All right. Well, hello, everybody. And welcome to Banyan Technology’s Tire Tracks. We have a very special guest today. This is Brian Smith, your host, CEO of Banyan Technology. Today, we welcome Jordan Pearman, who is VP of Supply Chain and Operations at Skidmore Sales and Service. Jordan, welcome and thank you so much for spending time with us here today to talk about what I think is not just an important topic, but really an exciting topic. We'll get to that in just a moment. Why don't you share with our listeners a little bit about you?

Sure. I am Jordan Pearman. I work at Skidmore Sales and Distributing on the north side of Cincinnati. We are one of the largest food ingredient distributors in the country. There's a very good likelihood that anybody who listens to this has something in their pantry that has some ingredient from our warehouse right behind this wall. We also have 19 other warehouses across the country, and we also do some manufacturing of food product. 60-year family-owned business. Still family held. Third generation of the family is entering the business right now. We're starting them off, right, working in supply chain.

Love it. Love it. Folks, let me assure you, I have been to their facility more than a few times, and it is very impressive, very well-run. Today, we're going to talk a bit about low consolidation and the opportunities for all of us, really, that are growing in this industry, the ability to really evaluate more proactively the movement of our goods, meeting client demands in a very successful way, and how we can leverage the technology in front of us to do that. Jordan, maybe my first question I'm going to start is you looked out to 2026, and I know you and I personally started conversations probably a year or so ago, and saying, how do we bring these type capabilities to the Banyan platform, to the market, to the benefit of your clients? Skidmore has always prided itself on client service at most, and I know from walking around your facility how it is so fundamental to your organization, and as you and your team have took a look to the future in 2026, how does freight management, the dynamics of the changing market start to really influence you to want to take a hard look at something like low consolidation? What's happening in the market?

Sure. I'll start with Skidmore has earned a fine living for a very long time, doing what I would consider technical sales. All of our salespeople are food scientists. They can go into any other food company and help a developer pick the right ingredients. I use the example of starches. One starch can make mayonnaise, turn into solids and oil, and another starch can keep a mayonnaise shelf stable for 10 years. Our sales team are all former developers, all technically trained food scientists, and they help our customers pick the right stuff. Coming out of COVID, the picking the right stuff didn't matter nearly as much as getting it.

True.

Yeah. What we've seen is coming out of the COVID frenetic freight world, that more and more, we are being asked to provide supply chain solutions to our customers. We need to help them pick the right stuff. But for us to continue to deliver value in a way that makes us irreplaceable to our customers, we want to start taking over more and more of their supply chain. Because like you said, we definitely pride ourselves in service, and Skidmore does supply chain for living, so the more of our customer supply chain we can manage, the better we can execute for them. That's really where starting, when you and I begin chatting about it, we've really been focusing as an organization, both in terms of skill set and technology. We have to get faster and better at freight and supply chain, because it's becoming one of our largest competitive advantages.

As your team, you have done some low consolidation in the past, it's been more manual in nature. As we go down this path, what are some of the immediate benefits or opportunities you and your team are looking to use this technology to take advantage of?

Sure. Our low consolidation right now is two guys, one's named PJ and one's named Gordon, and they see the stuff out on the dock that might be able to leave together, and they're really good at it. They're surprisingly accurate. It is a manual exercise. It is for most people and most companies. As technology and AI in particular have advanced, I think it's been a good opportunity for anyone in any industry to say, well, let's go from sifting through all the historical metrics and figuring out what we could, or can consolidate to being notified when there's something that might be consolidatable. So much of the process, it's easy when you sit down, you look at a bunch of bills of lading a couple of days later and say, “Well, I could have shipped these together.” Well, our customers don't operate at that speed. The ability to take and consolidate their shipments are shipments inbound. It's not just about saving money, that's a great benefit, of course, but it's about how do we just go that extra, extra mile for our customers to provide value to them.

We ship a lot of stuff to the same places. The food manufacturing industry roughly uses the same stuff and a lot of these plants have been around for 100 years. We're shipping these plants constantly. The more we can save them on freight and therefore, save them in damage on truckloads, the more value we're providing to them.

