EP 593: Dock Management Solutions from Conduit That Put You in Control
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The New Warehouse podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry. A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin.

Hey guys, it's Kevin with the new warehouse. I'm here at Manifest 2025 and we are in the podcast studio with Conrad Lillines, who is the CEO and co-founder of Conduit. So Conrad, how are you, sir? Thanks for having me, Kevin. Definitely, definitely. How's Manifest for you so far? It's been awesome. Day two, we're getting ready to wrap up, but I'm very impressed with how this conference has evolved over the last few years. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So tell us a little bit, I guess for people that aren't familiar, give us kind of the

brief overview of Conduit and then we'll talk a little bit about kind of your story with Conduit here. Sure, that sounds good. So Conduit is a modular dock and yard management system. Companies ranging from Body Armor, Volvo, Saks Fifth Avenue, and dozens and dozens of 3PLs rely on Conduit to help get trucks in and out of their sites efficiently, safely, and securely. All right.

All right. Interesting. Interesting. And now you're the founder of this company. That's right. Right. So tell us a little bit about kind of your journey, your story, and what really led up to you founding Conduit. Sure.

I started my career in logistics at a startup named Convoy. May she forever rest in peace. Yes. I was there for five and a half years working on this exact problem around how do drivers interface with warehouses. Okay. Everything from scheduling where we saw that 40% of times between a pickup and delivery appointment was wasted or idle time. You know, there's a host of reasons there, but one of the primary reasons are is you can't get the appointment times you need to run an efficient route.

There's a scarcity problem at these warehouses. And then the other hand of the coin is what does the driver do when they show up? There's whole companies that are built around driver check-in instructions now. For us, that is a module in our tool that couples perfectly with check-ins. So from scheduling to execution and reporting on the back end. But it really came as an inspiration from my time working in the space.

integrating with existing vendors that serve these industries and identifying some opportunities to bring more holistic solution to market. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, you know, I've gotten to know you over the last, I guess about two years now. So right. And, you know, you've really kind of been evolving the solution over time, right? So talk to us a little bit about that evolution, like where you started, and you mentioned modules there, right? So I know you have a couple different modules. So tell us like,

Where did it really start and then where has it gotten to since the start? Yeah, the start was building the simplest and easiest to configure scheduling module on the market. Okay. We got started with several packaging companies and manufacturers, but they very quickly helped us get over that next product hurdle, which was the check-in technology. Okay.

We did that really successfully with Volvo across their network of 3PLs. They were able to switch from an existing vendor to Conduit because we brought that combined offering to market. And then the next phase was really doubling down on the check-in experience. One fun example from the last year that we've had a tremendous amount of success with is with Body Armor. They have about 13 sites in the U.S. and we're part of their SOP for all of them. So their shipping and receiving office is in Conduit each and every day.

Importantly, they're in conduit. They're not walking around their yard knocking on driver doors, telling them, hey...

you know, get off the door ready for the next truck or, Hey, here's your seal. They're doing that all digitally and remotely communicating with drivers via text right from the condo platform. Oh, wow. Okay. So in the body armor network, 95% or more of drivers are checking in entirely on their own without having to leave their trucks. Yeah. It's been huge success for us. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's definitely, I mean, it's definitely a huge deal on efficiency, right? But it's also a huge deal on the safety aspect as well, right? Keeping people out of the yard. I mean, it's,

super dangerous place i i unfortunately know somebody that had a terrible accident in there um i think we all did yeah and i think it's and that's unfortunate to say right so it's great that you're coming up with something to solve some of that so i guess talk to us a little bit about the the problem set right so like you just mentioned one right like going out knocking on drivers doors but talk to us about kind of the the problems that lie in the the traditional way of doing these things

I think in terms of a hierarchy of problems, I think the reality is everyone's focused on improving their business through increased profitability, greater revenues. And one of the fundamental inhibitors of growth is how many trucks can you get in and out of your site a day or for a given labor shift.

