Jon Monroe
President, Jon Monroe Consulting, Founder, SYSM Technologies
I have had the good fortune of having worked in almost every aspect of the supply chain; ocean carriers (U.S. Lines and Hyundai), forwarders (Circle Int’l, Emery Ocean Services, BAX Global, Topocean and Worldwide Logistics) BCOs (Saks 5th Ave, General Motors, Frito Lay/Pepsico and Pioneer Electronics) and ports (Georgia Port Authority & Shanghai International Port Group). The breadth of my experience allows me to look at things with a different perspective. In May of 2021, I was tasked to set up the U.S. terminal network and team for Transfar Shipping, the Cainaio Logistics (Alibaba Company) backed container shipping line. Though setting up a shipping line in the midst of a pandemic is not an ideal time, it has been an exciting time.
My travels through and love of China, span more than three decades representing China based companies with seven of those years spent traversing the Yangtze River with my partner. This resulted in the writing and distribution of a 381-page e-book, Yangtze River World Report, a documentation of the containerization of the Yangtze River distributed by the JOC in 2010. Under the current circumstances, this type of research could not be done. During the same period, I managed to develop a number of middleware order management systems for the likes of Topocean, De Well and UWL. I have onboarded more than 100 companies and thousands of factories on these platforms, most, China based factories. Today, I help companies digitalize their import supply chain through SYSM a new middleware order, management platform I developed.
In January 2020, my family and I were on the 2nd to last Delta flight back to the U.S. before services were shut down due to COVID. In March of 2020, I began distributing a weekly blog (now a monthly) on the COVID China supply chain.