Expeditors International of Washington, Inc. (EXPD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We can go ahead and get started. Just going to have a little bit of introduction, so I don't think those that are joining very slightly late won't miss much. So officially, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Expeditors Empowering End-to-End Visibility and Control Webinar. My name is Brendan Carruthers. I'm the Sales & Marketing Operations Manager for the Mid-Atlantic region, and I'll be your primary facilitator for today's webinar. A few housekeeping items before we get started. First, note that today's webinar will indeed be recorded and available to you after completion of the post-webinar survey, which will be sent to you within 24 hours of the conclusion of the webinar. And of course, our team will be sharing images and speaking during the webinar. Understand that your video is off, and your microphones are muted. Throughout the webinar, if you have any questions, please put them in the Q&A box. [Operator Instructions] Our panelists will attempt to address these questions during the webinar itself, but we'll also make time to answer these questions at the end of the content. We should get through the bulk of the content in about 40 to 45 minutes, which will leave plenty of time for Q&A at the end. Joining me in webinar facilitation today is my colleague, Amber Townsel, District Sales Operations in Memphis, Tennessee. Our presentation today will start with a discussion of market conditions followed by a segmented discussion of how to empower end-to-end visibility. We'll then talk a little bit about best practices and then conclude with a Q&A session. We do need to acknowledge our disclaimer for the webinar. I'm sure everyone here has seen many similar notifications, and we thank you for taking note of this one. Please allow me to introduce our presenters for today. Julia Rindlaub assumed the role of Manager of Order Management for The Americas in June of 2023 after 6 years leading customer retention and business development in our Portland, Oregon District. Before that, Julia was the Customer Solutions Manager for the West Coast in Mexico and a Customs Brokerage Manager. She is responsible for supporting order management, business development, customer retention across The Americas branches. Jeremy Gamret. Jeremy began his career with Expeditors in 2006 as a member of the export operations team in Pittsburgh. In June of 2020, after leading the global network management center for 11 years, Jeremy assumed the role of Director, Order Management for The Americas. Jeremy is IATA and FIATA certified, a U.S. export compliance expert and holds BAs in Accounting and Operations Management from Penn State University as well as an Executive MBA from Seattle University. Jason Reish is now in his 13th year with Expeditors, spending the first 11 years working with our Detroit District. He began his career in export operations and moved into order management then the network management center before assuming the role of Manager of Order Management for the Atlanta District. Jason is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University. Julia is going to get us started today. But before it's handed off to her, a quick survey. What are the biggest challenges your supply chain faces today? And I'm going to give it over to Amber to manage that process.

Good morning, everyone. So I will now start the poll. Please submit your answers. [Voting]

Good morning. While this is up here, I just found out that I'm being recorded, so I hope I don't mess up today. Also, I want to answer this, but as a panelist, I can't answer it. So I'm curious to see what the answers are. We are going to audible by the way. I'm going to kick us off. Julia will join us a little bit later. Let's give it another minute here for the poll question.

So unfortunately, Jeremy, it looks like we're having some technical issues with the poll question. Let's see if everyone can drop an answer in the Q&A box to this. it's supposed to be a little more savvy than that, but it looks like it's not going to be. So just drop a 1, 2, 3 or 4 in the Q&A box. Audience, if you don't mind.