Do you feel it's a more secure opportunity as well? A lot of chatter in the industry these days about theft and fraud and control. Is that a consideration for you as well?

To some extent, yes. Everything is much more easily controlled when it's sitting in a full truckload locked. We don't have a lot of theft of food product, but it does happen. For us, it's more about just being able to control the destiny of the product when it hits our customer’s dock. The more of it I can ship in truckloads, the faster I know I can get it there, it's not sitting on an LTL dock, it's not getting pinwheeled by a guy in the middle of the night on an LTL dock. It's not getting loaded and unloaded by a bunch of guys that don't care about our product as much as I do. To us, there's value in the quality of the shipment. Our customers want their stuff as they expect it. All of this stuff, by the way, is in 50-pound paper bags, so it's really easy to damage.

From a security perspective, to me, in the food industry at large, security part of it is getting the right stuff, food safe, interlocked trailer. Because when there's damage, it can cause all kinds of trouble to us food nerds, it can cause allergen problems, it can cause kosher problems. From that perspective, yes, the security is very important and again, another way that we can deliver value to our customers.

Excellent, excellent. Jordan, I'm going to shift gears a little bit, because I have this theory, and I think this is a great example of you were kind enough to join us on site for our customer, client-centric session we had in September. You may not remember, but we had that conversation in the booth of where AI is going, or where it could take us all in some facets. What I love about this little consolidation and would love to get your take of yours and Skidmore's view of AI is this is a – while it's complex, it's a relatively practical application of AI. The belief, at least my belief that in the future, we'll stop using the term AI and just deliver these tools. Because I love not only the tool itself, but your application of the tool. You're solving an operational need and you're enhancing customer service. Really, at the end of the day, that's what all this is about. Forget AI for a minute. AI is helping you and I make this happen. Can you share a little bit the insight at Skidmore for 2026 and how you guys are approaching AI as an organization?

Yeah. Actually, I had a great example that we've used and I've repeated several times. It was at that very conference at the Banyan headquarters when I heard you say in front of everyone, AI is not here to replace us, but AI is going to help us. It's already here. We better get going. From our perspective and definitely from my perspective, AI gives us another toolbox that we can put tools in to help people and to help customers. When I say help them, it's great to say, yeah, we can make things more efficient, or we can save costs. Skidmore's got a unicorn of a culture in that we're very people-centric. To me, I want to see the approach we're taking with it is that AI should be enhancing people's day. If it's enhancing people's day, it's enhancing our customer's experience.

We're starting to look at more and more places where we can use agents to do lots of small automations. All those small automations might end up being a couple hours out of somebody's day once a week. From my perspective and definitely from Skidmore's perspective, I think you said it best, Brian, at that conference. We're going to get new tools. We need to start learning how to build our tools, and we need to start learning how to use our tools. I think that they're best applied to things that a human might be able to solve, but it will take too long for them to solve it. If solving an issue like consolidation doesn't move at the speed of the customer, that's where we need the machines.

Sure. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. As you look at this low consolidation, are there aspects? How are you coaching your team on where it applies? I know you guys are in the beta side of this right now, and we've got some integration work in front of us. Any, I don't want to say concerns, but pause for a concern. It's not about the tool itself, but how to apply it organizationally. As you think of the audience, some things you had to consider in how you're going to use low consolidation opportunity within the organization and rolling this out, so to speak.

Yeah. We've got a lot of really smart, very long-tenured people in our organization. I'm not going to tell them anything about the freight world, or how to do it better. The only thing I'm really worried about is making sure that organizationally and from a construction and development standpoint, keeping that in mind. Consolidation, or any AI tool needs to be something that helps them, because it's not going to do everything. At least today, AI can't consolidate all these loads for me, book them, get them through all my systems. I mean, that's where the biggest hurdle is usually going to be a system-to-system. Until we get to that point, that tool's got to serve the human first.

For sure. For sure. Any sense on the trucking side of things, on the carrier side from a capacity standpoint? We feel here, I think, in 2026, we felt the capacity has loosened up a little bit. I think prices have crept up a little bit. We've seen contractual prices on the LTL side, and maybe the spot market, current fuel issues aside, maybe we're more flat-lined. We do see there's a savings opportunity here. Are you seeing that, or anticipating that as well?

