Reveel's Mark Taylor Encourages Supply Chain Professionals to Adapt: Pros to Know Award

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Hello, my name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Mark Taylor, Vice President of Carrier Strategy for Reveel. Mark is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Leaders in Excellence category. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.

Let's talk about you! Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, and how you got to this current stage in your career.

Mark Taylor: Well, I started in the parcel industry in a foundational place, which is the Fort Worth hub of FedEx Ground. So, it doesn't get any more real than seeing people touch boxes every day, helping to develop plans for the facility and really seeing what it takes to drive the throughput of the building, sort into different locations, and really gives you the nuts and bolts of what happens behind the scenes.

From there, everything has been built on that foundational point. From working in the hub, I then went into more of a corporate role, into planning what new hubs the network needed. From there, looking at new services that we could add to our operations. And then after FedEx, after spending a decade there, I became a shipper and worked for Lowe's Home Improvement helping them to essentially build out their e-commerce fulfillment network, going from one node to over 200 nodes, for their e-commerce fulfillment as a shipper that gained perspective on the previous roles of being at the carrier.

And then after Lowe's, going into the consultant space, where I've spent the last 12 years as kind of a third side of the table, if you will, between carriers and shippers to be able to help shippers develop their carrier mixes, their parcel programs, how they should look strategically to really adapt to all of the changes that we've seen, especially in my time in that role.

Reveel is the newest chapter in where I've been in the industry, so now, applying everything that I've learned and gained from that experience to being able to contribute to our software intelligence platform, and further helping those shippers optimize their programs.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you aim to drive innovation into the product roadmap using Agentic AI. Why are technologies like Agentic AI so important to the growth and success of not only your company, but just companies in the supply chain space?

Mark Taylor: Each generation has its own advent of technology that it must adapt to to remain relevant and competitive. If we were having this interview in 2010, we may have talked about how to work with large data sets and using SQL and tools like SaaS to really look at tremendous amounts of data at one time to drive insights.

This generation's enabling technology is artificial intelligence.

And, those of us in the supply chain and in the parcel industry really do have to learn AI and how to adapt it into what we do to allow us to remain relevant in getting to the answers faster. I really do just see it as an enabling technology to be able to help us to do that to get to the insights we need, and the decisions and actions taken from those insights faster.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Your nomination form also details how you guide enterprise-level carrier strategy decisions. From where you sit, how has the carrier space evolved over the years, and what are some of the common trends or themes that you're seeing?

Mark Taylor: There are at least 3 different aspects of that equation.

One is the growth of the carriers. When I first started the industry, the name of the game was filling these parcel networks to a saturation point to enable delivery nationwide. It's hard for us to believe now, but there was a time in which UPS and FedEx did not deliver to every address in the United States. And to do that, they had to build the networks in order to do that. That was getting more volume from every shipper, and incentivizing customers to essentially give them more packages. Parcel networks are hungry. So they need that volume, they need that density in order to enable direct runs in line haul, delivery points, etc.

When I first started, that was the environment, and the carriers have now grown into the point where the networks are fully saturated, even to the point where UPS and FedEx currently don't just focus on getting volume, but focus on getting profitable volume. And so, the carrier growth has been one aspect of this.

Secondarily, it has been those changes that are competitive. No bigger disruption competitively than Amazon. Amazon has completely changed the game on what it means to service customers, what transit time expectations are, and it has really driven a completely different culture for e-commerce.

That has been one of the biggest changes. So, competitively is another aspect that all of these things have changed.

And then, thirdly, has been just really economic environment. Throughout the course, if you think about the era that I've been in the industry, starting in 2000 to now, I've seen a couple of recessions, or near recessions, where the economic needs of shippers created services like SmartPost. And those kind of postal consolidation services and then other times where transit time became so important that the carriers were doing specific things to lane tighten and try to become more competitive.

The economics, the carrier networks, and really the competitive environment has completely changed since when I started.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Your focus for the coming year is to apply retrieval, augmented generation and agentic AI technologies to the company's shipping intelligence platform. What is this platform? Kind of walk us through what it is for those of us that are not aware of it.

Mark Taylor: Reveel is a shipping intelligence platform. It combines some of the classic features, like business intelligence, displaying visuals that are helpful to gain insight about trends and spend. But it also gives further tools, like comparing agreements or scenarios of different types of shipping.

Recently, one thing that's very exciting about this year is deploying Agentic AI into what we're calling Reveel IQ. ReveelIQ is an agent that sits on top of our platform that enables users to ask questions in plain English and get back not just your typical chatbot answer, but additional insights, in addition to just pulling, for instance, the number of packages that you shipped last week. It also makes suggestions that really may not even be part of the original question but are peripheral and helpful to the question being asked by the shipper.

We're really excited about where we can go. That essentially adds an analyst that is sitting on the platform ready to answer your question 24/7.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Leaders in Excellence category honors company leaders who've made outstanding contributions to the supply chain space. What advice do you have for other professionals in supply chain?

Mark Taylor: I think the one word that I would boil all of this down to is adapt.

The challenges that I've had throughout the past 2.5 decades of being in this industry is being able to adapt to the environment, with all of those challenges that we mentioned. Carrier landscapes changing, economic environment changing, competitive landscape, and even what shippers are using the parcel carriers for. Those have all changed, and I've had to adapt each time with technologies, with where I sit in the industry.

If I had one piece of advice to give to supply chain professionals or parcel industry professionals, it would be adapt.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What is the one thing that we haven't discussed yet that's a good takeaway for our audience?

Mark Taylor: I think a good takeaway for the audience would be that, as we go forward, we're going to go into a new era. And we're going to have even more enabling technologies that help us to do what we need to do every day.

And I think the takeaway is that we should all embrace what we can to get to those answers faster to service our customers in the best way possible, through efficiencies, through visibility, and honestly, that's going to have a real impact on the way that even business and commerce is conducted in the United States.

I think that would be the takeaway, is that being technology-focused really helps us to adapt.