Technology companies come in many forms, addressing pain points across just about every single industry. Many of the most successful tech companies start with a specific goal in mind—fixing something in an industry that’s either broken or inefficient—which is why many founders have industry-specific backgrounds. Many founders don’t possess the kind of modern technology experience needed to successfully build their solution, but they have the idea and the industry knowledge to implement it. Tech savvy partners are crucial to building a successful product, but domain expertise is the most valuable asset for reshaping industries.
project44’s Logistics and Transportation Domain Expertise
project44’s Founder and CEO, Jett McCandless, and President, Tommy Barnes share over 40 years of industry experience, ranging from night shifts at docks, management at 3PLs, major retailer account management at large carriers, and founding multiple industry companies. Jett founded project44 based on his experiences working in different parts of the industry, and Tommy utilizes his wealth of experience to guide the company. Both were listed on Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2017 Pros to Know list. Their shared domain expertise has provided them with valuable insight to build and direct project44 and its products. That’s why the first place we look when adding team members is within our own industry.
Identifying Pain Points, Then Solving Them
Building a strong foundation for a company often relies on identifying pain points based upon first hand experience. If you’ve actually lived through the problem you’re solving, it becomes easier to visualize the best possible form of the solution. You start by identifying a root cause, and you build data and create workflows around it. Without domain expertise, finding the right data is extremely difficult—finding functional ways to implement data is almost impossible.
project44 was created based on Jett’s career experience. After working in the logistics industry in so many different capacities, he noticed a common thread of technological inefficiency. There were too many dated technology solutions, and too many pieces of “band-aid” technology that sought to fix small issues without addressing the larger ones. One of the largest pain points was that legacy technology like EDI wasn’t providing accurate, up to date data to all supply chain partners—the information sent from a shipper to a carrier, or a carrier to a 3PL, was not always the same on both sides of the communication. Technology capable of real-time data transfer and data normalization was being used in other industries, but it had yet to be implemented in logistics. Jett knew that a modern foundation of technology could revolutionize the industry, so he used his domain expertise to found a company to do just that.
Expertise in Action
Solving one problem in an industry is great, but creating a foundation upon which the entire industry can be rebuilt is incredible. project44 was built on the idea that industry technology was archaic, with the specific goal of replacing legacy data transfer. While that is just one part of the picture, once you begin to zoom out it becomes clear that this idea is capable of having a much larger impact. Building a new technological foundation for the industry means that we can solve, not only the problems of today, but we can anticipate the problems of the future and solve them before they impact your bottom line.
Companies want better data to act on, increased capacity flexibility and visibility, increased workforce productivity focused on strategic work, and analytics to help improve planning and execution. Our solutions provide value to carriers, 3PLs, shippers, TMS providers, and just about anyone else in the supply chain, and we built our team with people from each of those backgrounds. We’re better equipped to help them because, at one point or another, we were them. That’s the value of leveraging domain expertise in technology.