Microsoft and C.H. Robinson: Driving supply chain innovation together

Microsoft is relentless in delivering on our customers’ needs. C.H. Robinson is the point between something rolling off of a production line that’s a finished good and all of our customers around the world.

C.H. Robinson is a great choice to partner with Microsoft. There’s a very strong DNA that we share, but we’re also able to drive transformation and innovation by pulling together technology solutions.

When I think of scale, I think of enterprise-wide scale that covers the globe, but we also need flexibility. C.H. Robinson brings together a very strong background and tradition of investing in high‑grade, enterprise‑wide technology and access to markets, and then brings people into the equation so that we can talk the same language. We’re able to take that intelligence, that level of partnership, and that level of co‑innovation that we deploy, and we basically create a flywheel of continuous, nonstop transformation for ourselves.

I think if Lean AI and C.H. Robinson bring the convergence of people and continuous improvement in technology, it helps us actually take our operating models designed to spec. There are a lot of things that have to really go right — precise and perfect at the same time. You can also look at things at a more strategic level: What does my network look like? What should my policies be? And those can be tailored in a much more surgical and sophisticated way. All of that comes together with C.H. Robinson.

I don’t see an end state, and that’s a fascinating thing. When you don’t really see the end state of something, you’re going to continue to see a long period of constant transformation.

There are P&L impacts, service impacts, cost impacts, and efficiency impacts. When I say “making it real,” it means that if we think we’re going to go achieve these outcomes, what we’re seeing are real, tangible ways to develop roadmaps to achieve them. It’s a lot easier when you have visibility into the decisions you’re able to make. You have reliability and predictability, and it actually gets delivered in a way that we’re able to bank on.

Very few things that we do, we do alone without C.H. Robinson, and I don’t see that stopping. So if the question becomes “what’s next,” I think it’s an endless realm of possibilities. I don’t see us moving step by step — I think we’re going to be able to leap from staircase to staircase at a much faster pace.