LEADERSHIP Conversations with the Captains of Industry
A Platform for Paradigm Change
In the 1980s, it took Bryn Heimbeck six months to type a bill of lading without mistakes on an IBM Selectric. “The team gave me a standing ovation,” he recalls. A few years further along in his global trade career, Heimbeck left the typewriter far behind as he began to write computer code. “When you learn to program, you think about how you can use software to solve problems,” he says. Those early problem-solving efforts bore abundant fruit in 1997, when Heimbeck and his colleague Kevin Clark co-founded Trade Tech, a digital platform for global trade. Heimbeck, the president of Trade Tech, sat down with us recently to discuss the company’s history and current activities, and how he’s leading it into the future. IL: What opportunities did you and Kevin Clark observe in the 1990s that prompted you to found Trade Tech? Kevin and I worked together at Fritz Companies. He’d been reading about the internet, which the U.S. military had developed to give personnel access to computer applications from any location. It occurred to me that if you could have a supply chain management application available from anywhere, then when customers asked if we could handle their business in obscure but growing markets, we could always say yes. If we could get people all operating on a single platform, housed on one server that could be located anywhere, then they could work together. There wasn’t anything called Software as a Service at the time. We had to invent a browser- based front end by turning forms around so we could push data out. IL: What’s one lesson you learned early in your career that helped to shape you as a leader? Back in the day, we used fax machines. You printed a document, dialed a number, and maybe got a busy signal. Your phone rang, so you set down the paper and took a call from someone else who also needed a document. You printed that and went back to the fax machine, forgetting that the last document hadn’t gone through yet. It was terribly inefficient. Then we put in autofaxing, and my team loved it immediately. It’s important to identify what people spend the most time on and what causes problems. Then they trust you, and when you introduce something new, they don’t push back.
Bryn Heimbeck Co-founder and President Trade Tech
From using a typewriter and fax machine to an automated accounting process, Bryn Heimbeck has done it all. These days, he continues to strive to make all processes easier so everyone sleeps better at night.
by Merrill Douglas
10 Inbound Logistics • September 2024
Powered by FlippingBook