Past Work | Jump
Insight-Driven Strategy | Tech Commercialization & Globalization
SenseAware, started by FedEx, shaped by Jump in 2009, ready for action in 2020.
My team at Jump and I worked with FedEx Innovation in 2009 to commercialize and globalize their SenseAware platform, enabling customers to ship their items in “a box that can call home.” Their internal team had already done substantial technical work to create a working technology, embodied by a wireless device with sensors that customers would drop into their package. Their team ran pilots with a handful of customers, but the company didn’t know what direction to take next. Which customers and needs should take priority? Theft protection? Food spoilage detection? What types of shipments? How and when to engage customers? And what countries should be first? And how should this new service integrate into the larger company?
Our analysis led us to recommend healthcare as the critical vertical, with temperature-sensitive and irreplaceable shipments our focus. That led to research we conducted on the ground with customers, such as logistics managers for medical equipment and in pharma; and FedEx operations in Australia, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Singapore, and India. We delivered insights into supply chain professionals and a comprehensive strategy for rolling out and developing the business, including product and services. This was more than a sensor in a box. It had to have an entire service infrastructure, go-to-market approach, and sales team appropriate for selling an innovation at the front end of a coming wave.
As FedEx worked through launching the business, we were engaged in advising leaders, troubleshooting the inevitable growing pains, and accelerating the growth in service subscriptions and sensor usage. This meant a necessary accounting of how assumptions in our discovery-driven planning and business modeling were playing out with FedEx team members on the front lines signing up clients for services, learning and adapting their tactics to enable them to survive that vulnerable period before an innovation will be embraced by the enterprise.
This work prepared FedEx for today’s sensor-based logistics future over 10 years ago, and presaged their developing understanding of the growing need for healthcare solutions. They learned that 24-7 monitoring and end-to-end solutions for shipping, storage, and distribution are core to the value proposition for healthcare customers.
FedEx launched Healthcare Shipping Solutions in 2011 and broke ground on their own cold-chain logistics center in TN in 2013. This capability put FedEx in the right position to contribute to the massive and successful vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic.
In this article on the FedEx.com newsroom, “looking back at the most important week in FedEx history” they wrote about SenseAware:
“The first shipments of COVID-19 vaccines flew to destinations across the country via FedEx Priority Alert First Overnight. Each shipment included a FedEx SenseAware ID device to track its location in real-time.
...
Shipping the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine requires accuracy, precision, and temperature control since it must be kept at subzero temperatures of -90 degrees Fahrenheit. We are well positioned to handle these shipments with our temperature-control solutions, real-time monitoring capabilities, and a dedicated healthcare team to support the customs brokerage and express transportation of vaccines and bioscience shipments around the world. Our healthcare team is well-versed in the transportation and handling of vaccine shipments. We’ve shipped flu vaccines each flu season for the past decade.”
A year later, FedEx had delivered 300 million doses in the US alone, all using SenseAware.
“Before the pandemic, FedEx developed innovative technologies and expanded its cold chain facilities, which support vaccine shipments and other healthcare business. In the U.S., FedEx SenseAware ID, a Bluetooth low-energy sensor device attached to each vaccine and ancillary kit shipments, ensures these time-sensitive deliveries move swiftly and safely through the FedEx Express network with FedEx First Overnight service. From origin to destination, dedicated FedEx Priority Alert customer support agents are using SenseAware monitoring technology to track the location of vaccine shipments in near real-time. This technology is complemented by the FedEx Surround platform, which leverages artificial intelligence and predictive tools to proactively monitor conditions surrounding the packages, allowing customer support agents to intervene if weather or traffic delays threaten to impede delivery times.”
People are alive and thriving today because of each person at FedEx who made those shipments happen, door to door. That includes each person who put in the work since 2008 that helps an innovation come into existence, get out there and make an impact when the time comes, even if its most important week is 10 years later.
The Jump Senseaware team:
Udaya Patnaik, Kingshuk Das, Ibanga Umanah, Pete Mortensen, Neal Moore, Joanna Madsen, with later help from Chris Kosednar, Eric Schreiber, and others at Jump
The FedEx project team:
Chris Swearingen, Nicole Heckman, John Holmes, Zack Perry, Jesse Gately, Will Murphy, Ken Milman, O.P. Saaksrud, Kyle Fanning;
Later: Suren Ajmera, Amber Williams
Under leadership of FedEx Innovation leadership: Mark Hamm, Michelle Proctor
(My apologies if I’ve missed anyone)
By the way: Neal’s role in all this?
Co-founded the consulting company
Developed capabilities of team to do the work, including B2B ethnography
Designed and led client stakeholder and customer interviews
Guided Jump team and rotating cast of clients through 6 weeks of international fieldwork
Designed new service experience journeys and service blueprints for Senseaware concepts
Cocreated and delivered massive insights worksession with 15-20 clients to share and process insights, with an visual agenda, interactive breakout activities, and exec facilitation
Strategized and mapped different paths for commercialization,
Strategized and mapped different landing spots in and outside the company for the SenseAware technology and business, supported decisionmakers with alternatives and rationales eg, spin out the business into a subsidiary, vs integrate as an internal operations improvement in the main business
Created commercialization roadmaps and timelines with work breakdowns
Collaborated with client and team in ‘10X growth hacking” business modeling
LINKS
https://fedexbusinessinsights.com/the-next-generation-of-sensors/