Yes. It's also interesting because we've been doing these webinars since 20 -- late 2020 and early 2021, and the answers have changed. The responses have changed pretty significantly since then. I think that what we were seeing at that time is at the end of 2020, the beginning of 2021, everything was such -- a poll is demand-driven. And so on-time shipping from suppliers is really the biggest challenge. I've seen a lot of 4s now, still a lot of 1s. That's good. Yes, I think that we have been, just in general, seeing a shift towards really managing unpredictable demand. But it seems like with this group, a pretty good mix here. Not a whole lot about obtaining air or ocean capacity right now. That looked a lot different about 3 months ago. But thank you all for helping us out with dropping your responses in the Q&A box. Let's go ahead and move forward here. So I think I alluded to this a little bit here. Certainly, in supply chains, it's felt like a roller coaster. What seemed to be disruptions would happen every 1 or 2 or 3 years really have become much more commonplace. And so kind of going through a little bit of history here from what we've seen kind of -- I like breaking it back into these kind of 4 areas. So pre-2010, remember when a volcano was a major disruption when they shut down some airspace and kind of over Europe, it seems like that today would be a drop in a bucket. But at that time, that was major news. And then we were talking about ILA kind of about 12 years ago. And it, ultimately, kind of became really largely a nonfactor. And then there's a lot of concern about ILWU and then, of course, bankruptcy and then as the 45th administration kind of came into office, there was a lot of conversation around tariffs. And obviously, that holds true today. And then if we think about obviously the disruption of COVID, I think we're still feeling the bullwhip effect of how everybody shut down and then consumer demand exploded at the same time. And then today, it seems like every single disruption can really create a huge impact. Supply chains have been operating at capacity for 4 years or so. And so even 3 days of disruption with the ILA seemed like a major challenge, a major issue and certainly kind of a reminder of what creating resiliency means and how important it is. I want to get into a little bit more of kind of some market updates. And I like just thinking about it in an aggregate level, supply and demand. So starting on the demand side, this is something that I like to look at monthly. Really towards the end of every month, I'm really waiting for the new numbers to come out. And so at the top here, we'd like to look at personal income, just see what the trend is. Obviously, a positive trend in disposable personal income is important. And then personal consumption expenditures is really the demand side here and so we see over the last couple of months growth. I'd also like to look at the Bureau of Economic Analysis breakdown of what's driving that. And so what we've been seeing is the increases in personal consumption expenditures have largely been service-driven, not goods-driven. And so fortunately, for the past couple of months, on the demand side, both an increase in spending of services as well as an increase in spending of goods. The largest contributors on the goods side were nondurable goods, food and beverages and then good to see motor vehicles and parts kind of coming back. I know it's been a tough period of time for the automotive industry. So good to see motor vehicles kind of back leading the way for growth in the demand side. The next release on that, by the way, I had down there at the end of the month. Next, I'd like to look at the supply side. And for me, the Purchasing Managers Index is a really important one. This is basically a gauge of -- if purchasing managers are buying raw materials and components for manufacturing, then there must be manufacturing happening. And so above 50 is growth, below 50 is contraction. We've seen actually the past 3 months in a row, the global manufacturing PMI, the Purchasing Managers Index, being below 50. So it signals deterioration for 3 consecutive months. Really 4 of the 5 components were consistent with contraction in September as October. So output, new orders, employment and stocks of purchases all fail. So this decline, this rate of decline is the steepest since 2022. Go ahead and click one more. This kind of breaks it down into consumer goods, intermediate goods and investment goods. Obviously, they all kind of follow a similar trend line. I think that for a majority of Expeditors' customers, consumer and intermediate goods is really what drives our volumes. And so that purple line is what I pay most attention to. And so we're really seeing it throughout over the past 2 months is just interesting. Next, I'd like to look at inventory to sales ratios. And I like going back kind of matching along with the time line that I showed earlier just kind of understanding historically inventory to sales ratios typically hover around 1.35 or 1.4:1. We did see some growth in inventories as there was concern about labor strikes and then as there was concern about the ocean market, we were seeing some buffer stocks growing, inventories getting to about 1.5:1. And then obviously, the crazy bullwhip effect that happened at the beginning of 2020. Inventories immediately increased as everybody shut down and sheltered in place and then immediately went way down as everybody started buying consumer goods. Obviously, manufacturing had kind of an interesting difference in trending here. But the overall inventory to sales were really depleted at the beginning of 2021. And then I think that we all saw rebuilding of these inventories and safety stocks in over these past several months. I know this is -- it's updated until July. The publication shows that over the past 3 months, everything has really kind of stabilized. It leveled off around 1.35:1. So good to see that kind of being stable over the past 6 months or so. So what does that mean for us in global logistics and transportation? I'd like to look at what's happening with capacity, so the supply side for transportation. Basically, on the left, I know there's a lot of movement here that's showing trade lane growth or contraction. But really, it's these numbers that are kind of in the center. I'd like to look at total capacity compared to 2019. So overall, there's more global freighter capacity in the marketplace. We see airline freighters up 23%. So very significant number of additional aircraft in the market for moving freighters. Really -- hang on just 1 second here. Just understanding that the trade lines in particular, we obviously really look at Asia to the U.S. So we could see that plus 31%, it's huge increase in demand in that trade line. Now looking at trucking, I think trucking is more of a bellwether in terms of what's happening in the U.S. domestic market even -- obviously, if anything is moving air or ocean, it's eventually going to hit a truck for the most part. And so we've seen a huge increase. I'd like to look on the cash truckload index on the left side. Basically, that -- those purple bars are showing growth -- year-over-year growth for the same period previously. So we saw about 2 years of growth, which really we saw rates spike up followed by nearly 2 years of contraction. And so what we're seeing is kind of a straight line pre-COVID numbers here for the cash truckload line-haul index. And then on the right, I always keep an eye on spot market rates. So this is DAT trend lines. It's really been level right about $2 a mile for dry vans and around $2.40 a mile for flatbeds, pretty level for the past 6 months. Next, I'd like to look at the state of rail. And so this is U.S. rail traffic, and I have it filtered down to just intermodal only. And so the dark blue line is 2024. So really, throughout the past 3 months or so, a significant increase in rail traffic compared to the previous couple of years. So we're hearing a lot of concern of what's happening on the East Coast. And at the same time, we're hearing West Coast ports are operating at record volumes, and they're operating smoothly. And the rails for the most part are operating smoothly as well. Next, I'd like to look at ocean capacity. On the left side, it's just a snapshot of total idle capacity in the marketplace. And so idle capacity is usually an indicator on what the lines are doing and what the charter market is doing. And so as an example, we did see March 2023, we saw the profitability of the lines go down. We did see a lot more of commercially idle vessels. So that's the top right section, the dark blue. That's really when the lines are withholding capacity from the market. They're dropping anchor. They're holding ships idle. And so we saw that overall number reach about 7% or 8%, which is the highest that we've seen it since 2018. We did see it a year later, one of the lowest. You see March 2024, one of the lowest amounts of idle capacity. And it started to creep back up a little bit here. On the bottom, it's really just ships and yard under overhaul maintenance and repair. But interesting to watch what's happening with the ocean capacity because this is what drives our rates. Next, I'd like to look at, this is a little bit of our crystal ball. This is what we call our purchase order index. This is an aggregate view of all of the purchase orders that Expeditors consumes. So it's a roll-up of all of the industries that we serve, retail, automotive, aviation, tech, pharma. And so this black line is really what I like to follow. The black line is the 7-day rolling average of new purchase orders being written. And we see that orange line, that increased slope across the board, that's telling us the general trend that more orders are being written versus the same period last year. I have it highlighted about 15,000 a day as our current average. In the same period last year, we were seeing about 12,000 a day. So it's about a 25% increase in new orders being written for the same period last year. One of the things that I'm looking at very closely is, our orders being pulled forward. Obviously, with the news about the incoming administration, there's going to be a lot of speculation related to global tariffs. I've not yet seen a rush to pull ahead orders to ship it ahead of January. I know the other date in January that everybody is considering is the ILA is still unresolved. So those labor negotiations are still happening. Everybody is still paying close attention to that. But really, we did see a rush to pull orders ahead in May, June and July. That's kind of that spike underneath that 2.5 number, that black spike was a lot of orders being pulled ahead. We're seeing maybe the beginning of a little bit of that. You could see right at the very right side, it maybe is a beginning of a pull ahead. But I think we need one more week of data to really draw any conclusions there. And then next, I'd like to look at, this is the same PO index, but it's telling us by requested ship date how many orders are being requested to ship. And so hovering over this week, really, what we're seeing here is a plateau. So no spike expected in new bookings over the next couple of weeks, but no significant drop-off. Average lead times are about 70 days on these new orders being written. So the reason why it tails off all the way at the end of January is because we don't have the orders for Q1 yet. We have some of them, but obviously, new orders will filter in and with closer ship dates. And so that will fill it out. So when I look at this week by week, this is basically telling me not to expect any changes in booking volumes over the next 3 or 4 weeks. We're expecting it to be pretty consistent. All right. So a couple of things that are on the screen here that we want to get into in terms of what are the control points where we can help assist our customers. But before we get into that, we have Jason Reish with us here. So maybe, Jason, you can jump on camera. Jason, he's our Order Management Manager in Atlanta. Brendan had a great introduction of all of us. Jason, you recently had a trip to Asia. So I think you were gone for a couple of weeks. I'd love to hear just where did you travel to, what were some of the conversations you were having, what were you hearing from that side in Asia.

