Bricz - Leaning into growth by providing the supply chain solutions of tomorrow

Leaning into growth by providing the supply chain solutions of tomorrow

LEANING INTO GROWTH PROVIDING THE SUPPLY SOLUTIONS OF TOMORROW

GROWTH BY SUPPLY CHAIN TOMORROW

Tyler Linderman, Vice President, Strategy & Growth at Bricz shares insights into the supply chain transformation, technological innovation and strategic partnerships underpinning their exciting global expansion.

ith a vision to develop, grow and drive solutions for complex supply chains, the company’s experts work with some of the world’s largest retailers, distributors and brands to generate value, explore opportunities and deliver omnichannel excellence.

Founded in January 2014, Bricz started life in the US as a warehouse management system (WMS) implementation firm and its first customer was US retail giant The Home Depot. The company’s initial focus gravitated towards

technology enablement around Manhattan Associates solutions –eventually diversifying into working with multiple supply chain providers including Körber, Blue Yonder and Oracle.

Since then Bricz has expanded its service provision to include order management system (OMS), transportation management (TMS), labour management system (LMS) and – most recently – robotics and automation technology solutions. In 2020, Bricz opened an office in the UK and turned its attention towards building a European client base.

Bricz is a leading supply chain solutions provider passionate about creating outstanding customer experiences.

Here to shed light on the strategic partnerships, supply chain transformation and technological innovation underpinning the growth and momentum at Bricz is Tyler Linderman, Vice President, Strategy

& Growth.

To understand the drive and direction at Bricz in 2023, Tyler rewinds a few years and describes how in the past decade the company developed its WMS solutions to go deeper in this offering but also widened the breadth and scope of its services to include OMS, TMS, LMS and robotics and automation consulting as a complex supply chain solutions provider.

“We are big believers in partnering with best-of-breed technology providers in our core areas of the supply chain systems,” says Tyler. “I lead our growth and corporate strategy. So that includes strategic initiatives on how we grow as a company but also our partnerships and alliances with various supply chain system vendors and other partners throughout the industry.”

In 2020, Bricz opened its first UK office to expand its operations to Europe.

“We're located in the UK but obviously we work across Europe with customers in Belgium, Holland,

Spain, across all of Europe, in fact. We’re very excited to begin expansion within Central and Northern Europe in the coming year as well to better service our customers in the European Union,” adds Tyler. “We work a little bit differently in Europe compared to the US, as we have a more focused approach currently as we grow, similar to how we started in the US. But we started in a similar way with WMS implementation and consultancy, since expanding into automation strategy and other supply chain solutions provision. When we started the office in the UK three years ago, we recognised that logistics and distribution systems

had evolved from being in a place where everyone just thought it was a WMS and another automation provider over the top. What we've realised over the last few years is that the world has changed a lot and supply chains have become a lot more complex with regards to the number of suppliers businesses have to interact with and the number of systems that interact with those suppliers. We're here to provide a bit of a comfort blanket between the customer and that complexity.”

Opening a new UK office three years ago in the midst of COVID

“It actually turned out to be a useful time to extend our operations in the UK, because we had a bit of time to get together with the right kind of customers that that you need when you're expanding your organisation into a new region,” says Tyler.

“Since then, we've increased the size of our team with the addition of key consultants, subject matter experts and administration team members. We've done that with help from our US and India counterparts, identifying global clients whom we work with, and

lockdowns worked in Bricz’s favour, explains Tyler.

obviously building out a client list of our own in the UK as well. That began with WMS implementation and consultancy support and we continue to focus on consulting services around strategy, selection and implementation of WMS and related technologies.”

While the European team was getting off the ground with the UK office and growing Bricz’s European operations in the past three years, Tyler shares how the US side of the company wielded technological innovation to lean into its own set of challenges during this time.

“2023 has been exciting, right?” begins Tyler. “We’ve seen different demands this year than there were even in 2022 or 2021 when we had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, customers shifted focus heavily towards e-commerce, so we spent a lot of time enabling things like

buying online and then picking up in-store or improving e-commerce processes within the warehouse using some of those traditional WMS features like pick carts, voice picking and batch picking methodologies.

“But I would say recently here in the US, our focus shifted a little bit away from e-commerce and back to how do we get in front of the stores and how do we get product efficiently through the stores. It's now a question of how we pull together the first, middle and last mile for both store networks and our e-commerce networks for our customers.

