Topic: 3PL Trends, Inflation Factors, and Retail Logistics 

Speaker: Andrew Cox, Senior Analyst, FrieghtWaves
 

Presentation:
FreightWaves is "The World's leading Freight Market Forecast & Analytics Platform." Andrew Cox is a senior analyst for the retail sector at FreightWaves and is the author of "Point of Sale," the retail supply chain newsletter. The topic of our discussion is "3PL Trends, Inflation Factors, and Retail Logistics." We will have a 30-minute presentation by Andrew with a 15-minute question & answer session following. 

Topics he will cover include:

3PL Trends:

- Where we are in the cycle

- Huge tech investments from the big players; trying to stave off new digital entrants

- Convergence between legacy brokers and "digital freight brokers"; not dissimilar to Amazon and Walmart increasingly becoming more similar 

Inflation:

- Commodity prices 

- Transportation costs 

Retail Logistics Trends:

- E-commerce acceleration; movement from wholesale to DTC model

- Positioning product closer to consumers

- Faster delivery times

- Accelerated use of new fulfillment methods, notably ship-from-store and BOPIS

- Transportation cost inflation everywhere on every mode

- Difficulty sourcing capacity; driver shortfall; industry bottlenecks 

Company information:

FreightWaves is the leading FreightIntel provider, offering current digital intelligence and context to the freight community on a central platform. FreightWaves' SaaS product, SONAR, is the leading freight market analytics tool and dashboard, aggregating billions of data points from hundreds of sources to provide the fastest data in the transportation and logistics sector. The platform is mode agnostic and has time-series and geo-based data from all modes of freight, including truck, rail, ocean, air, and warehouse. FreightWaves.com, the company's news site, is the leading provider of news and commentary for the space, serving up over 2.5M pageviews a month and over 1.5B monthly impressions. FreightWaves also hosts conferences under Transparency and MarketWaves branding and is a co-developer of the first futures contracts dedicated to trucking spot rates.