Yes. So thanks. Welcome, everyone. So, yes, it was about mid-September, of course, right before the East Coast labor strike. So it was perfect timing if you ask our origin teams. But I spent about a week in Cambodia in our Phnom Penh office and then spent another week with our team in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. So about 2 weeks just in Southeast Asia. So we kind of had 3 plans, 3 kind of points that I was focused on when I went there. So one, right, was talking with the customer, sourcing teams, the Asia sourcing teams that a lot of folks have based in Southeast Asia and really understanding like what do they have going on, what are their questions, complexities, what are they focused on. We often get to talk to the customers here in the States, but we don't always have that opportunity to sit down face-to-face with those overseas. The next area that we talked and looked a lot at was understanding the local dynamics, things like understanding the different levels of foreign investment in some of these countries. I knew there was some Chinese investments going into Cambodia just from what I see in the news, but I didn't understand really the complexity and the size of investments they have of creating new highways and trying to open up channels to allow larger vessels in Cambodia for more direct shipments and other things. So it was really great to understand kind of the infrastructure complexities that go on in a couple of these countries. And then ultimately, you're right, the largest and primary goal was sitting with our teams to understand what their perspective was on customer expectations. A lot of our accounts we've had for several years, and as you just have new employees, new opportunities, we want to make sure, right, we took that opportunity to really realign of what's going on in the States, what are our customers looking to do in the next 2, 3, 12 months in some of those cases. So those are kind of the 3 big areas of why we went. In terms of what we were really hearing from a lot of those contacts that we made overseas, so one, we got to tour a couple of the river terminals in Cambodia and Vietnam. And for me, there was a little different perspective. I've seen the big boats, and it's very easy in the United States with all the infrastructure, but the Southeast Asia origins were very, very interested even at the terminals. The operators there were curious about, "Hey, if there's a new administration, what's going to happen?" We saw a big boom from Section 301 tariffs. A lot of people shifted a lot of manufacturing to Southeast Asia. I'm curious, right? They all want to plan and have expansion opportunities. They're curious if we thought that was going to continue if there was a new administration or even if the current administration maintained. So they're very interested in the political and financial aspects of the United States, which makes sense because we are typically one of their biggest customers. And then, obviously, a lot of questions around the ILA strikes. If we thought they were going to happen, what's going to happen to them? What were contingencies going on with vendors or customers rather in the U.S.?

