By Maneet Singh, Chief Information Officer
Odyssey’s tech evolution for 2025
The logistics industry is evolving fast, and technology is at the center of that shift. Recently, our CEO shared Odyssey’s path forward for 2025, which, along with several other exciting goals, includes making strategic IT investments to improve supply chain efficiency, increase visibility, and bring AI-driven innovation to our customers. As Odyssey’s CIO, I’d like to share some specific thoughts on how Odyssey is thinking through its technology strategy for the coming year.
We have two goals – both of which will provide significant benefits to our customers from this shift in approach. First, we’re working to leverage our refreshed tech capacity to support each of our divisions reach their goals. More ambitiously, in 2025, our team will be working to build a technology ecosystem that will empower Odyssey to deliver major efficiencies to our customers, improve their visibility over their freight, and reduce their shipping costs.
2024 goals set; goals achieved
Let’s first take a minute to reflect on our accomplishments. Last year, Odyssey made a series of commitments around technology, which we refer to as our ‘defensive’ era of IT. We took a hard look at our technological landscape to make it more secure, user-friendly, and connected. Our North Star during the past several months was ‘connected systems, integrated data’ — all with a purpose of giving our stakeholders better visibility and improved service. While we were driven to get our technology all working together, at the core was a matter of risk mitigation.
I’m proud to say most of this work is complete. We now successfully consolidated systems and integrated data sources that had been operating in parallel for 20 years. We benchmarked our IT ecosystem against not only logistics competitors, but also against top-class, tech-enabled industries.
The results are nothing short of tremendous. Now that we have consolidated the technological ecosystem under One Odyssey, we’re ready to go the next level – “Digital Evolution of Odyssey”— our offensive posture. What will this look like strategically and what does it mean for our customers?
Expanding the art of the possible
As our CEO pointed out, as part of moving from Foundational efforts to Winning in Future, it is time to think bigger. Recent advancements have allowed us to serve customers more effectively, enabling a world where distance doesn’t matter. While last year was about modernizing our tech stack—doing what needed to be done, now we can focus on what’s possible.
As I’ve written in previous blogs, Odyssey’s approach to technology has evolved to become fiercely outcomes-driven. Any tech we invest in can’t simply be interesting experiments with ROI realizations coming far down the road. IT at Odyssey is a business enabler, and we want our customers to experience stronger capabilities and services now – and to give them an edge they cannot get anywhere else.
We continue to ask the right questions: How do we make it easier for Odyssey’s customers to ship their freight? How can we make work more efficient for our employees and business leaders, so our customers benefit?
However, at the top of our list of questions is: How do we build a tech ecosystem that will lead the supply chain by example into a more effective mode of functioning?
Going on the offense with AI
One main reason we pursued data integration so doggedly is that we knew this was a prerequisite to leveraging generative AI for the benefit of our customers. In the last couple of years, much has been made of AI’s potential to transform the logistics industry.
At Odyssey, many of these transformative applications are now coming to life before our eyes. By leveraging a unified data lake, we make data-driven predictive decisions that bring exponentially greater efficiency to our customers’ operations — and to our own. While not an exhaustive list, these applications include route optimization and planning, warehousing optimization, and dynamic, natural-language virtual assistants. Each of these applications is no longer a far-flung hope or a near-future possibility. Odyssey can offer our efficiencies to our customers, here and now.
Big ideas, bold technology and real customer impact
We continue to develop and expand partnerships with our customers to address their most visionary ideas so we can deliver bold solutions. We’re asking our leaders to throw out the playbook, throw out any notion of budget constraints, and simply ask: what would move the needle the most for Odyssey’s customers?
We take these ideas and connect them with our technological ability, unlocking new ways of moving our customers’ freight. It’s truly an exciting time.
I’m proud that we’ve built a culture at Odyssey where technology isn’t an end, but a pathway to a more powerful and connected supply chain. This way of thinking is critical to our customers’ success and what keeps us moving forward in our evolution. What excites me most is that our company supports technology to unlock new frontiers at the horizon of our operations.
The work we’ve done to enhance our tech ecosystem has expanded Odyssey’s capacities, to the point where almost no conclusion is foregone. In 2025, we’ll be working to evolve the future of technology in logistics alongside some of the best supply chain talent in the world.
