Ship4wd's Carmit Glik on Digital Freight Forwarding

Carmit Glik began her supply chain career at the age of 20, joining a newly-established agency under Maersk, one of the largest shipping and logistics companies in the world.

Currently, she serves as the CEO of Ship4wd, a digital freight forwarding company she founded three years ago to address the international freight needs of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

Ship4wd is particularly focused on supporting SMBs, which often lack the necessary knowledge and tools to navigate global trade.

Carmit's initial role with Maersk grew rapidly, giving her a comprehensive foundation in the industry. This enabled her to participate in Maersk's International Shipping Education (MISE) programme, which was aimed at developing future leaders in shipping and logistics.

Over her 17 years with the company, Carmit lived in five countries across three continents, gaining expertise in areas such as maritime law and ground logistics.

Her first international role was as Maersk’s South China Regional Sales Manager in 2005, where she worked in Hong Kong, a major global port and the 'Gate of China'. This role involved exposure to large-scale international supply chains and saw her work major brands like Walmart, Lenovo and Huawei.

Subsequently, she returned to Europe, taking up positions in Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands- eventually culminating in her last role as Director & Global Head of Sales. 

After leaving Maersk, Glik established an innovation hub in Rotterdam as the Europe CEO for Cogoport, a startup focused on digitalising supply chain flows in Europe, which has since become a unicorn.

Her experience at Cogoport deepened her understanding of the continent’s supply chains and the interconnections between various transport routes.

How should companies adapt their supply chain practices to global geopolitical events? 

When I used to raise this topic five or six years ago, people would find it strange, especially small companies. The attitude towards geopolitical disruption of the supply chain was “ok, things happen, but so be it”.

Today, I don’t think anybody questions the need to adapt: we’ve all seen that events in one part of the world can have massive global impact.

I’ve been in this industry for 25 years and I’ve never had a quiet year. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all even more aware of the fragility of the supply chain and the far-reaching ramifications of regional events.

The first piece of advice I’d give is to think deeply about how your supply chain is structured right now and to work towards diversifying it.

Having multiple options spread across the world is what will enable you to adapt to every “what if” scenario and procure your goods from somewhere else if one supplier becomes unavailable. These “what ifs" are not as far away as they seemed in the past or even as they seem right now.

My second piece of advice is to work with a logistics partner that can effectively manage these varied locations and options. To operate globally, you need a truly global partner that can meet this diversification of your supplier portfolio. 

What challenges do smaller businesses face in relation to shipping and how can they overcome them? 

Well, first, all the geopolitical volatility we just spoke about. Large corporations have typically already ensured the all-important diversity of their supply chains.

This doesn’t mean that holdups and obstacles don’t impact them, but their impact is mitigated because they can pivot to other options when they need to. In the case of SMBs, however, they normally don’t diversify their suppliers, their processes or their tools, so any problems can cause huge issues for their company and even cause them to shut down.

Being a small company doesn’t mean that you’re less dependent on the rest of the world, but more.

I’ve spoken with more than a few former small business owners who didn’t survive the pandemic, for example, because freight rates were so high and they weren’t guaranteed any shipment allocations. For these reasons, I actually think that SMBs deal with much higher risks from geopolitical events than larger enterprises. 

Secondly, SMBs have smaller teams and more restricted budgets than large companies, so they aren’t usually able to hire a designated logistics manager or team to deal with the complex admin of shipping goods.

This is quite a significant challenge for these smaller businesses, because it means they lack the crucial industry know-how and acumen to build a resilient supply chain and might not even realise the gaps in their knowledge until the situation becomes urgent.

For example, lots of SMBs might not know to ensure that they can access their documentation anytime from anywhere in the world. Then, when disaster strikes, they are unable to make decisions about their supply chain and so retain their all-important flexibility.

This is what we try to do at Ship4wd, providing SMBs with the necessary tools and knowledge and creating that support structure for them. We explain to them what they’re currently lacking, what they need and how we can help to address those needs.

Does digital transformation have a role to play in freight forwarding? 

Yes, a massive role! It’s just getting started - I think we’re probably the last industry to join the digital age.

On the one hand, this means there’s a lot of opportunity for transformation, but, on the other, there’s a lot of work to do. In our industry, we deal with mountains of data and, if this data isn’t transparent to those moving goods around the world, it’s basically useless.

Creating that transparency across the supply chain is a massive change that our industry is currently going through and it’ll change the way we do business across the world.

When you order a book from Amazon, for example, you know exactly when it’s coming; if it comes while you’re out the house, you know exactly where to find it. You paid for it up front and you don’t expect the price to change between the moment you placed your order and the moment the book arrives.

In contrast, any business owner might have a container with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods to be sold to his customers but absolutely no idea where it is, when it will arrive or how much he’ll end up having to pay for its shipping.

It’s crazy, but the visibility into the process has really been that low. And it has knock-on effects: if he doesn’t know when his products are arriving, he might decide to build up his inventory just in case they don’t come on time.

So now his costs are soaring, he has to store more and more goods and he might not even end up needing them.

The way businesses have dealt with this lack of visibility over the years feels, to me, like living with a sickness and never curing it. They just try to cope with the situation as best they can and accept that they may never know if their cargo will arrive or when. It’s been like this for 50 years. And they try to mitigate the uncertainty with other solutions, which isn’t wrong, but ends up costing quite a lot of money.

Now, finally, we’re seeing a shift towards more transparency, with huge shipping companies like Hapag-Lloyd and Zim stating that they’re going to turn all of their containers into smart containers, so customers will know exactly what happens to their cargo and where it is at all times.

This isn’t new technology, but it’s being incorporated into the supply chain in new ways. The transparency thing is just one example and there are many others that will most definitely change our industry going forward.

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