Are you seeing a lot of infrastructure investment?

Yes. Particularly in Cambodia, it was a little bit mind-blowing. They showed us one, there was a large highway. You used to have to go through the city in a lot of cases to move your containers from one side of Cambodia over to the river terminals and there were restrictive hours. So your container that should take a couple of hours could end up taking an entire day because of hourly restrictions on trucks. But then they built a new highway to kind of go around the city. And it's a fresh, brand-new highway like we love here in Georgia, nice and smooth. Also, they even showed us there's a channel that I literally think is probably about 20 feet wide today. And they said, no, this is what they're targeting to blow out and just completely expand this to allow actual vessels. Today, about a robot could probably get done it successfully. And they're already talking about the investments of -- they've got to clear the land, they've got to move these companies out that have houses, factories, warehouses along the river banks here, right? Probably see imminent domain or something go on there, where they're just going to clear this out to allow for bigger vessels to move in and out of the river.

Pretty incredible. So that's a little bit about origin side. Julia, you're -- as manager in the Americas, you're customer-facing. And so I think that a lot of this stuff that's on the slide here are some of the things that you're hearing here at the destination of the customer side. I think right now, we're probably seeing a record number of RFIs, request for quotes, request for proposals. What are some of the biggest things that you're hearing here on the customer side?

Yes, we are seeing a record number of RFIs and RFQs. And really, the focus is on end-to-end visibility, right? They really -- customers are really looking for those control points, really looking for reliability. They're looking for accurate data, informed data to make decisions about their supply chains. And then I think one of the things that Jason did touch on a little bit is a lot of sourcing changes, right? We're hearing a lot about sourcing changes, looking at new markets, looking at companies that can help facilitate trade in those markets that can help support vendor relationships. And so we're seeing a lot of changes happening and people trying to make and put in place resilient solutions that can really help enable and set them up for whatever market challenges we're going to see coming up because there's always something that's happening.

So while the ILA was ultimately a nonfactor, at least not a large impact this time, are you hearing or seeing any responses to the 3 days that there was a work stoppage?

Yes, definitely. And I think we'll get into that a little bit around the delivery management, but what we saw is customers that had visibility to container statuses, had some type of solution in place where they're centralized and standardized data that they weren't spending time trying to track, trying to go to all different ports and understand what was happening and just had one source of information to really make some type of informed decision, right, to quickly react to what was taking place and just having the right solution that was in place prior to some of these market disruptions.

