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 heavily burdened with various tasks. They developed custom engines for their SaaS product to meet business-specific needs and spent significant time coding connections to third-party applications from carriers and shippers. Additionally, engineers manually coded data and API orchestrations, which was time-consuming and created lengthy onboarding times for new customers and carriers. This impacted overall customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and generated resource bottlenecks.

“We integrated our digital carriers with one of our technologies. Two engineers spent two months on it, costing tens of thousands of dollars,” said Ken Apple, VP 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 its engineering priorities and adopting Digibee. Adopting an iPaaS solution rapidly increased their time to market and was key to their new strategy. They were able to ideate, iterate, and go to production with zero engineers because all new product ideas for the business start with iPaaS from a business perspective. The key steps of 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 to Production: One engineer built a prototype to create a mechanism for 3PLs and brokerages to advertise, quote freight, and fulfill orders with dynamic pricing driven by a team. The next phase aimed to incorporate automation and AI. Each channel had a slightly different API/interface (email vs. reach out vs. poll). The prototype built on Digibee was not only sufficient to validate the concept, but more than sufficient for production, and is already providing immense business value already. This approach has also changed how the Mariner team thinks about solving any new business problem, by connecting existing systems using an iPaaS instead of having to code everything.
  

• Optimizing Talent Usage: With Digibee, Mariner has one person doing the work of two engineers which took three times as long. It also allows less senior engineers to handle integrations, freeing up highly skilled engineers for complex tasks.

“Digibee allows us to use less senior software engineers [to do the data orchestration and integrations], and I can take highly skilled engineers and focus them on the things that only they can do, like building out sophisticated logic inside of our engines,” said Ken Apple, VP of Engineering at Mariner.

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

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

Ken Apple, VP of Engineering at Mariner Logistics

The Results

The implementation of Digibee yielded remarkable results for Mariner Logistics:

• Accelerated Product Development: Reduced development time 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 Rapid 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 Onboarding Speed: Faster integration processes reduced onboarding times for customers and partners, enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

“When I talk to people about Digibee, I tell them to create a force multiplier with this mature technology. The people using this kind of technology find it’s a huge lever. As an engineering leader, you shouldn’t ignore this technology. It should be part of your repertoire, and we’ve seen great ROI already,” Ken emphasized.