipping label customization or branding. Can all of that be automated?
John Wharff 19:26
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a concept within EasyPost Enterprise of like document templates that you can build. So if you want to do things like add custom routing barcodes that help packages move throughout your warehouse, or do you just want to add your logo to a label and everything else like that?
We can set up templates so that every time specific orders come through, or even if you're doing things like for fulfilling for other companies, doing drop shipping, you want a specific order reference number to change what logo gets populated the label. We can do that and get that set up for you.
Lori Boyer 19:54
What I'm hearing from John is if you want it, it can be done.
John Wharff 19:58
Most likely.
Lori Boyer 19:58
Pretty much. I was just speaking with a wonderful EasyPost Enterprise customer. FabFitFun, recently, and he could not say enough about the customization options. That basically you could take the system and make it do anything that you wanted to do, so.
John Wharff 20:14
Yeah, I think that that comes into problem solving, right? You can't solve a problem if you don't first understand what the problem is. And then the problem won't always have the same solution. Different people are going to have different needs, are going to have different priorities, and it's only through understanding that and being in the industry so long that we've kind of seen all of the different problems that specific shippers can have that we can help you to overcome those problems by custom building you a system that meets all of your needs.
Lori Boyer 20:40
Awesome. Well, that is all the questions that I've got. John, thank you so much for being here. Is there anything else that you feel like you'd like to add about EasyPost Enterprise or maybe if somebody is wanting to learn about it, you know, how should they get in contact?
John Wharff 20:55
Yeah, I think that it's really important to, even if it's kind of a fleeting desire where you just want to know what's available, you want to know, what types of systems exist? What types of custom solutions work? Just reach out to us. You can contact us through our website. You can reach directly out to like sales@easypost.com, whatever it may be. We always want to take the approach that knowledge is good. We want to share it. We have a lot of it. We have a lot of people who have been in the shipping and logistics industry for 20, 30, 40 years.
Lori Boyer 21:25
It's true.
John Wharff 21:26
We want to be able to share that information because it doesn't do any good if it just lives with us. So reach out, let's talk, let's figure out exactly what your problems are. And we probably have a solution that can help you out.
Lori Boyer 21:37
Well, I know that one of the cornerstones here at EasyPost is that we want to simplify the complex. So while it is highly complex, high performance shipping, EasyPost Enterprise and EasyPost is designed to try to help simplify that. So thank you again so much for being here. And as John said, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.