Yes. So maybe a little bit of a reminder of how fragile some of the supply chain data visibility can be. All right. Let's move forward here. I think really, we want to -- all this is talking about building resiliency. And so obviously, there's a lot of parties involved in the supply chain. There's a lot of fragmented sources for data, and it can lead to inconsistency. We're talking about potentially multiple customs providers, multiple transportation providers. Just for one movement from Asia to the U.S., you can have a dozen supply chain parties being involved. And so it can be complex and messy. It's not necessarily linear. So all the work that we do with our customers is to try to understand what are the control points, what are the areas that we can influence. So we can't control global ocean capacity. We can't control labor disruptions on either coast. But what we can control is visibility so that, as Julia was mentioning, our customers can make informed business decisions. And so if we move forward, really, our overall approach is to help organize these things in a way where we can make sense of it and we can more clearly identify the control. And so thinking of this from an ocean perspective, we call it total container management. It's the combination of 3 stand-alone service offerings, carrier allocation, order management and delivery management where we help our customers to add control and really influence in these areas. Go ahead and move forward once more. So we'll get in a little bit into how this works, but it's really broken down into 2 kind of key areas. There's the origin management piece that's all out planning and booking and controlling the booking. We'll talk a little bit about how we can help forecast and provide those plans up to 14 weeks in advance to the carriers with the overall goal of creating consistency to book against the MQCs and creating visibility for the carriers that are supporting you and the carriers where maybe they need a little bit of help or encouragement to make sure that they're offering the capacity that they've committed to and then really managing the control process upstream. As much as we can control upstream to create consistency around bookings and timely delivery of cargo at the origin, better consistency we have downstream. And then we'll talk a little bit about destination management and get into how we create visibility on that side in order to really streamline the deliveries and manage risk related to demurrage and detention.

So a couple of ways that we do this, right? We've got a few different kind of managed solutions that we work with on the Expeditors side. So the first area, and I kind of even want to set the stage of where this first service kind of comes into play, we call it carrier allocation. And so with the ILA strikes that just recently happened, right, we had customers that when you're utilizing this platform, right, these are BCO-type customers with direct steam ship line contracts. They were able to look out and see all their orders that they had coming up in the future and say, "All right, here's my allocation plan, my MQCs that I have with the carriers. Now, I want to go ahead and shift all this, right?" I want certain strategic purchase orders and vendors to now instead of ship to the East Coast, where I might get backed up and logged for a few weeks, maybe shift over to the West Coast. At least I have an opportunity then, might be backlogged, but maybe I have some transload options, something like that, if something becomes critical." And so customers wanted that option of, "All right, I've got a lot of POs, a lot of containers. How do I ship that quickly? How do I have visibility to that? How do I ship it, and how do my carriers specifically see that volume as well?" And so one of the ways we do that, as I mentioned, is what we call carrier allocation. These are just a couple of snapshots from what the tool looks like. But really what happens in the tool is it works by grabbing the need by dates for all the volume or the purchase orders and allows them to be allocated to vessels. Now this is allowing us to kind of ensure that everything has moved timely, and we're really focusing on the need by dates. So something can be pulled back or needs to be deprioritized because there's hotter cargo that has a faster need by date be in the D.C. We can ship that volume accordingly and prioritize it with the carriers that are actually able to give and allocate new volumes. The cool thing about this tool, carriers are actually able to see all this and able to make decisions weeks in advance, right? So it all depends on how the MQCs, your minimum quantities might be negotiated with the carrier. But the carriers can now see the volume that you are forecasting to Jeremy's point, 4, 8, 10, 14 weeks out sometimes, however far you can go. And the carriers can really start to then see, "Here's how much volume I need to be able to allocate to the customer. If that's too much volume that they're requesting, I'm going to deny the remainder. I'll confirm my amount that I can move and then give the customer visibility really what they need to go and find additional carriers for." So it allows customers to be a little bit quicker any time there is a change, but also just give the carriers a consistent plan every single week to see, okay, 3 and 4 weeks out, what do I need to plan on for this customer, what are they going to be giving to me with really a higher sense of certainty. I know a lot of times people can ship these things and they change dynamically and quickly. The output of that, now we can start to see what is planned versus what is actual. So you might have your plan of who these POs are going to be designated to as far as carriers are concerned, but what are those carriers actually picking up and going forward with. Once you have this type of real actionable data, right, this is something that can really come in handy as you're acquiring new lanes, as you're going into contract season in the spring maybe again, leading up to the TPM Conference if you're going to that, you can start to have assurance of, here's what the carriers promised me or what we planned. Here's how they actually executed and who we moved that cargo with. This kind of just talks about kind of that upstream planning portion of what customers can do. The next area that we start to move into then is the actual order management. So when we move from preplanning to actual planning of the orders, typically, a lot of customers, they're looking at visibility starting really when a shipment is generated. When the vendor has a shipment ready, that's when they start to get their visibility, quantities, where is it going, where is it headed from, do they have the right compliance material, et cetera, all included in their shipment. What we like to look at is creating really visibility from the time of inception of an order all the way through the time this gets confirmed on board a vessel or a plane or truck. And so this is just, again, a quick example of some of the different screens. This is really the vendor booking portal you see on the left side, but this gives us visibility to exactly what's on the purchase order. The vendor actually gets prompts, reminders throughout the system of when they need to book, when they need to go make an update. So it's kind of that extra ping to the vendor that today is probably done by a lot of folks by IM, by e-mails, by assessment reports being shared back and forth. But this really starts prompting them automatically. If they haven't done what you expected them to do, they get an alert. And they'll keep getting that alert and then you also have the management side of it from an Expeditors' teams at origin to then go read out to that vendor as well to confirm that they're doing what's needed. Once we have a lot of information, then it moves into our expo system. Now this is usually where a lot of our customers are interacting. They have a PO, maybe they have a container number or something else, they can quickly go and search it there. The next area, right, again, we want to create actionable intelligence with all this new data that we're gathering from the vendors. This is, right, just a snapshot of what vendors or rather customers can see when it comes to what's going on with their orders. So it's really, in a way, a health indicator, right? Am I seeing a lot of orders that are getting booked on time? Am I seeing orders that are backlogged and should be booked but aren't? Is there a new wave of orders, shipments that are going to be coming up that I need to prepare for or make sure my vendors, carriers, origin providers are all prompted an alert to? You can see that visibility at a high level, kind of an executive management view I'd like to say, then also kind of start breaking it down into the different levels. Customers can see, okay, something still at origin, why is it still at origin? Has the vendor not done their job? Is the carrier behind on scheduling the shipments, releasing shipping orders, et cetera? But you can start to break that down into a more granular level.

