STORD: Increasing Supply Chain Visibility and Efficiency

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Jacob Boudreau, Founder and CTO, STORD Jacob Boudreau, Founder and CTO
From source to manufacturing to destination, a product moves through various checkpoints, including warehouses, distribution centers, and trucks. Managing the nodes in the supply chain without a purpose-built technology solution can be a herculean task for shippers and manufacturers. As a result, they end up using countless email threads, phone calls, and spreadsheets to orchestrate the shipments’ entire journey across distribution nodes, until it reaches its destination. Further complicating the situation, customers’ expectations continue to raise the burden on shippers to be consistent with timely deliveries. Customers are less likely to tolerate delivery or product shortcomings. To this end, supply chain visibility has become crucial; especially with the pressure to be ahead of competitors, shippers need to move faster and leverage the right technology solution.

This is where STORD helps shippers, with its digital warehousing and distribution network solution that streamlines the capital intensive, slow-moving, and disjointed supply chain process through the power of cloud computing. STORD knits a network of logistics infrastructure, real-time visibility software, and data-driven expertise together to move products across the globe with greater transparency and flexibility and in an optimized manner. It helps companies and shippers to gain the capabilities and technology required to compete on a global scale. “We’ve connected the historically fragmented supply chain into one seamless network to abstract away the complexities of building cloud-based distribution for shippers,” says Jacob Boudreau, founder, and CTO of STORD.

In an interview with CIOApplications Magazine, Boudreau gives insights into how STORD helps its customers gain more visibility across their supply chain and build true omnichannel distribution.

Could you elaborate more on STORD’s solution and how it benefits to your clients?

Our network of warehouses and carriers and broad logistics services is connected through our cloud-based software. To provide extended visibility to shippers, we integrate their enterprise resource planning (ERP), order management system (OMS), and transportation management system (TMS) to our software; this helps our clients take their logistics to the cloud and ship through the flexible, nationwide network of warehouses, carriers, or onboard their existing 3PLs. This, in turn, standardizes the data between systems and enables a central point of truth across a distributed supply chain. In our software, we’re able to provide current availability and the operational tools to manage their inventory, orders, shipments, and product flow across the network.

STORD provides the “control tower” to a shipper’s internal and external infrastructure in their distribution to enable operational management, multisite inventory visibility, and more. We empower our customers to have visibility across their supply chain and, more importantly, make better decisions in a well informed and immediate manner without being hemmed in by pre-existing infrastructure.

What does STORD’s customer onboarding process look like?

We approach every customer differently based on their needs to ensure they get value as quickly as possible. For our customers to experience the most success, we begin by evaluating their entire distribution and ensure that they are working at optimal efficiency.

Then we leverage data science and machine learning to ensure that inventory is placed where it should be. During this time, we’re rapidly placing their inventory in optimal locations for cost-savings and quality improvements. This is one of the areas that the STORD model and solutions are really unique, we connect both design and execution; whereas a company might have historically ran expensive modeling solutions then tried to piece together various 3PLs to enable it, we are able to immediately execute on the optimizations our customers need and our data science team identifies.

We’ve connected the historically fragmented supply chain into one seamless network to abstract away the complexities of building cloud-based distribution for shippers


In other cases, we work on the immediate requirements of our customers. We help them scale and replicate the success-formula across their other locations, whether via software, services, or across different distribution channels.

Can you please cite one of your customer success stories?

We have a customer whose distribution network was relying upon its manufacturing plants to distribute finished products to their end customers leading to a lot of under-optimized and costly shipments. This whole process was tracked and handled in their CRM, ERP, and across emails, phone calls, and physical documents. This led to a lot of inaccurate inventory and delayed delivery of goods – all of which was impacting the client’s bottom line.

We helped them scale their distribution network across multiple new facilities and provided them our cloud-based software that enabled their needed supply chain visibility alongside an integration directly to their ERP. With our software and EDI integration to their ERP system, the client could accelerate their delivery of product, ensure accurate inventory at all times, and make better supply chain decisions. Since then, they have scaled to four locations across multiple business units in the company.

What sets STORD apart from the rest of its competitors?

What differentiates STORD from others is our business model and how we work with our customers. Our platform enables customers to gain visibility into their current supply chain as well as determine optimizations powered by our data science and machine learning and immediately execute on those insights. This is what enables them to build and scale sophisticated and integrated cloud-based supply chains. Alongside this, our team brings years of expertise in the supply chain landscape – our executive team is made up of individuals coming from Amazon’s supply chain teams to those with WMS and ERP software backgrounds to ensure expertise for any of our customers’ needs.

My co-founder and STORD’s CEO, Sean Henry, and I always reiterate that one of our core values is to focus on the customer. We believe we are successful when our customers are successful.

How has COVID-19 impacted your business or that of your clients? How did STORD align itself accordingly?

Our diverse customer base allowed us to witness the situation across various industries during the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately provide best-practices to each of our customers. We have helped companies that were impacted by dropping demands, quickly reposition inbounding product to lower-cost locations. We have also helped companies rapidly roll out new distribution locations and integrations to keep up with the increased demands. Our solution has helped companies in these dramatic demand/supply whiplashes or variations in markets to avoid having that fixed static infrastructure and fixed assets that blocked them from being agile or flexible.

Historically, companies have invested in technology areas, in new product development, and a variety of other areas, but not typically in the supply chain. But as a result of the pandemic, we are seeing companies making heavy investments in their supply chain and re-evaluating how they can use it as a competitive advantage.

What does the roadmap look like for STORD?

In May, we acquired a transportation provider Cove Logistics, to further strengthen our overall distribution capabilities, particularly in freight services. Moving forward, we are building new capabilities across distribution and logistics services to enable companies to handle some of the shifting trends from external factors like COVID-19 as well as accelerating supply chain demands. As we continue accelerating our additional capabilities across distribution, we’re continuing to help companies build successful omnichannel distribution.

We primarily operate in North America, but we are quickly expanding. Ultimately, our goal is to enable shippers with a global logistics network and software to build a successful supply chain.

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