#103: The First Mile Advantage – with Nick Daly of Gravity Supply Chain

And Nick, if you were to think about gravity and what makes it unique, right? Because there's so many other solution providers that tackle visibility in general.

A lot of them tackle the middle mile, even the last mile, of course.

But thinking about the uniqueness of gravity, what would you say are the main things that come to mind?

Well, in relation to those other visibility platforms, when you focus only on the ocean leg, you're watching the outcome of decisions that were already made weeks or months ago.

The vessel status gives you almost no time to respond.

And what people are missing is the production phase.

that time before a container even reaches a departure port, that's where the risk is.

A production milestone that slips in week three of a 12-week lead time is completely manageable.

You can recover, you can make a decision, you can accelerate, you can substitute, you can adjust the booking.

And the same slippage that's discovered in week 10 or just before the container or the console is delivered to port, It's an entirely different outcome.

You can't react.

And it's entirely because of when you knew about it.

But I think the thing that people miss most isn't just risk visibility.

It's the range of supply chain initiatives that become generally deliverable when you can see upstream.

And this is where I think gravity helps.

enables, provides within its functionality as well.

So things such as shipment consolidation.

So it's a straightforward cost lever, but you can't execute it reliably unless you know which factories will be ready and when.

So if your production data is sitting in email threads and Excel spreadsheets, consolidation for you or for your partner becomes guesswork and you miss windows constantly.

That cost, that bad planning has ramifications further downstream as well i'll give you some more examples multi-country consolidation is the same problem but at a larger scale so many larger brands bcos shippers they do multi-country consolidation so pulling cargo from say vietnam bangladesh india into a single booking requires precise upstream timing and data across all three origins simultaneously Let's go more, even DC Bypass is another one.

So routing goods directly to stores or end customers only works if you have a high confidence in arrival timing and inbound quality.

And again, that confidence comes from upstream visibility.

Milk runs, scheduled collections across a cluster of suppliers on a single truck again require knowing which suppliers will be ready and when and more let's say a little bit more practically carrier forecasting allocation if you're managing contracted carrier capacity you need to know your booking and volume weeks out gravity's platform gives you data that makes all of that possible recently i was reading about the blank sailing schedule in the load star and I think it mentioned even in the best recent month, nearly one in 10 planned TU was blanked.

So that in itself is a port level event.

But whether it destroys your supply chain or is absorbed with minimal disruption depends entirely on decisions that happened weeks earlier upstream.