Congestion at the shipping and receiving office, depending on how these sites are designed, is often one of the reasons sites aren't able to achieve their maximum throughput. Drivers are parking their trucks, blocking both directions from the ingress and egress. And with conduit, they're getting through much quicker because they're not getting out of their truck. They're getting put on a dock door in seconds instead of 10 minutes after doing a half-mile walk back and forth to the shipping and receiving office. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of improvement there and, you know, obviously improving that because if you think about a warehouse operation, right, it, a lot of people might think that like, oh, well,

well, you know, the warehouse doesn't start until the dock door, right? But it starts before that, right? I mean, it starts in the yard, essentially, right? And if you have a gate, gate check-in, right, is really kind of that process. So obviously you're speeding up that time for the driver, right, like you said. But tell us a little bit about how some of your customers have seen not only the efficiency gains, like in the yard area, dock area, but then how that translates

translates over and flows through the entire operation? That's a great question. So if we think about the phases of conduit, it's scheduling, check-in, and now a big focus of ours is that customer service rep, transportation analyst role on what loads are missing the schedule, which customer is emailing me about, hey, I need proof of delivery. A lot of times that's phone tag or a

Snail mail, not snail mail, but email with your facilities to try and track down like a simple document or a seal verification. Yeah, like 21 emails later, right? Exactly. What's cool with Conduit is a centralized customer support team can now access all of their facilities through one pane of glass, so

search across multiple dimensions, whether it's carrier, customer, PO number, you name it number, and find the whole audit log of who scheduled it, how much lead time did they give us, did they follow our processes, how many reschedules did they have, was the POD signed, or was there a shortage or overage on the manifest that needed to be recorded and sent through the organization?

Anyway, the third phase of Conduit is providing this multi-facility, we're calling it control tower, for these centralized customer service and transportation analysts to really make their jobs easier. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a huge thing.

you know, someone close to me, like as worked on this as in like a dispatcher and scheduling a doc. And, uh, you know, she would tell me that, you know, I got, I got to walk out here into this million square foot building and walk the doc and do these different things. And then people got to go in the yard and check on these things. It's,

super inefficient, like the traditional way of doing it, right? And a lot of times, like a lot of that is on like clipboard, right? Paper, Excel, spreadsheet. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about, you know, the customer that makes sense for you. I mean, you said some of your existing customers, right? But if someone's listening to this and...

you know, they're thinking like, oh yeah, like I hate having to go out into my yard, right? Or I hate having to do this process around the dock. Like what makes them a good fit for conduit? Yeah. Whether someone has an existing scheduling solution or not, what we look for is high volume, multi-location, 3PLs, manufacturers, retailers, CPGs. Yeah. The value prop they'll come, they'll see if even

even if they have an existing scheduling solution, we often get bucketed in conduits, a doc scheduler. You're right. We're a doc management tool. Okay. Think of all of the tasks, decide just scheduling an appointment that are happening on the doc. Oh yeah. You're, you're dispatching forklift operators via radio. You're constantly shuttling paper back and forth to those people, having drivers sign in, verify their driver's license.

For someone who wants a faster moving, more secure and safer facility, we think conduit's a great option that's going to continue to grow alongside them as we build out our tech. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think that's a great point too. Like, I mean, you think, you know, the immediate when you think about the dock, right, is just, is getting the truck ready.

There in the door, right? And then it starts to unload and all that stuff. But to your point, there's a lot of these tedious kind of in-between processes that occur, like this paper shuffling you mentioned. So tell us a little bit about, because we're here at Manifest, right? So this is the future of logistics and spy chain, right? Yeah. So I guess from your side of the world, I mean, what does the future dock look like? Most warehouses that I've seen go down a digitization journey that... Yeah.

Right now, people are dealing with dock and yard problems. It's definitely becoming more of a highlight or focal point for people where they've already implemented WMS. We have customers that don't have WMS yet but are using Condo to improve their throughput. But our traditional customer already has gone down that digitization journey and now is tackling the yard and dock problem.

I think not only is it the logical next step, but the role of the dock is becoming more important when you see humongous trends in cargo theft, for example. Increasing focuses on safety, people trying to centralize roles that were previously dedicated to each facility. How can you centralize something if you still have to essentially have the same communication channel that you had with that person before?

when you are in the facility. You need a digital audit log and system of record that's managing everything that's coming on and off your docks, if that's your goal. So that's the way I see it evolving. I think it becomes more strategic from an analytics perspective. From a carrier management perspective too, has been quite interesting.

