Listen to this articleDsco is a data sharing and data intelligence company. Their nuance is that they are laser focused down to helping retailers and brands share the data that they need to around innovative supply chain strategies such as drop shipping, endless aisle, and a distributed supply chain. That data ends up being driven by inventory visibility, purchase order exchange, and product fulfillment. Dsco helps them share that data in a standardized way, with a business model that aligns to the explosion of data needing to be shared and encourages the sharing of more data, then the company provides them with data insights.
Below is our interview with Jeremy Hanks, the Founder and CEO of Dsco:
Q: Jeremy, you’ve recently announced your partnership with Shippo; could you tell us something more?
A: Inside of a distributed supply chain strategy like drop shipping, order fulfillment is where the rubber hits the road. It’s where the B2B purchase order intersects with the consumer. As we’ve developed our solution over the past several year we found that in many cases, the branded suppliers and retailers we were helping didn’t have good ways to capture and share the data from fulfillment workflows. Off and on for 4 yrs we explored integration to the shipping carriers to supplement the missing data, and it’s just a huge challenge. And then we discovered Shippo! Our companies both align so closely, and they’d already done all the heavy lifting for the carrier integration and normalization of the fulfillment lifecycle. We are now able to supplement our data sharing for millions and millions of orders between retailers and suppliers with Shippo’s data/solution. Which is a huge win. And don’t get me started with the data intelligence/insights that are coming!
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your solutions?
A: We spend a lot of time thinking about and focusing on inventory visibility. Everything in the B2B supply chain specific to data, workflows, orders (P.O.s and Consumer orders), fulfillment, etc. on the way to some given product (supply) matching up to a specific consumer (demand) is related to inventory visibility. You have to “see” the supply. We believe that if you looked at our solution for drop shipping for instance, what you’d find is an entirely different approach and level of sophistication in how our platform helps brands and retailers around inventory visibility. We believe we have those kinds of differences in our approach to orders and fulfillment as well, but inventory is the key to distributed supply chain.
Q: What makes Dsco a good choice?
A: I think what makes us a good choice for both retailers and suppliers is our foundational beliefs, our “three legged stool” if you will:
– We treat both suppliers and retailers equally in how with think about building solutions. Historically, solution providers really only care about retailers as they are the dictators in the B2B relationship.
– We approach data exchange (the core of everything we do) with a religious fervor around standardization. Without this, we wouldn’t have been able to do things like our Gandalf Guide who automates supplier onboarding and data testing.
– Finally, we’re building software. It should scale. So we do not charge “taxes” on data (Kilocharacter fees) or orders. We have a model that doesn’t take a cut of growth.
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Q: What are your plans for next six months?
A: I’m really excited about the next six months. We have been working for a good while on some pretty advanced data warehousing initiatives, and are tracking billions of data events (especially around inventory visibility) per month. We will be rolling out some completely new things in the industry around thinking about trading partner performance and in solving some super challenging problems in the supply chain based on all of this data and our unique ability to derive insights from it. And our partnership with Shippo really helps us fill in some blanks to these projects around fulfillment; so stay tuned for some additional Dsco awesomeness coming your way very soon!
