I’ve worked in the transportation sector for 26 years. My first job out of college was as an import coordinator for Maersk Line.
Freight brokers, truck drivers, and cargo owners would call a hotline and ask me, “Where is my cargo?” “Where’s my container?” “Did you receive my fax?” Maersk was in high growth at the time, and the work environment was fast-paced.
That job no longer exists.
As the industry evolved, so did I, moving from APM Terminals to public sector consulting, and eventually into software and services. Along the way, I gained a deeper understanding not just of how complex software systems work, but what it takes to drive change into complex organizations.
Today, I’m the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Tideworks. Some of the roles I held in the past have disappeared as the industry has changed. I’m still here because I changed with it.
Yes, change can feel risky and uncertain. But it’s required to grow and build long-term success.
Transportation is slow to change, but the changes have been huge
I’ve had a front-row seat to remarkable changes in the industry, both on the technology and commercial sides.
When I started in transportation, email wasn’t widespread yet. Instead, Maersk relied on Telex, an old technology that ran on large mainframe systems. Messages didn’t arrive instantly; they arrived eventually.
Bills of lading were keyed in manually. Manifests were scrubbed for errors by hand. When a customer called asking where their cargo was, the call was answered by a real-life agent, not through automated APIs and dashboards.
In the early 2000s, cell phones weren’t connected to the internet. Today, 15,000 truck drivers use their smartphones to access a port community system through an app that knows the geolocation of their truck. The entire model of how drivers interact with a port has changed because of a device that can fit into your pocket.
Commercially, globalization changed the logistical scale of intermodal shipping. It impacts us every day. I recently bought a bag of cashews at Costco, and the label listed seven different countries of origin. For just that bag. Twenty years ago, that bag of cashews would have come from only one country.
The pandemic and tariff uncertainty accelerated the pace of change in recent years and taught us that we need to build supply chains that are flexible, because conditions can change on a dime. Technology helps to make this happen.
Read the full technical paper in Port Technology International.