Yes. And when you were visiting with our customers at the origin side, is this the type of analytics that you were seeing them use to manage the relationships? I'm just -- I'm curious if they're following up like order by order or if they're working towards managing aggregate performance.

So in my particular interactions, it was still a lot of order by order. They still have large amounts of personnel that are kind of designated to specific suppliers, specific orders or departments for the customer. And they are following up on these things transactionally daily through e-mails is really the primary form.

Yes, right. And the idea here is that we're providing that clear line of sight so they understand exactly what the exceptions are.

That's right.

And the next one here, we had a booking analysis, an order change analysis. Maybe talk here about the behavior that we're trying to influence by raising this visibility.

Yes. So this is actually a tool that we give to our customers so that they can see what's going on within their own 4 walls, right? So we constantly want to see and measure the vendors and what's going on there. But this starts to give us really a better picture of what's happening when it comes to creating the orders. Are things changing left and right? Are they changing really early on after a purchase order might be cut? Or are they changing a lot further after? In some cases, right, people could be changing delivery points, quantities, packed quantities, et cetera. And they might be updating these things downstream. Sometimes we'll see customers actually are updating this information after something is confirmed on board, and ASN has been sent with D.C. That starts to then impact, right, all these internal stakeholders downstream where we thought maybe it was just a vendor issue or someone created an order incorrectly. Now that D.C. not be able to receive it timely because some information has changed, and there's a mismatch in the system that they need to go hunt down and discover. So this really helps us pull out, hey, are there areas where things are changing too late in the process or maybe things are changing too often and vendors aren't able to stay on top of it because there's too many dynamic changes that they're not ready for.

Right. So we're trying to measure vendor performance and then when we dig into the root causes, we see that they're maybe trying to hit a moving target.

Exactly. Goalposts are moving. Yes, and then this next view is really what the vendors are doing. So this is a booking analysis. If you jump ahead here one more or you're there, sorry. This booking analysis now really takes a look at, okay, vendors have a purchase order. Maybe it's 70, 120 days in advance in some cases. They might go ahead and book it right away to try and meet some milestone expectations. But now we can see, are they changing that? Are they providing the booking on time? A, that's important. But B, are they giving us correct and accurate information? If they tell us initially, there's only one container to book and then 3 weeks later, right before it's about to move, they're telling us there's 3 or 4 containers, there's new quantities, et cetera. These are all things that make it more complicated for our customers to adjust and plan accordingly, not to mention it can mess with their ordering cycles and their forecasting as well if they have incorrect information being fed to them by the vendors. So this allows us to see what's happening. Is it happening on time? And then it even can start to expand and get into who exactly is changing what from the vendors? And then how often are they changing it and how late in the process are they changing it as well?

Great. Well, the overall goal here is at the origin side, we want the vendors to book on time in full in order to create kind of that smooth handoff of cargo and hopefully securing capacity and moving on a vessel timely. All right. Moving forward here, after kind of inserting ourselves to help control upstream, we want to think about the downstream process. And so, Julia, if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about our approach to helping customers plan labor, inbound visibility to the DCs and then managing trade providers.

