We consider the year a success if our customers achieved success. In terms of both numbers and customer happiness, 2024 was a great year.
Best Support - G2, and other Analyst Recognitions
G2 currently evaluates 209 shipping technologies based on customer reviews. Out of the category, Shipium ranked best in support.
We treat our relationships with customers seriously. Building a brand based on credibility and follow through is essential in our industry because operations tech runs like a central nervous system throughout a company's supply chain. Shipium's platform has achieved an important level of status within our growing customer base because we power shipping operations from one end (like delivery promises to customers in carts) to the other end (like carrier selection).
While our platform is extremely performant, as shown by the trust that companies as large as the Fortune 100 are putting into us, when challenges arise we must support our customers. We do this through dedicated support, open communication channels, and a diversified staff across technical, carrier, and partner groups.
G2's recognition wasn't the only major analyst accomplishment in 2024, however.
Earlier this year Gartner recognized Shipium in the Multicarrier Parcel Management (MCPMS) category. As they chart the advancements in shipping operations, they provide a maturity model for modern operators to consider. Our platform capabilities squarely put us at Level 5, the highest level.
Our vision for the future of shipping is matched by Gartner's assessment as well, where they shared their top recommendation:
"Optimize and consolidate parcel shipments by using an MCPMS as a complementary solution to the TMS and/or WMS, ERP or OMS, or as a transportation solution for shippers that primarily use parcel as their mode of transportation."
Exponential increase in usage
Customers flocked to Shipium this year, with our customer base growing like crazy and their usage of the platform growing exponentially.
Based on our estimates, we believe that at some point in 2025, we could be the 6th largest retail shipper in North America, just under Amazon, Walmart, and others.
That is the power of the platform: do more together than you can do yourself.
By aggregating shipping operations and execution across industries, our leading Machine Learning and AI models are fed with bigger, differentiated datasets customers can't get anywhere else that power more accurate and more powerful algorithms assisting modern operations.
This year we launched a better glimpse to a tangible example: Dynamic Time-in-Transit modeling.
Our ML powered TnT values gave customers better predictive understanding of delivery times, powering the transit aspects of EDDs our customers consume directly or through our platform partners like Manhattan and Blue Yonder. Because the design of the platform is end-to-end coordination, the same ML models powered more informed shipment execution, resulting in dramatic cost savings through "intelligent downgrades"—aka picking a cheaper method that hits a faster date.
You can view a demo of our Dynamic Time-in-Transit modeling here.
Establishing the ecosystem
All year we have been promoting the idea that supply chain technology is a team sport. Any solution or service that positions itself as the only savior for success is neither your savior nor will help you be successful.
We have done our part by aggressively pursuing tight partnerships that benefit both our customers and the operator community as a whole.
The perfect partnership with Green Mountain continues to build, as our joint customers look to pair the strategic insights and support with our execution systems. The tight data integration between us has led to better cost efficiency and smarter planning for customers. More announcements on this partnership are coming soon.
We announced formal partnerships with Manhattan, Blue Yonder, and Körber, while strengthening our formal partnership with Logiwa. Several more unofficial partnerships have grown behind the scenes, as we're now deeply integrated to dozens of systems of record used by customers. The launch of our integration framework has given customers the confidence that using Shipium within their existing systems is easy.
Carriers still love us — nothing has changed. We announced formal inclusion into FedEx Compatible and UPS Ready programs, and have announced dozens of partnerships, with DoorDash as the most recent. We are still the network carriers wish you used.
Another successful peak
When we dig into our peak season numbers, we see incredible success all around.
For shipments measured from November 15th through December 29th, customers saved an average of 9% on their selections. You can read more about our methodology here, but in summary, we measure this by working with customers to understand their selection criteria pre-Shipium, then run a simulation via our Simulation product, and compare the results against actuals.
Incredibly, shipping costs were driven down week-by-week. CPP was a full 16% cheaper the week of December 18-24 than the week of November 15-21. Our analysis across customer datasets shows it is because of a greater diversification of carrier volume flow, and fits our ethos of a "merit-based" selection system. As we got closer to Christmas day, customers with multiple carriers available saw real-time shifts in—
- carrier capacity capabilities
- eligibility requirements via our real-time rules engine
- costs via our real-time fully-loaded cost models
- and probable performance (speed, accuracy) via our real-time dynamic time-in-transit models
That dynamic real-time evaluation meant the best option was being picked for every shipment.
Keeping the promises that you made
It's great costs were down, but what about performance?
On Time Delivery (OTD) was awesome. This year we worked with customers to better measure OTD as it relates to desired delivery dates, not necessary SLAs. Measuring OTD by carrier SLAs is good, and Shipium has historically performed great (99%).
But modern companies know that taking on a little bit of OTD risk in order to promote faster delivery dates, especially during a competitive holiday season, can lead to millions in new revenue that smartly offsets being overly conservative and weighted towards promoting just carrier SLAs.
Said differently: If 92% of the time a delivery will happen in 3 days or less, then why give a 5-day EDD?
Well, our customers get that superior strategy, and take advantage of our "Desired Delivery Date" mechanism in carrier selection, and pass in faster dates than carrier SLAs, and ask us to find the carrier who will hit those dates.
During peak season — which can be hard to predict with volatile weather, carrier capacity issues, and compressed timelines — our OTD for those shipments was a sterling 95.4% across all customers.
To put it in perspective 30.48% of all shipments during peak season were delivered in 4 days or less. Of that group, 79.5% were delivered using a cheaper ground or economy method, versus an expedited method where the carrier SLA was 4 days or faster. This is the very real results of Shipium coordinating and impacting both topline and bottomeline strategies.
Global expansion
This year saw expansion into Canada and Mexico for added origins. Multiple customers are now using Shipium for their fulfillment operations across all three countries.
Customers love this because it gives them a centralized location to manage all carriers, contracts, rates, rules, and now ML + AI models.
Global enterprises serve a global audience, and we helped them reach those markets during peak. We helped deliver packages to 114 different countries in the build up to Christmas day.
True enterprise scale of Machine Learning and AI capabilities
Throughout 2024, we evaluated over 4 billion data points across 11 different ML models tested and deployed to the platform.
To give you a sense of scale of peak season, about 1 billion were during the Nov 15 - Dec 29 timeframe.
Our signature ML capability — predicting parcel transit time — keeps getting better. Throughout 2024, hitting on-or-before carrier SLAs was 99.1%, while hitting on-or-before desired delivery dates was 97.1%. The real shocking gains were within the model's ability to hit an exact date, which is now clocking in at over 90%. Anyone who has worked in supply chains knows how difficult that is.
Shipium's north star is to help you coordinate and control all shipping operations from one end of your supply chain to the other. Doing so is the only way to impact customer experience in a positive way, and follow through with cost and risk optimizations that scale. We will continue to launch new products throughout 2025 that will target new shipping related challenges locked away in other systems, and centralize them among the industry's most trusted enterprise shipping platform. The results will be even better performance across speed, cost, accuracy, and flexibility for customers.
