Part of the American Dream is to have free market enterprises partnering together to supplement one’s weaknesses with the strengths of the other. An interesting trend occurring that will help our economy continue to grow is big business partnering with small business. The traditional folk tale that both sides believe is that small businesses do not have the capital, resources or intelligence to be a service provider for large corporations and this leads to quick knee jerk rejection from larger firms when approached by small businesses. Likewise, small businesses fall prey to self-fulfilling prophecies, not believing they have the ability to meet the service demands of large corporations.

As technology progresses not just daily but minutely, this mindset is changing. It used to be that conventional wisdom says “We’ve done it this way for years and it’s worked fine”, or my personal favorite “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” as we say in the south. Within the last five years, many larger firms have to adapt quickly to the changing complexities of the market. They don’t have the staff to accommodate for this, and as a result they’re bringing in outside help.

Coley Brown, a chief executive of VisionMine, had a few things to say about big business being slow to adapt to changing technological demands. “The reason they are failing is that it’s easy to come up with an idea but hard to get it implemented. And the bottleneck is the willingness to take risk . . . Bring a small organization into the process with 10 or 15 people with tech expertise, and the group tends to work very quickly and do something in a couple of days that the large organization might do in a couple of months.”

Jay Rosan, vice president for health innovation at Walgreens stated “In the past, new things had to primarily come from within the walls of a big company. But then the R&D pipeline started drying up, and there weren’t as many new ideas being developed. Now there is a tendency to understand that new, young companies can bring us ideas that can be differentiating for us.”

How does all this translate into the logistics sector and specifically PLP you might ask? Well, we have a recently developing project that involves working with 8 different companies (including small to mid size manufacturers & distributors, mid to large size trucking firms, and one large retail corporation). The corporation was using conventional procurement methods for trucking but service was declining and pricing was not all that great either. In steps PLP. We were introduced to this corporation by one of the suppliers for this project, and due to us being a small, flexible and innovative business, we were able to provide them with a solution that they’ve never seen anyone accomplish before. In another scenario, a local large manufacturing firm is using conventional procurement methods for warehousing & trucking, but they need a more specialized time sensitive solution that will require complex & cumbersome procurement processes that would take too much time away from their daily production focus. Again, this is a perfect fit for PLP and we hope that next year at this time we’ll be discussing this issue from a much different angle.

Check out this article for more insight on this issue.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how PLP can accomplish this for your business, please contact me, Josh Harshman at 678-921-8181 ext 202. We have a solution for you. Also, ask us any further questions you may have on twitter, facebook or linkedin!