Yes, for sure. And so when we look at downstream and destination activities, what we see is a lot of people wanting to standardize and accurate and centralized visibility to inbound containers, right? They don't want to spend a lot of time talking with different providers, trying to track containers. So having one source of information, one source of the truth. And so our solution around this is delivery management. It's a managed service, which means that it is both systems and people that are managing the service with a focus on enabling the visibility to the SaaS containers, supporting on the appointment scheduling and prioritization of containers for deliveries and then mitigating detention and demurrage. And so what you're looking at is a screenshot of the homepage. And it really is focused on kind of 3 different areas here, right? So inbound, what is the status? And one of the things that we utilize is also some predictive ETA technologies. We know having an accurate ETA is really critical and getting at that can be challenging, right? There's a lot of different sources of ETA information. There's carriers, there's support. And so what we do is we leverage all different types of data sources to triangulate it, some historical information and to really provide what we see about 2 weeks out a 97% accurate ETA. So just from a starting point, knowing that you can rely on that information and how that visibility is key. As we work through the different buckets and statuses here, appointment scheduling is part of this. It's a carrier-agnostic service. So we have customers that use Expeditors as a dray provider. We have customers that have all different dray providers that are out there. And we're aggregating the information, the inbound delivery scheduling across those providers. Down at the bottom, there's an awaiting delivery section. And really, this is focused on what's at risk, right, what's not. Customs are released, what is about to hit that free time and just really saying, "Hey, red alert. These are containers to focus on." And then the last bucket is really around the deliveries and detention. And so we know that a lot of times, they need to focus on the upstream around demurrage. But really on the back end, just managing that and ensuring containers are returned and the return on time. There's not any accruing additional costs associated there. And we're not going to go through all the different tabs here today. But along with this, there's a lot of data and reporting and information. And so if you go just back really quick, one of the things when we talk about an end-to-end solution and the visibility is when this is tied with our order management services, we're really able to give you from PO inception all the way through delivery. So one of the things that we highlighted was lead times, and this is something that really comes into play, right? So you have one source of truth, one source of data. And we have a lot of really robust analytics. And so not only does this type of solution help with the management of deliveries, but really just giving you that end-to-end visibility, right? So we talk about it and tying these solutions together really helps facilitate that process. And then this is our D&D management portion of it, and this is something that we're in the process of rolling out now. And really, what are containers that are about to hit or in demurrage, right? And so you can very quickly see containers that are at risk. You can prioritize and make decisions around that, similarly with ones in detention. One of the interesting things that we saw with ILA strike is that some of our customers that did have this type of visibility, they were really able to easily make informed decisions, right? They were trying to figure out the status of containers, where they were. We were able to help share that information. They were able to dive into this type of view -- of this type of dashboard and say, "Okay, these are the ones that are risk. These are the ones we want to pull early. These are the ones that are accruing demurrage." And so this is something that we're really excited about rolling out and bringing to the field. And then the last one here, just to highlight, one of the things that we're talking about is that end-to-end visibility. And so this is one of the ways that we help facilitate that. We have a lot of different ways we want to communicate information and reporting and statuses. And this is -- it's really our exception management type dashboard. And so what the focus is, is it ties in carrier GPS to your orders, pulling in all the associated transportation milestones. And you can see, okay, where is my product? What vessel is it on? If there is a port strike, is it impacted? If the Red Sea when that shut down, people could see, okay, these are -- where the vessels are and the longer transit time that was associated. And so really just saying and bringing that visibility. And you can see it is from order booked all the way to order delivered really at that order level. So not just at a container level, but really saying, okay, what product is impacted by whatever is happening within the market.

All right. Thank you very much. So I guess to kind of bring it all together here, what we see or what we wanted to share was a series of best practices to achieve a best-in-class supply chain. Really, it starts with consuming that order information or release information if you're operating off of production schedules and using that to plan capacity upstream, then controlling the booking process to make sure that orders are being booked on time in full and then connecting that all -- that line item detail with the downstream visibility to achieve on-time delivery.

So we got a question in the box here that I want to answer. What is the standard days for suppliers to request container bookings before the cargo ready date? And so that changes. I'd say that during times of tight capacity, we would want to book 21 or 28 days in advance. Really booking more than 28 days in advance, the carriers are simply not going to release capacity. That 21 days seems to be about the sweet spot right now. When capacity is a little looser, normally 14 days would be normal. So that's what we see. Brendan, did you see any other questions come through?

Yes, there are a couple. Thanks, Jeremy. We'll start with, are there some industries that manage PO visibility better than ours?

