BUILDING A WINNING TEAM

In the Race Toward Transformation, Transportation-Focused Executives Need Help From Outside Providers, Customers, Suppliers and More

Surging demand. Driver shortages. Consumers demanding faster-arriving goods. Remarkable advances in over-the-road safety equipment. Driverless vehicles, drones and 3D printing. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Executives working in transportation and related disciplines face a nearly unprecedented barrage of challenges and opportunities. Which is precisely why, Forbes Insights research reveals, the industry is looking for help and collaboration across its ecosystem. THE RISE OF OUTSOURCING

Keeping up is tough, so much so that 64% of executives recently surveyed by Forbes Insights indicate difficulties keeping pace with changes in technology, demographics and the competitive environment. Similarly, over half, 53%, say they are concerned their competitors may be moving significantly faster, contributing to disruption in terms of capabilities, costs/ margins, service provision and similar attributes.

So it’s not surprising: Transportation-focused executives are increasingly looking for outside help. Today, only about one-third of companies (33%) say they outsource the majority, or a significant portion, of their logistics, supply chain and transport operations/needs. But going forward, the figure nearly doubles, with 61% saying they will be relying significantly more on external service providers.

By the numbers, almost three in five, 59%, say they will more aggressively pursue the outsourcing of transportation processes. This includes activities such as fleet leasing and maintenance. Similarly, 57% of executives say they will aggressively pursue greater outsourcing of logistics processes including warehousing-as-a-service, scheduling, carrier management, etc. A key driver “is that as the technology in the vehicles becomes even more sophisticated, it becomes not only harder to keep up with changes but also to service existing fleets,” says Mary Long, managing director of the Supply Chain Management Institute at the University of San Diego School of Business. Firms will also increasingly turn to truck leasing and related services “as a means of gaining greater flexibility as well as access to the latest technologies and lower capital costs.”

IT TAKES AN ECOSYSTEM

Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and related technologies, transportation-focused executives will meanwhile be seeking access to more data as a means of optimizing routes, loads, costs and other variables. So the industry can expect its leaders to begin working more intimately, sharing more data end-to-end across the value chain.

In fact, 60% say they will aggressively pursue closer collaboration and information sharing with their own suppliers; 57% will collaborate more closely with partners/distributors; 55% will pursue closer collaboration with customers. Collaboration will also expand with 3PLs (third-party logistics companies), IT providers and even competitors. When the goals are greater efficiency, speed and accuracy— and when new technologies and data sharing can deliver breakthrough results—it pays to forge closer ties with all who share interests and needs. In short, given its remarkably demanding set of challenges on so many fast-evolving and often unfamiliar fronts, small wonder: The pursuit of outside assistance is a necessity.

whiz with a rebellious streak, Anagnost dropped out of high school before getting a mechanical engineering degree from California State University, Northridge, and then a master’s and a Ph.D. from Stanford.

Anagnost worked at Lockheed Martin and at NASA. But aeronautics was too slow. So he turned to software, joining Exa Corp. in Boston in 1992 and then, five years later, signing up as a product manager at Autodesk. It was a winning company. Its AutoCAD software was used by architects and engineers to design everything from high-rises to car parts. Twenty years later, AutoCAD and related design products still account for 80% of sales.

After a decade of growth, Autodesk plunged during the recession of 2009, with shares trading at $12, down 75% from two years before. Under Carl Bass, who’d taken over as chief executive from the better-known Carol Bartz, Autodesk invested heavily in research and development across

a range of projects without landing anything as big as AutoCAD.

There was another matter. Cloud computing had shaken up software for good. Autodesk would need to join other companies like Adobe and migrate from out-of-the-box products that would get re-released every few months to onlinebased software that could be updated and sold as a subscription.

Subscriptions took some of the heat off from The Street. But Autodesk couldn’t just sell its old business better—it needed to commit to a new one. Anagnost selected construction as the market most ripe for attack. Trackers expect the global construction-software market to reach $10 billion by 2020. Bad sequencing of subcontractors, water damage and engineering failures take a big toll.

At the Royal BAM Group, a construction company in the Netherlands, Autodesk software is critical from conception of plans to onsite monitoring. Its BIM 360 management tools can tell engineers when projects are behind schedule or out of sync. At nearly 100 finished projects in Ireland and the United Kingdom, Autodesk software helps monitor schools and hospitals for maintenance—new features codeveloped by Royal BAM and Autodesk’s engineers hand in hand.

Brian Tolles, an analyst at Jackson Square Partners, one of Autodesk’s big investors, says that Autodesk is moving faster than competitors of its size and is getting access to more customers than the small firms that have spotted the opportunity in construction tech. “It’s their market to capture,” Tolles says.

Not everyone buys into Anagnost’s vision, and the construction push has yet to move Autodesk back into the black. “I don’t see the subscription model on its own as a driver of growth,” says Stephen Bersey, an analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities USA. “It still requires material product innovation, where I have yet to see new products gaining traction.”

But Anagnost argues that far from ending innovation at Autodesk, by narrowing its focus he’s got the company thinking big again. “We were an innovation engine moving

at a much faster speed than our customers were,” Anagnost says. That’s far from the case with new products like BIM 360 Project IQ, the artificial intelligence product Autodesk has been working on for its construction suite over the past few years. The new software leverages ten years of customer data and 39 million recorded customer issues (such as water damage) to predict which problems urgently need attention on a construction site.

“I want Autodesk to be the company that made construction more industrialized,” Anagnost says. Now he gets to some of his futuristic talk: 3-D printing foundations out of concrete; urban design in a world of self-driving cars; making micro-factories for Etsy artisans. This is not science fiction, he says; you’ll see these things in as soon as a decade.