Krenar Komoni, founder and chief executive officer of Tive, offers advice on evaluating freight-tech providers, and emphasizes the need for collaboration as the basis for making key decisions in the supply chain. 

In a time of rising inflation and interest rates, there’s intense pressure on freight providers to operate as cost-efficiently as possible, Komoni says. That becomes the guiding factor in shopping for freight technology — “how to operate with the least amount of operational expense and continue to scale, so they don’t get stagnant.”

Freight and logistics providers need to grow in line with the needs of their customers, but they don’t want to hire a lot more people as they do. Keeping costs down is even more essential with the possibility of recession in the coming year.

That said, freight companies can’t afford not to spend on new technology. Their chief concern is that implementations don’t take overly long to complete, and that return on investment is rapid. In today’s technology market, that means seeing results in a matter of months. “In 2023,” Komoni says, “they’re not looking to invest in projects that take a year or two.”

There’s no lack of tech vendors from which to choose, but buyers need to follow certain guidelines to ensure that they’re choosing the right ones. Chief among them is longevity. It’s important to a tech buyer that the vendor has been in the market for a number of years and has a record of proven success.

Second is the cost and time of implementation. Speed of ROI is not just a matter of recovering the price of the prospective solution; it’s also important because the industry is changing so frequently, and buyers don’t want to be locked into the purchase of a system that’s no longer relevant to their needs.