Interesting. So I would say, first of all, inbound to manufacturing is a little bit of a challenge. I think that anybody who's been part of automotive supply chains or again any inbound manufacturing, you're operating off of kind of a moving production forecast. And so that means that you have kind of changes to what the needs are for production. The more consistency helps to drive overall improved supply chain performance. And so I think that from my perspective, retail has really focused heavily on purchase order management and visibility upstream. And I think Walmart famously has one of the world's most efficient and effective supply chains. I know that not -- there really are no others that have that sort of control over their carrier base or their vendor base in the same way. But certainly, smaller retailers have taken on the same concepts and really trying to drive visibility from order inception all the way through delivery. And so applying that same for inbound and manufacturing using production forecast and shipment releases, we've seen a lot of great success in aviation and automotive and industrial manufacturing. Really, the goal, I think, is to try to move away from e-mails and spreadsheets into operating platforms to help provide that single source of control and data for visibility.

Thank you, Jeremy. We have one more. Does Expeditors have to be the NVOCC to provide any of these services that we've been discussing?

Yes. Thanks. To clarify, anything that we talked about, these are stand-alone services. So container management -- carrier allocation, order management, delivery management are each stand-alone and they're each carrier-neutral. And so we can offer that service regardless of the carriers. We see and share this as a best practice, total container management to combine these service offerings to really have that overall end-to-end control.

I'm sorry, Jeremy, there was one more. What's the difference between this and a subscription-based service? Is this centrally managed? Or is it decentralized?

Got it. So this is all a managed service. So we don't offer these platforms for customers to self-manage. We believe that a managed service is a differentiator. In that, we have teams that manage data timeliness, data completeness and data accuracy. And so we sometimes come up against Software-as-a-Service providers in this space as potential competitors. For those that buy software, they're still typically left with trying to answer the question or solve the problem of who's going to manage it. And so that's why we provide this as a managed service. Really, any of the technology that you would see that we showed as part of a managed service offering.

Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Jason. That is all the questions.

No, we got one more that popped up, sorry.

We got one more?

What would your shipping volume need to be to invest in a managed service? Really, it could be small -- on the small side. It doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands of containers here. We have customers that ship 20 or 25 shipments a month that invested in managed service. The reason why it's beneficial for those size of customers is because they don't have to contract for annual fees to buy a platform. Our managed services are transactional, fee-based service. So really, I'd say about 25 to 30 shipments is kind of the smallest. Anything below that, you probably do have the capacity to manage it kind of manually. Okay. I want to hit our closer slide.

Absolutely. Going once, going twice on the questions. But if you can shoot one in there at the very last second if you like, everyone, that would be just fine. So what we're going to do here is give you an opportunity to grab the QR code that will take you to the respective presenter's LinkedIn page. But as a reminder, we are going to be sending out a post-webinar survey to you. Our metric is within 24 hours, but you really ought to have it before the end of the day today unless there's some sort of technology-related challenge, which I don't expect there will be. Once you complete that survey, you'll be redirected to a landing page where you'll have access to this presentation as a PDF deck and also a link to the recording of this webinar. So here's Julia. Here's Jason. Again, you'll have this. So no need to grab your phones. You don't have to, just making you aware that it's coming your way. Before we sign off, this is a quick hit of some of our upcoming events. The month of December does tend to be a little bit light for obvious reasons, many people taking holidays, it is the holiday season. But we do have an event coming up for our Onyx Strategic Insights Partners. So they're a wholly owned subsidiary of Expeditors. They take a global view, a distinctly strategic view of global supply chains, definitely worth talking about there. U.S. Customs Market Update Webinar, that's going to be enormously popular. I think we have about 1,500 attendees right now. I'm not aware of any attendance restrictions for this. We haven't hit that restriction yet. But given the impending administrative change for the U.S. government, this is very popular. So if you do want to join that, please do jump in there and register as soon as you can. And this last one here is -- it's an in-person event that we're hosting in Raleigh next month on the same day as that webinar. So if you have to be -- if you happen to be in the area in Raleigh and you want to come and join us, that's being hosted by our Tradewin Group, extremely, extremely high level of knowledge and expertise there. If you'd like to get into a deep dive about export compliance and duty mitigation among other topics, very engaging site there on December 4. And I'll be there in person, so I'll get a chance to meet you. Lastly, we just have a couple of ways to stay in touch with you, for you to stay in touch with us. We're, of course, on all the socials. We have a YouTube channel. We have a podcast coming your way. Feel free to connect with us however you like. And if you're having trouble with any of these communication channels, reach out to me, and I will support and make sure that you get squared away. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate the opportunity to discuss this topic with you. And again, Julia, Jason and Jeremy, thank you so much. Amber, thank you. Everyone, have a terrific remainder of the week.