YMX Logistics' Erin Mitchell Encourages Young Professionals to Use Their Differences to Stand Out: Pros to Know Award

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Hello, my name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Erin Mitchell, Chief Operating Officer at YMX Logistics. Erin is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Top Transportation Innovators category.

Let's talk about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, and how you got to where you are today.

Erin Mitchell: I am the Chief Operating Officer of YMX Logistics. For those that haven't heard of us, which is probably quite a few people, we're a little over 2 years old, and we're a yard operations services provider that's heavily focused in technology enablement, electrification, and various other ancillary services around the yard. So, autonomous gate and vision systems, and things like that. We provide drivers, we provide trucks, and we provide, all the systems that help operate it.

I was employee No. 2. We've been growing this organization rapidly. It's kind of the dream and the thesis of our CEO, Matt Yearling, to integrate the technology and the operations, and I am really excited to be a part of this and help make this happen. I think we've got a great team of people, and everything's clicking, so it's going well.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Under your leadership, YMX has been at the forefront in deploying zero-emission electric yard trucks. Beyond sustainability, what operational or financial impacts are enterprise shippers seeing from electrifying their yard fleets?

Erin Mitchell: When you look at the use cases of electrification or how to apply sustainable technologies in your logistics operations or your manufacturing operations, your yard is a really easy place to start.

Many of the challenges that exist with other modes of transportation go away or are minimized when you're electrifying in the yard. Like, your truck itself is never far from the charger. You can do 2-3 trucks per charger, so if you've got a busy yard and you're running 24-7 with 3 trucks, you can do that with one charger, so you can get payback a lot quicker. You can also slip-seat your trucks easier, things like that. So, where you might have an over-the-road piece of equipment that you're able to run 10 hours a day with a single driver, or you're looking at having to put a team in it in order to get that payback on that huge equipment investment. In a yard, you can easily slip-seat, you can run 3 shifts a day out of a single truck, and really get that payback much quicker because your payback comes in the amount of hours you use, the electricity vs. the hours and fuel you save on the diesel. So, it's a pretty easy win.

But I think some of the other wins that we see in our operations and in what we bring to customers is also with the drivers and the driver experience. The EV trucks are much quieter. They don't vibrate as much.

A lot of the drivers are like, I don't get out of my truck after my shift and feel like I've just been shaken all day. They're like, it's easier on my body. They also don't have diesel exhaust fumes, so you don't go home smelling like diesel. The yard doesn't smell like diesel anymore. It's just a cleaner environment. There's not as much particulate in the air.

And then I think for some of our customers, some of them are very aware of this, this need, like food manufacturers, and some of them, it's just, like, an added benefit. But, like, these EV trucks, there's no fluids to leak. Aside from the hydraulic fluid, there's no engine oil that could leak, there's no transmission fluids that can leak, there's no diesel, there's no DEF, just a lot less fluids on the property, and a lot less things that can be leaking out of your truck. And so, especially when we talk to food manufacturers or customers that have very big environmental pledges, not having the risk of a fluid leak, a diesel leak on their property, or things like that is a huge win for them. It's just another thing that they don't have to worry about, they don't have to track stuff like that.

I think it's just a significant improvement all around, and I've yet, aside from the cost of the trucks themselves, really seen a downside in the EVs.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how after 22 years in the corporate world, you left to join a startup, which is YMX. How has your perspective on yard operations evolved over time, and why do you believe it's often underestimated?

Erin Mitchell: I've led logistics operations for Kraft Heinz, I had all of North American logistics operations, and so I was very aware of from a budgetary standpoint and a service standpoint, and a labor standpoint, here's my warehouse budgets, here's my shuttling budgets, here's my material handling equipment, all these things, and then, in this little pocket in the corner is yard operations, and it really wasn't a huge line item, right? I get that same feeling when I talk to factories, and when I talk to some of our customers, and even some 3PLs. This isn't a huge budgetary concern, yard operations.

But what I learned in my career was that yard inefficiencies can contribute to budget leaks or service failures very quickly.

And that can happen in the warehouse, that can happen with your transportation providers, or your factory operations. We had at Kraft Heinz, I think one thing that bit us a couple times was we'd have these big seasonal pushes, right? We were a food manufacturer. And we'd have pushes for things like Super Bowl. Super Bowl's a huge eating holiday. There's a lot of eating holidays, like Easter was a big deal for us. And, so we'd get all the inventory positioned in the distribution centers. We'd have all the transportation planned, we'd have the labor plan, the MHE plan, everything's ready to go. And I remember there was one year, and it was actual Super Bowl, it was in January, it was in Atlanta, our yard service providers, our drivers for the yard, didn't show up.

It was like Saturday night, and that site's a 24-7, almost 20% of the North American revenue for Kraft Heinz was coming out of that Atlanta distribution center, and we didn't have yard drivers on a Saturday night, and so we could load some of the live loads, but there wasn't a lot of live loads on Saturday night. It was mostly loading the drops, and so we ended up not hitting our plan because we couldn't get yard drivers in.

In my head, deployment worked together, transportation worked together, all these different groups set this up for success, and we had this one failure in the yard that really kind of set us back.

And so I think that was the first time when we were like, okay, we need to be doing something different as an organization, we need better visibility, we need better service providers. We need just a different, measure of success here, and how we select providers. And so, we really started that journey at Kraft Heinz, started that journey of yard visibility, of technology, of getting better providers, finding better providers than some of the national ones, and that was really what got me interested in this field, and that was kind of where, too, I met Matt Yearling, the CEO of YMX, who was the CEO of PINC at the time. We were both struggling with the same things, me on the shipper side, him on the technology side. There were failures in that service provider space. I see that now, I felt it myself firsthand, but then as I moved into YMX, and we're working to change an industry and we're working to fix a problem. Now I have customers that are retailers, I have customers that are huge shippers, I have customers that are 3PLs. I see it firsthand from all of them, too.

