Bill McHenry

Freight visibility matters to freight brokers–they must act when a shipment is delayed. Brokers use costly call centers as a solution, and the manual nature of this solution provided delayed and inaccurate data. After identifying this market problem, I built a business case to determine the feasibility of the proposed product. My business case convinced my leadership that we should move forward with this project. Once leadership approved my business case, I wrote the user stories and worked with engineers to complete and launch the initial product on time.

After a year on the market, I realized we needed to pivot to deal with the growing threat of startups entering the freight visibility space. I decided it would be best to partner with these companies in a way that preserved our revenue. Our product became successful, providing visibility to hundreds of thousands of shipments per month.

Omnitracs purchased a product in a niche market. The product was essential to the daily business of our customers, but our customers felt that the product was becoming stale.

Initially, I was asked to build an innovative roadmap. However, it quickly became clear that system stability was the cause of our customer dissatisfaction. I realized that we needed to make a few key changes to attain system stability. The main obstacle came from our customers' expectations for immediate gratification. I needed to alter their expectations.

My main message to achieve buy-in was that the short-term changes would lead to long-term gains. Throughout the year, I conveyed that message to keep our customers focused on the goal. The outcome was that we retained all of our main customers, which provided a basis for continued development.

For decades, Omnitracs faced only other US companies in the Canadian market. As new Canadian competitors popped up, Omnitracs needed to change direction. My leadership asked me to move to Toronto to identify and fill our product gaps. I visited customers across Canada to understand their needs, and I spoke with our sales and operations teams.

Regional differences made it challenging to prioritize; Albertan customers had their list and Québécois had their list, and there was no overlap between them. Limited resources prevented us from meeting both markets’ needs at the same time. In order to decide which market we would defend first, I evaluated different factors, including:
- What was the cost of completing these projects?
- How well could we defend the market we chose NOT to invest in?
- Where were our competitors most effective?

I chose the Quebec route, and we ultimately delivered our localized product and defended our market share.

CROSSMARK’s performance when representing its clients’ brands means everything. Measuring performance was manual and time consuming. To solve this problem, CROSSMARK wanted to build a dashboard that provided real-time visibility to its customers.

After initial failed attempts, executive leadership brought me in to get the project back on track. After establishing trust with our senior stakeholders, I assembled a team to capture the business requirements. Development began as soon as I received buy-in, and we consistently demoed new functionality to the business to validate our work.

We ended up delivering the dashboard more quickly than we anticipated, and the product captured the continued business from our clients.

A client used CROSSMARK to promote its products in different retail outlets and wanted a qualitative way to measure CROSSMARK’s impact. Our team was slammed with work, and this project required heavy business logic, so I took on the project myself. Using Alteryx and Tableau, I captured the client's business logic and provided a dashboard that illustrated CROSSMARK's value and ensured continued business.