When I was at Convoy, we spent a lot of time reverse engineering our customers' scorecards for us. Okay. And a lot of time, they were expecting us to submit our own on-time data, our own fall-off data. Mm-hmm.

But with Conduit, we're arming these facilities and the transportation teams that these facilities support with their own first-party data. Interesting. There's no fudging the numbers, reversing engineering anything. You set your own standards, and you're able to set the tone in a much more realistic way. Yeah, you're not cooking those books, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think that's been, for me, right, here at Manifest and the people I've talked to, I mean, it's been such a...

central theme, right? The data, right? Like you just mentioned, right? So, I mean, you talk about, you know, the efficiency that it brings, right? The elimination of this, you know, shuffle back and forth, walking out to the yard, coming back, paper from here to there and all these different things. But, I mean, tell us a little bit about that data aspect too. Like, let's dive a little further in on that. I mean,

How are companies, I guess your customers at this point, how are they leveraging some of that data now to maybe uncover things that they didn't actually realize in the past? I have two examples. One's kind of a layup-style win, and then one's much more transformational for a company. The layup-style win is going back to the carrier scorecarding. People were able to identify instantly after looking at the data set that a certain carrier was always arriving early

I don't know, 45 minutes late, called 60 minutes late. Okay. And they're actually able to start putting in like a carrot and stick program, like a late fee program. Yeah. And we help them build workflows out around that so that they're able to manage that on the floor. Like they need to be able to... Interesting. ...push back on these carriers when they arrive using a system that's giving them that proof. And then you have that real-time feedback, but you also have the retroactive feedback saying, hey...

I'm not going to, you're not going to be our top carrier because you're much later than all these other people. And here's the data that shows it. Yeah. Your rates probably shouldn't be that high either.

The more of the game changing example is we have a produce distributor in Washington state and they were struggling with overtime and underutilized labor depending on the day of the week. Yeah. Because they had an even labor plan before conduit. They didn't have a good way of measuring or forecasting when trucks were coming or going. And more importantly, what was on those trucks, how many labor hours they needed to plan for, you know,

you know, container floor loaded palletize all different shapes. Yeah. I've dealt with that. Yeah. Sometimes it's like, Oh, we're sending you 10 containers tomorrow. And then it's like, Oh, it's actually gonna be three. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, many tools that are out there don't get this to this level of detail of what's on the truck. And the next level beyond that is combining that with how long did it take to load and unload the truck?

And did you have a team of two people loading or unloading or just one person? Right. And when you have that data set, now we're providing realistic labor analytics to produce services and logistics, Inc., in this case. Yeah. And they were able to create a much more dynamic labor plan that actually ended up being better for their employees. And they have two different styles of shifts going that's accommodating for the longer days that are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and the shorter days that are Mondays and Fridays.

And what Teresa, my champion over there, told me is they're able to cut their overtime by 50% and really improve employee experience with better shifts. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's definitely like an unlock. I mean, you know, such a big, like you said, transformational change because a lot of times, you know, there's like a lot of variability there, right? And you try to plan for that. And, you know, I've experienced that in a past life too where, you know, we did –

you know, we could do from a labor perspective, six to eight containers a day unload, right? But sometimes, you know, coming out of the port, right, they're like, oh, we got, you know, one day it's like, oh, we got two on the schedule we're going to drop off, right? Three days later, they're like,

oh, we're bringing you 18, right, tomorrow, right? And it's like, what happens to these days in between, right? Like, how can we even this out? And then how do you get your labor, you know, planned to do that? And I think that's a great example of how that data can be transformational in that sense because now you get that visibility and, you know, it is like, it's not like on that day where you have three containers versus 10, right? You don't have to take half the dock staff and, like,

send them to sweep, right? Or do something else, right? And you can better utilize that labor. We're just onboarding a new customer that has a heavy port presence across the U.S. Yeah.

The thing they came to us for was just that. They felt like they had no control of that inbound container volume. There's no control, yeah. They are coming to us because they want to be able to make a trade-off between those per diem fees and their labor costs. Yeah. It might be worth it to have that trailer hang out somewhere in between the port and their facility. Yeah. If it means that they're not paying overtime to the number of people that would take to load and unload that trailer. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's interesting, too, is like...

