For a merchant to use Shopify, connected to Stripe, connected to Visa, working with me, it’s relatively “easy”. Not many people involved in the process and some of them (me) don’t have any power to control how the flow works.
When Cargill ships a 100,000 MT parcel of grain to be processed, there are SO many people and organisations that touch the commodity in some form. From inspection companies like SGS, to rail lines, to customs authorities, to port representatives, to ocean transportation, to banks....the list goes on. And historically the vision has been an “all or nothing” style of platform.
One day we will figure out the solution to this problem, but not anytime soon and probably not with Splinter. Four of the world’s five largest grain companies, three of the world’s five largest iron ore companies, and many more use the product that I work on (www.SEDNA.com) to manage their global supply chains, and their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs.
You see this in action with businesses like Flexport who started with a very formidable vision to build a platform for third-party logistics, and ultimately had to pivot to become a very digital freight forwarder after being trapped by the traditions and slow-moving nature of the industry.
In these organisations there is incredible buzz and thought around digital transformation, but many of these companies are also only recently beginning to trust cloud software. So although there is a big desire to innovate and operate on the cutting edge, so many primitives and so much of the day-to-day process keeps them lagging behind.