EP 210: Vector

Kevin Lawton

On this episode, I was joined by the CEO and Co-Founder of Vector, Will Chu. Vector is providing paperless solutions for the transportation and logistics industries. We discuss the origins of Vector, why paper has been so prevalent in our industry and how their solutions work.

Key Takeaways

• The origins of Vector actually remind me of a previous podcast on DCL Logistics where there was a well-established company that resulted in a younger generation coming in to make it more technologically advanced. Will explains how he had a friend whose father owned a trucking company that had gotten pretty large but got to a point where he did not want to run it anymore. Will was invited by the friend to help him work on the business and as Will was looking at the business he was seeing there was a lot of paper being moved around, mostly BOLs, that was causing many inefficiencies. With his software background, he was able to look at a way to create electronic BOL’s to eliminate paper in many of the steps of carrier pickups and drop-offs. He then turned that into a company that is now Vector.
• Vector is on a great mission to eliminate paper in the supply chain and I believe that is critical not only for being more sustainable but also for speeding up the supply chain and making us more efficient. The results that Vector has seen speak for themself with Will reporting that they are seeing average paper times of 66 minutes being reduced all the way down to 11 minutes. That is almost a savings of an hour per truck which if you think about how many trucks are moving around is an enormous amount of time. In their mission, they have created and are a part of the Contactless Standard which is bringing companies together to create a paperless standard for the industry.
• The mission to go paperless is something that recently sparked my interest because of an encounter I had with a trucker. He was signing some BOL’s and explained to me that he had been driving for 40 years and cannot believe that the technology has never changed. Will related to this explaining that it is something that has been foundational to trucking and it has been difficult for people to see the change because it works. Oftentimes disrupting the flow of things can be scary especially when it is messing with the potential of on-time shipments but if we can improve in such a substantial way then a little bit of pain during a change will be worth it in the end.

Listen to the episode below and leave your thoughts in the comments.