• TPM23
  • February 26 – March 1, 2023 | Long Beach Convention Center
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Weston LaBar

Cargomatic

Chief Strategy Officer

Weston LaBar serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Cargomatic, the leading digital brokerage and freight marketplace creating solutions for customers’ drayage, intermodal, and short-haul FTL/LTL needs in all the nation’s seaports, rail ramps, and most major metropolitan markets with over 35,000 trucks. Prior to joining Cargomatic, Weston spent seven years serving as Chief Executive Officer at the Harbor Trucking Association, the nation’s largest drayage trucking association. He has more than a decade of experience as an investor, strategic advisor, and executive helping grow early-stage startups, managing trade associations, as well as large advocacy and external affairs projects. Weston is active in local, state, and federal policy-making on goods movement and international trade and has led countless initiatives with other stakeholders in the global supply chain to increase port productivity and the advancement of technology in freight.

Sessions With Weston LaBar

Wednesday, 1 March

  • 11:00am - 11:45am (PST) / 01/mar/2023 07:00 pm - 01/mar/2023 07:45 pm

    When Visibility and Capacity Matching Meet: A Balsam Brands Case Study

    Case studies at JOC events offer a glimpse of the issues shippers face in their supply chain networks and how they are partnering with their logistics and transportation providers to resolve them.

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    When pandemic-led cargo surges strained landside capacity in 2021 and early 2022, shippers of all sorts faced a myriad of problems. With warehouse space filled to the rafters and trucking companies unable to keep up with volumes, containers backed up at the ports, unable to move. Finding trucking providers proved a daunting, time-consuming task, and detention and demurrage charges skyrocketed. Balsam Brands, one of the largest companies providing Christmas- and other holiday-related décor and which imported about 6,000 TEU in 2021, paid “obscene” amounts for D&D in 2021, said Michael Shaughnessy, the company’s senior vice president of operations, supply chain, and emerging markets. Enter Cargomatic, a tech-focused logistics solutions company that uses AI-based visibility tools and more than 14,000 motor carriers operating some 35,000 trucks across 65 terminals in the US, Canada, and Mexico to match shippers’ needs to move cargo timely with the trucking capacity it needs in specific markets. “Our D&D and per-diem charges this year are a fraction of what they were in ’21, and we’ve minimized missed and delayed pickups,” said Shaughnessy, who signed on with Cargomatic in March. This case study will examine the significant challenges Balsam was able to address by creating a single point of contact to manage its trucking shipments, rather than developing, managing, and juggling the hundreds of relationships it would otherwise need to have.

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