For some of these retailers, the yard is really almost like a piece of their production. We bring a trailer in, we take it to salvage, we get it cleaned, we take it for outbound loading. Within several hours, it's turned back out and it's headed to a store. So, facilitating that process. Or from a manufacturing standpoint, we have a huge CPG manufacturer that we work with. They were having significant line outages because their yard operations provider wasn't getting trailers to and from the door fast enough, so they were shutting down and slowing lines just because they had nowhere to go with the product that was coming off the line. We just always make sure that we're focused on if we need to be hand-in-hand with the building on OEE, on service, on on-time, whatever those metrics are, we want to make sure we're totally plugged in, totally engaged, design a solution, both operations but technology as well that gets us all there and makes us all successful. So it's the impact we can have in the yard is much more than just the line on the P&L, it's the impact on service, it's the impact on labor costs, it's the impact on downtime. It's cumulative, and it's big.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Also detailed in your submission form is how leadership in the supply chain is not limited by gender, but instead defined by vision, resilience, and a commitment to people. And as a female in the supply chain, you've been a winner of our Women in Supply Chain Forum Award. What advice do you have for other women in the supply chain space?

Erin Mitchell: One of the things that I think I didn't fully appreciate until probably the last couple years of my career was how you can use your differences to stand out. I tried to fit in, right? I go into meetings, and it's all men; I was always trying to keep up with the guys, right? In transportation, supply chain operations, even when I started my career in the tech field, it's a lot of male-dominated stuff, and so a lot of it was just, can I keep up with what's going on in the room and stuff like that? And then I realized as my career was progressing and as I was growing, and I was running into people that have been in my network for a long time, that actually the fact that I was different was good. People remembered me, people remembered what I had to say in a room of 40 men, I was the one woman, I stood out, people remembered that I was there. I think I did not appreciate that for a while at the beginning, so I think one of the things I want to say is just appreciate your differences, and what makes you you, and try to leverage that to your advantage.

I think the other thing that we really try to do at YMX, and I've tried to do for my whole career, is advocating for not just myself, but for others as well. So, if you've got someone who's strengths are a better fit for a different role, or has a career goal and you're not sure how to get them there. How do you start connecting people to those people that can help them? How do you start supporting them? Not everyone has all the answers, but we can all be a friend and help people along the way. I think a lot of folks that I worked with would say when I was going through something, I reached out to Erin, and she gave me a couple names, or some pieces of advice, or whatever, and I always just try to help other people out.

And then I think the last one, this one's very tactical, and it’s easy to know if you're doing it, it's easy to measure, it's not always easy to execute, but it's insisting on diverse interview panels and candidate pools. As you progress through your career and you're hiring people, you're building teams, you're on teams that are hiring people. Insist on having interview panels that are diverse, so whether that means people of color, people of different backgrounds, people of different genders. Candidate pools are diverse. I think there's been more than once, many times in my career where I've said I won't start interviews until there's some diversity in the candidate pool. And I've always volunteered to be on interview panels whenever anyone needs me. So, it's just one of those things, it helps level the playing field.

And it doesn't always mean the best candidate's gonna get the job, so it doesn't mean you're weighing it one way or tipping the scale, but it is giving everyone a chance. And so those are some things I always try to do, and I think those are things we can all strive to do.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The top Transportation Innovators category recognizes professionals in the transportation space. What advice do you have for other transportation professionals in supply chain?

Erin Mitchell: I went to Iowa State University for my undergrad degree, and I go back there and I guest lecture once a semester to their supply chain management senior level class. And the thing that I guest lecture on is transportation as a strategic enabler. It's understanding transportation isn't transactional, transportation isn't a commodity. Transportation is a piece of a larger puzzle, and the decisions you make about transportation can impact things like your working capital, your service levels, your sustainability goals. They have massive impact on your total supply chain plan, and should be taken into consideration as you're developing your distribution network, your geographies, your real estate plans, your labor staffing plans. There's just a huge amount of things that transportation impacts, and one of the reasons I talk to these senior-level students about it is a lot of them are going into roles where their first jobs are going to be transportation buyers, or transportation managers, and it's understanding that you're not just an A to B, this is a commodity, it is an entire piece of your strategic platform of how you get your goods to market.

I think starting the process of understanding, like here's what that looks like in some organizations, it's very commoditized, and here's what a really good strategic organization, how they view transportation, the different tools they use, things like that, I think that's all really important as you grow your understanding of the space, and really evolve into being a transportation professional.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What is the one thing that we haven't addressed so far that would be a good takeaway, or something important for our viewers to learn more about you and the company?

Erin Mitchell: I think when you're thinking about yourself and your role in your career and where you are, and I think a lot of people are at various points in time going through career changes or evaluating new roles, things like that. I think it's important that we all check in with ourselves occasionally, and say what is important to me right now? It may not be what was important to you a few years ago, but understanding, as you're moving through your career, what experiences do you hope to get? What kind of people or organization do you hope to work with? What kind of goals do you have personally? Do you want to work with a company who's very into sustainability or technology? Or are you more interested in going to work for a big brand and have that name behind you? I think understanding that about yourself will help you make good career choices that will help you feel energized about your work, and not drained.

I think that helps you bring your best self to work every day if you can check in with yourself and just say, hey, what's important to me, and is this meeting my needs right now? And if not, how can I help it meet my needs, or what do I need to do to get there?