The Air Cargo
Operating System
Helping Carriers Bring Brands Closer to Consumers in 2023
Presented by ClearJet • Author: Chris Guggenheim
HOW TO READ THIS WHITE PAPER
Picture this: You’re responsible for the on-time delivery of 10,000-1,000,000 consumer ecommerce orders per month. You’ve been in the transportation, logistics, and distribution (TLD) sector for 8-25 years and your most recent area of focus is parcel network design and implementation. You have strong, sometimes personal relationships with senior management at FedEx and UPS and might know the name of your representatives’ children. You consume a spectrum of media related to mastering your role including the more traditional PARCEL Magazine and the more progressive FreightWaves. You scroll through your LinkedIn feed daily, reading long-form posts from professional peers who moonlight as industry influencers to gain consulting opportunities. Although millions of packages move per day, the composure of industry-wide logistics networks are influenced by a few powerful personalities.
Are you going to be one of them in 2023?
This white paper details a revolutionary protocol that will shape the next chapter of your high-volume parcel network masterclass. There are revolutionary solutions for the first, middle mile, and last mile separately. There are accessorial solutions for visibility, auditing, and sustainability. Some companies offer services that bundle up as many of these solutions as possible, often becoming adjacent to a ‘master of none’ outcome. What if you could flip an ‘on’ switch for an operating system addressing the most impressionable parts of a package’s journey without overreaching into places it can’t optimize as efficiently?
Delete the middle mile with ClearJet:
The Air Cargo Operating System.
Chris Guggenheim
Founder & CEO ClearJet
Chris Guggenheim is the Founder & CEO of ClearJet. ClearJet localizes DTC orders for enterprise merchants. Prior to ClearJet, Chris launched X Delivery as the CEO. Chris is the Founder and Executive Chair of ONELIVE, Shopify Plus’ largest value-add reseller focused on DTC Entertainment, Sports, Esports, and Food/Beverage merchants. Chris is an active member of YPO and the Austin TX entrepreneurship community.
A Visual History
In the past few years, a few common approaches have been implemented by the highest level decision makers in the parcel and transportation world tasked with parcel network design within both brand and carrier organizations:
1
Nationwide Carriers Only
Focus on nurturing key relationships with incumbent nationwide shipping carriers like FedEx and UPS along with the USPS; and services that combine the two (e.g FedEx SmartPost and UPS SurePost) in order to gain the most dramatic volume-based discounts for their shipping program. This is a traditional approach that will benefit operating expense ratios, cost per shipment, and cost of goods sold and shipped metrics for senior management at brand-organizations responsible for order fulfillment and senior management within carrier organizations responsible for strategic demand channel development.
Nationwide Carriers Only
Retailer
Carrier
Logistics Flow
2
Carrier Diversification
Focus on adding additional carriers and services who specialize in specific regions or specific legs of a package’s journey from warehouse to consumer in order to decrease the risk associated with relying on very few options for package delivery. This is a new approach adopted by some brand-organizations that benefits overall network time in transit metrics and offers some consumers hyper-fast delivery depending on their location (typically, metropolitan areas). This approach has created new avenues of experimentation for parcel professionals serving retailer organizations on the buy-side. It has also created new business opportunities on the sell-side for entrepreneurs to create niche solutions that ‘new-age’ parcel professionals might want to plug-in to their program.
Shipper Economics
Retailer
Carrier
3
Vertical Integration
Focus on an M&A path towards integrating existing parcel optimization resources in-house. The vertical integration we’ve seen on the grandest stage has been that of retailer organizations buying up service organizations focused on the most progressive areas of parcel network design, like AEO’s acquisition of Quiet Logistics and then AirTerra (e.g a distributed 3PL network and then an air cargo share network). This approach has created exit outcomes on the sell-side and increased ownership of all areas of logistics on the buy-side.
The Operating System
ClearJet uses its own technology to provide an invisible connection between airlines and last mile delivery carriers to help carriers bring brands closer to consumers.
We’ve established who will benefit from this white paper, and detailed the path towards where we are now.
In recent years, the interest of senior management focused on parcel network design has increased exponentially:
The Air Cargo Operating System addresses three core challenges that senior management responsible for parcel network design and implementation are tasked with:
- Maintaining nationwide carrier relationships
- Carrier diversification
- “Playing nice in the sandbox”