We do. There's definitely a savings opportunity and consolidate in multiple shipments down to one. It wouldn't make sense to say otherwise. We are fortunate in that we do business with a handful of carriers, and we've done business with them for a very, very long time. Even in those situations where we get preferential freight treatment, there's still a value in the savings that consolidation can provide. It's savings, of course, financially in the cost of the load. It's savings in time. It's savings in processing damage. It's savings in having to call a carrier and sort out where five different things are in five different places in the country, versus on one truck.

Back to the human-centric theme, to me, the consolidating multiple shipments down to one onto a single truck load, that's a no-brainer. Everybody wants to do it. Everybody tries to do it. AI needs to help us all do it better. To me, the real savings is that now all of that administrative work of five or six LTL shipments, I can take off of the human and they can do something more valuable to our customers.

For sure. For sure. Then maybe the last main topic, you are facing an integration project to make this happen. That's not unique to this world. How are you feeling about that? How are you feeling about planning for that? Again, to our audience that would be confronting that as well, what your approach has been? I think we have worked together up front to define a process flow just to, as back for a little bit, and have agreed on the data flow as well. You've got to take that information back internally and maybe share with the audience a bit the process you guys are going through to plan for that integration to take advantage of low consolidation.

Sure. From the very technical aspect of it, if Banyan’s consolidating loads for us, we have to take what would have been multiple bills of lading, get them converted one and get it back into our system. From an IT perspective, most IT folks will tell you that that's easily doable. I think that the broader theme is that, I see every day how integrating our ERP to Banyan makes us faster, more flexible, more resilient to get stuff to our customers. We actually, anybody that's good more can log into our ERP system and book freight. We can watch freight, we can monitor freight. It's what we do. The total topic of integrating more of Banyan and our TMS into our everyday workspace in our ERP system, it'll only continue to provide more and more value, the more and more we do it.

For sure. For sure. Final thoughts on change management. Now you've got to push this down through the organization. What feedback are you getting? Are we able to answer the questions that the team has on the ops accounting and warehouse side of things? How is your organization approaching really the change management to make this happen?

Not just on load consolidation. I'm spoiled in change management. Skidmore has a very, very customer-focused culture. As long as it's right for the customer, as long as it's right for us, nobody really questions it. It's more of a matter of when based on the resources we have and if. On load consolidation in particular, it's interesting, because we don't have a lot of processes, I guess, that can affect our customer, our logistics folks, our warehouses and finance all the same time. In consolidation, that topic alone has to bridge all of those departments.

Again, the humans aren't the obstacle. I'm speaking from a position of privilege, because of our culture. At the end of the day, all the humans also have to get the system to do all of that stuff. I don't worry about change management, because in a healthy company and one that's focused on their customers, they're going to pick the best idea and they're going to do the right thing.

Well said. Well said. You guys certainly have a track record for that. Well, Jordan, let me say this, I think for folks that don't know you and your organization, you guys run a wonderful ship. I want to say a tight ship, but really, it is a very employee-centric organization, impressive organization. I definitely want to thank you not just for today, but really the partnership to help build this tool out and to the audience for clarity. We are working through a low consolidation tool that allows for both a single truck stop to go from multiple LTL loads into a single stop truckload, as well as a multi-stop truckload. A lot of challenges and things to think through to make it happen, but I think we're going to have a great experience here in the next couple of months and be delivering a great product, and as you said, a great experience for the end client and nothing could be more important than that. I thank you for your partnership on this. It's been great today. I look forward to us seeing the results together for sure.

Brian, I echo the same. I appreciate the partnership and the patience. I give you guys and you in particular a heap of credit for listening to your customers. Not only that, but being able from the tech side to take it and make a tool that's useful for everybody. There's nobody who ships anything that wouldn't benefit from freight consolidation.

No, I love it. I love it. Totally agree. Well, folks, that's all for Tire Tracks for today. Jordan, thank you again. Thanks for joining us. We will see everyone in the very near future. Take care.

Look forward to it. Thank you, Brian.