How do you discover that trade-off? But without the data visibility, it's hard to figure that out, right? Yeah, and for me as a founder, I haven't spent much time operating warehouses. My first job was doing inventory for my family business, like counting little PVC pipe and whatnot. But by no means real high-volume warehouse experience. One of the best parts of my job is...

like being able to learn about these new opportunities and see which ones logically fit in what we think is doc management beyond doc scheduling. So seal verification workflows is a key one that I've recently become super excited about.

Seal verification is like the Wild West. Some facilities don't even look at the seal. They just have the driver clip it. Who knows what's going on between shipper and receiver? Anyway, the best part of my job is being able to learn about these other opportunities and build them into our product for...

you know, customers benefit from in the future. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's great for sure. And, uh, and so we're here at manifest too, right? And, uh, so as you've been here on the last day, as we're recording this, um, what, what have you heard from some of the attendees here? Like what are some of their biggest challenges that they're facing? Yeah. The keynote this morning, did you watch the Dave Clark? No, I didn't. It was, it was great. Um,

He's creating a data garbage disposal to get all the data in one place. And I think he's going to build a tremendous company on top of it. But it goes to his insight that there's an opportunity now to take all this data, whether it's email, system data, phone, you name it, and actually start to conceptualize it and understand it in a more meaningful way. I think a lot of people have resonated with that.

I think the other one is just like the experience that their team has to go through when they're dealing with third-party drivers. Okay. People who come up to us are like, my staff are getting yelled at because a driver missed their appointment and can't get worked in. Yeah. I love that because we create that digital barrier between the two so that they have better experiences. They can like, you know, better text someone than yell at someone. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there can be definitely some friction there, right, between driver and shipper. And, you know, driver shows up late. They don't want to take accountability for showing up late. They don't want to wait. Got another drop off, right? So it creates a lot of tension there. So, I mean, I can definitely see that digital component kind of streamlining everything there to be able to make it just better on both sides of the table, right? The other one that is extremely popular are these digital agents. Right.

And an area where I see that being incredibly helpful is a lot of our customers are

still deal with issues where drivers don't know what order number they're here for. And then the driver needs to go and contact their dispatcher. Maybe the dispatcher's asleep. Who knows? And they're just sitting in their truck for like two hours waiting for a number. That's like a great application for an agent to be able to instantly provide drivers the information they need to get processed efficiently. So I see a lot of that talk, and I'm very excited for it. We're definitely thinking a lot about it.

Yeah. Very popular theme. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. All right. So we talked about a little challenges, but aside from Conduit being the most exciting thing at Manifest, what else has caught your attention here? What's on top of your mind? I've seen a few companies that are spending a lot more time trying to understand and categorize the data that's on these paper documents. Right. I think...

The last generation of companies that have attacked this space have used different technology, like OCR, for example, where the computer is just trying to read text, but it can't really conceptualize it. I am pumped to see what AI is going to do for supply chain with document recognition, whether that's overages, shortages, detention requests, chicken scratch scribbles on someone's signing. Is it even legit? I think we're just starting to see some of the benefits. I don't fully...

understand them or see them at scale yet but it's one of the things I've been seeing a lot of in there that I'm really pumped to see come to light in more ways yeah absolutely definitely I think it's an exciting time for sure and it's great to see you here at Manifest and finally get you on the podcast we've been trying to get you on for a little while now I'm so glad we can finally schedule this I know definitely so it's great to catch up with you and learn all about Conduit and the journey and everything there if people are interested in learning more about Conduit what's the best way to do that?

I'm a very open book. You can call me or text me 206-902-6541 or email me conrad at getconduit.ai or follow us on LinkedIn.

There you go. Or go to the website, right? Or go through the website, www.helloconduit.com. There you go. Hello Conduit. So really appreciate Conrad stopping by the studio here with us at Manifest and telling us all about Conduit. So if you're having those headaches at the dock or in the yard, definitely reach out to Conrad. You got his phone number now, so blow him up.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes and for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.