Mariner Logistics Accelerated Product Development 24x with Digibee

The challenge

Mariner Logistics, a prominent player in the logistics industry, offers warehousing, fulfillment, and inventory management services to fast-growing companies. With over 200 employees, Mariner Logistics serves renowned companies such as Bayer, Shasta, Masienda, and Blackhive. As a tech-forward brokerage, Mariner Logistics aimed to scale its business by enhancing efficiency and capacity through technological advancements.

Mariner Logistics launched Project Apollo to integrate various technologies into a unified system to provide turnkey automation for logistics brokerage. Project Apollo focused on automating freight coverage, managing capacity, bringing extra capacity online for businesses, and automating the spot bidding process with a risk-focused approach. The project leverages advanced AI technologies for AI phone calls, ensuring seamless cross-channel communication across email, voice, and SMS.

Project Apollo is a key competitive advantage for Mariner. It is designed to provide a seamless experience by integrating multiple systems, including customers’ ERP systems (such as SAP and Oracle), carrier systems, and supporting automated workflows. Project Apollo aims to meet carriers where they are—whether through phone calls, text messages, or emails—to ensure effective interactions, increasing successful engagements without forcing carriers to adopt new technology platforms. This approach digitizes non-digital interactions, creating immense value for shippers and 3PLs, and allows brokerages like Mariner Logistics to automate a large percentage of its freight operations, significantly enhancing both capacity and efficiency.

Before Digibee:

Before adopting Digibee, Mariner Logistics’ engineers were overwhelmed with multiple tasks. They developed custom engines for their SaaS product to meet specific business needs and spent significant time coding connections to third-party carrier and shipper applications. Additionally, engineers were hand-coding API data and orchestrations, which was time-consuming and created long onboarding times for new customers and carriers. This impacted overall customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and created resource bottlenecks.

“We integrated our digital carriers with one of our technologies. It took two engineers two months to do it, costing tens of thousands of dollars,” said Ken Apple, vice president of engineering at Mariner Logistics.

The Objective

Mariner Logistics aimed to:

• Provide seamless integration with every shipper to digitally engage carriers who have not adopted technology, meeting them where they are rather than forcing platform adoption.
• Enhance operational efficiency and completely automate a large percentage of all freight that moved through the brokerage.
• Reduce onboarding times for customers and partners to improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

The solution

To overcome these challenges, Mariner Logistics embarked on a transformative journey by rethinking their engineering priorities and adopting Digibee. Adopting an iPaaS solution rapidly increased their time to market and was critical to their new strategy. They were able to ideate, iterate, and go live without any engineers because all new product ideas for the business start with iPaaS from a business perspective. Key steps in this implementation included:

• Realizing the need for change: Ken Apple, VP Engineering at Mariner, recognized the inefficiency of their current approach. “I’m challenging a traditional premise that we have about how we should build software. We need to quit building applications and assemble solutions. You’re spending a bunch of money on expensive engineers. Those expensive engineers are solvers, they like to build. If you put any tech problem in front of them, they’ll solve it. But that’s not a cost-effective way of solving every problem. You have to have some discernment about the kinds of problems that are worth solving by an engineer versus not.”

• Identifying tasks for acceleration: Mariner Logistics first identified the time-consuming tasks that required their most skillful engineers. These tasks were categorized into business-specific or generic tasks that did not impact their core business logic (engines). Ken identified connectivity to carriers’ and customers’ ERP systems, as well as the workflows to implement business processes and data orchestration between engines and third-party systems as primary candidates for optimization and embracing AI.

• Choosing Digibee: Mariner Logistics evaluated Digibee alongside three leading iPaaS products and their custom solution. They used carefully crafted criteria and a short proof-of-concept (PoC) based on their specific requirements. They selected Digibee because of its ease of building workflows without special training or certifications, the acceleration in building workflows due to Digibee’s fail-safe workflows, and the reduction in operational efforts from predictable performance with dedicated Docker containers for every request execution. Digibee allowed for seamless integration with third-party applications and ERP systems like SAP and Oracle without disrupting existing workflows.

• Prototyping for Production: An engineer built a prototype to create an engine for 3PLs and brokers to advertise, quote freight, and fulfill orders with dynamic pricing driven by a team. The next phase focused on incorporating automation and AI. Each channel had a slightly different API/interface (email vs. contact vs. survey). The prototype built on Digibee was not only enough to validate the concept, but more than enough for production, and is already delivering immense business value. This approach has also changed the way the Mariner team thinks about solving any new business problem, connecting existing systems using an iPaaS instead of having to code everything.

• Optimizing the use of talent: With Digibee, Mariner has one person doing the work of two engineers, which used to take three times longer. It also allows less senior engineers to handle integrations, freeing up highly skilled engineers for complex tasks.

“Digibee allows us to use less experienced software engineers [to do data orchestration and integrations], and I can take highly skilled engineers and focus them on things that only they can do, like building sophisticated logic into our engines,” said Ken Apple, Mariner’s vice president of engineering.

By reducing custom development and leveraging Digibee for faster proof-of-concept (POC) development, Mariner Logistics has significantly accelerated its product development, increasing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

“If you’re not using Digibee to solve these types of problems, then you’re just overspending on your engineering effort.”

Ken Apple, Vice President of Engineering, Mariner Logistics

The results

Implementing Digibee has yielded remarkable results for Mariner Logistics:

• Accelerated Product Development: Reduced development time by up to 24x on certain key projects.
• Rapid POC development: Accelerated proof-of-concept development, minimizing waste and enabling swift idea validation. Scale from PoC directly to Production without having to rebuild
• Reduced costs and fast ROI: Achieved cost efficiency by avoiding expensive integrations, resulting in positive ROI within three months.
• Optimized resource utilization: Less experienced engineers handled integrations, while highly skilled engineers focused on developing sophisticated APIs and logic.
• Improved integration speed: Faster onboarding processes have reduced integration times for customers and partners, increasing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

“When I talk to people about Digibee, I tell them to create a force multiplier with this mature technology. People who use this type of technology find it to be a great leverage. As an engineering leader, you should not ignore this technology. It should be part of your repertoire and we have already seen great ROI,” Ken emphasized.

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