“There’s been a shift back towards the ‘omnichannel’ buzzword, which

“It's become abundantly clear that the identification of value is becoming second nature to everybody because they have to identify the areas of their organisation that provide the most value”

was all the rage in the late teens, especially in 2018 and 2019. In 2023, we’ve had to ask how we improve our overall functionality if we look at the supply chain tech market as a whole, but especially in North America.

“The other industry development that I think is interesting is in the WMS space. More and more companies are evaluating what they need to do from a technology standpoint as they go forward. So your major WMS providers and our partners are almost all fully cloudbased SaaS products, which is a big shift in the marketplace in the WMS space from where we were five or seven years ago. The other

interesting factor is it's the last technology to move to the cloud because it is a real-time processing engine. When you're operating an order management system, you have more buffer for processing of the order. If an order takes eight seconds to route, there's minimal impact on the end user. But if a picker is picking a product and it takes seven seconds to return the screen back to the user, and they're doing that 200 times an hour, that's a bigger impact. So at Bricz, we're helping customers evaluate what the path forward looks like at these large companies in the WMS space by exploring how they can reduce risks with cloud technology and ensure that their processing is capable. Post-COVID there have been new challenges and new conversations, but still well within our realm of expertise, which are a lot of fun to have.

“All our customers have asked for and had to demonstrate a huge amount of agility. It's become abundantly clear that the identification of value is becoming second nature to everybody because they have to identify the areas of their organisation that provide the most value. This goes for their systems, their suppliers, their clients and their customers.”

With all the recent developments, demands and opportunities arising

in the supply chain industry, Bricz is looking to the future as a company and plans are in place to build on the momentum in 2023 so far and carry it forward into the years to come with transformation and technological innovation at the centre of its growth strategies.

“Our growth plans are twofold,” summarises Tyler. “The first is global growth and our teams in Europe and India are obviously a big part of that. We have established a strong base here in North America but more and more of our customers are asking if we can support them globally. So we are looking at how we take the same great execution we developed in the US and roll it out worldwide and conversely learn what our Europe and India teams do exceptionally well and apply that in North America. The team in the UK and Europe more broadly is a big piece of that growth. Part of this is expanding with existing customers that have European operations, but also supporting new customers in Europe. We also have a team in India, where we've done an exceptional job of leveraging our India team members to support European projects as well. The time zones are fairly similar, so the European team works with our India team very closely. The other nice thing about how we're set up at Bricz is

“With all the growth we’ve achieved in the last five years, we’ve still managed to maintain a company culture which is very entrepreneurial, close-knit and energetic which is something we celebrate here at Bricz”

Tyler Linderman, Vice President, Strategy & Growth

our ability to work as one company across three broad global regions.

“We've put collaborative methodologies in place to facilitate global cooperation among our teams which we’ve been able to effectively execute this year. It provides a lot more flexibility for our customers since they get the same people talking to them – whether it's a warehouse in the US, Europe or Asia. So we're working with a few customers on a truly global scale with our support and our value proposition for them is it doesn't matter where in the world your distribution centre is located, we

can still offer top-level support and services. Our teams are going to talk to each other and customers can expect efficiencies of scale across their teams by engaging with our people, who are all WMS experts reading from the same page.”

Here, Tyler adds that efficiently managing global growth has been a crucial determinant of the recent success at Bricz.

“I think the thing that our people have noticed since COVID is the amazing way Bricz has managed to leverage its skills matrix globally. We've got UK people who work on

Mexico projects. We've got people in India who work on Netherlands projects and US people working on UK projects. I think we all thought that we worked internationally or globally before COVID, but now we’ve built a completely different way to operate. That's what we love to see – it’s the way Bricz can leverage being a truly global company by using the skills of all of its people worldwide.”

continents. “Every Friday, we come together with the leads from each of our regions to discuss strategy,” says Tyler. “Say we have a project opportunity, we ask each other how we can best pool our resources to maximise it in the best interest of our clients. That speaks to one of our key value propositions and our key core competencies at Bricz: excellence in customer service. Our CEO Ram Gopalakrishnan asks us all the time, ‘Are you listening to the customer? Are we answering the question that they're asking?’ Because we truly believe, across the globe, there's a lot of opportunity for supply chain advancements and our initial projects are yielding fantastic results through global collaboration.”

