#14 - From Everest to Freight - Johnny Davison, Hitrak Founder & CEO

Yeah, right.

In those early days, what kind of challenges or gaps were you seeing that kind of made you go, actually, I think we should build our own?

Well, I saw paper processes mid-workflow.

So if you look at a really optimised workflow, I'll take manufacturing for example.

So you take a manufacturing line and that's an end-to-end workflow, right? So you've got, even if there's sort of interconnected and integrated plant and machinery and technology, it's end-to-end where you're There's raw product and then there's finished goods outputted, but connected operations all the way through that production line.

And if you look at a manufacturing line, you look at a supply chain, it's more or less the same thing.

But the supply chain at the time, and still now, is broken in these chains, these links, as you sort of move something from source through hubs to destination and in receiver, whoever that might be, business or consumer.

There was paper mid-workflow and you'd lose all visibility and it would impose this manual burden onto the team members that were delivering those services.

And then when we were being asked by customers, hey, could you give us this insight? Could you give us this report? We weren't actually able to come up with that data.

We didn't have the data due to the paper.

so really it was just recognizing that a modern service should be end-to-end digital and then as we sort of iteratively developed our software it became very apparent to us very early on that every operational task needed to be digitally faithfully recorded and represented in a software platform And if we could get to as close to reality as possible with our digital system, as with the operational process that we were representing, then actually we could produce these very quick real time insights and And then starting to think a little bit more about, OK, what else is relative to this transport management system? Well, we want to know where the truck is.

So we've got a telematics API and feed, and now we know where the truck is and we know what's on the truck.

What else is relevant? Well, SMS or email is relevant.

So now we can proactively communicate out where that carton is.

Or when there's an exception, we can trigger a notification that alerts the customer.

It might be a rollover.

There's been a delay to your freight.

We're telling everyone in real time via SMS and email that there's a delay.

Give them the opportunity to resupply before the end customer's impacted.

So it was really just... you know, visibility and then iteratively developing the idea for how we solve those sorts of problems was the key insight.

And like you, so you're not from a tech background.

So how did you, how did you find, like, I guess the early, early days, like, did you have to partner with, with someone from a tech background? I can imagine obviously a lot to learn from you, but yeah.

How did you find those early days coming from a non-traditional tech background?

Yeah, so I think our business, Hightrack today, has been built really with the coming together of a technology capability know-how and combining that with industry knowledge and know-how and context.

And when you've got the right balance between, okay, this is how the systems are built, and this is why they're built that way, and this is what we're trying to, these are the problems we're trying to solve, and you've got the balance between industry and tech, then I think you need the right culture, you need the right feedback loops, et cetera.