The second layer of Bricz’s growth plans coalesces around robotics and automation technology solutions, particularly within the warehouse.

Tyler stresses that Bricz grew organically from the ground up as a company in the past decade, which means their teams are closeknit even if they operate on different

“More and more companies are asking us to help evaluate where they’re at with robotics and automation technologies,” expands Tyler. He explains there are new trends emerging in the labour market that impact supply chain companies around the world.

“It is becoming more difficult to find team members who can perform the roles you need, but

also find enough of these staff to execute processes with growth in mind,” explains Tyler. “We’re finding that more companies are looking to take those valuable skills that people have and put them in decision-making jobs and utilise robotics for repetitive movements or tasks. Many of our customers would rather have one person work on quality audits or vast value-added service processing, rather than just pick up a pallet and move it from point A to point B. At Bricz we’re exploring how we can help them achieve this end goal with the right software and hardware.

“Our growth plans are built around expanding robotics and automation practice in the supply chain industry, both here in the US and globally. We have invested heavily in conference trade shows like ProMat and MODEX here in the US, and then

“Our growth plans are built around expanding robotics and automation practice in the supply chain industry, both here in the US and globally”

more recently we went to a show called IntraLogisteX in the UK.

“We are more than just a WMS implementation firm. We're a supply chain solutions firm. A big piece of that is extending into somewhere that may be slightly outside of our comfort zone, and

driving change in robotics and automation tech is where we’re heading. The best part is we're not a traditional system integrator or reseller of those solutions. So we take an agnostic approach as we evaluate and find solutions for customers since we’re not resellers of any one solution. Again, this goes

back to our ethos of listening to the customer and doing what's right for them, finding the truly best solution for them and then pushing that forward.”

As Bricz expands globally and into the robotics and automation spaces, partnerships and collaborations are

essential to the company’s growth strategy. Tyler harkens back to the early days when Bricz launched and explains that the company soon realised many incredible supply chain vendors already existed.

“We never had and do not have any intention to build or rebuild our own

version of these systems,” explains Tyler. “From day one, partners have been fundamental to us –particularly collaboration with companies at the leading edge, the best best-of-breed vendors offering the latest technology solutions.

“For example, Tecsys is a warehouse management and order management vendor. They

offer other solutions as well, but mainly we're partnering with them on the warehousing side of things. Tecsys offers a compelling niche value proposition for the healthcare market here in North America, as a best of breed solution when it comes to healthcare systems. If you consider large hospital systems and the delivery of medicines or equipment, they have unique functionality built

Stay ahead of the curve.

In a world where supply chains are increasingly automated, adaptability is your key to success. Tecsys Elite™ is an end-to-end supply chain platform – including ERP, OMS, WMS and TMS – designed to give you complete control and the flexibility to evolve when you need it.

Take the next step:

Read the Ultimate Guide to Warehouse Automation READ GUIDE

Tecsys Elite™ WMS – part of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Warehouse Management Systems for 12 straight years.

“Tecsys established themselves at the forefront of the healthcare industry in that area, so it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with them”

into their WMS specific to that industry.

“They’ve established themselves at the forefront of the healthcare industry in that area, so it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with them so that when we come across an opportunity in that marketplace, we've got the ability and right contacts to partner, execute and implement effectively.

“It's incredibly important to our growth and operations that we identify the right partners to align with strategically but also ensure that we have common goals so we can drive success together.”

Offering his perspective from the European side of the company, Tyler reiterates that as Bricz has embarked on its exciting period of global expansion alongside the broadening and deepening of its service provision, it has maintained a fantastic company culture while embracing the change that comes with strategic partnerships, supply chain transformation and technological innovation.

entrepreneurial, close-knit and energetic which is something we celebrate here at Bricz,” says Tyler.

To learn more about Bricz, visit their website bricz.com.

Added Value

“With all the growth we’ve achieved in the last five years, we’ve still managed to maintain a company culture which is very

Events

Tyler is looking forward to attending Manifest Vegas at Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, US from February 5-7th 2024 and representing Bricz at this unique conference where a traditional expo hall style event meets speaking sessions, panels, networking opportunities and other engaging experiences for supply chain industry leaders.