Yellow

Uday Tallapragada is a forward thinking and results driven senior IT leader with extensive experience in multiple facets of Digital application development. He has led small, medium and large cross-functional global teams in delivering business capabilities through state-of-the-art technologies. Uday is a collaborative team builder with the ability to translate complex things into simple presentation.

What are some of the challenges impacting the logistics industry?

The labor shortage is perhaps the largest issue facing carriers and logistic companies. ATA estimated a shortage of about 80,000 drivers in the industry.To address this, we have opened our own driver academies. We have 22 driving academies that are open all over the country, where we provide free CDL driver training to budding or prospective drivers. In doing this, one of our aims is to  recruit more diverse candidates who can be trained to become drivers.

Although the pandemic had a significant influence on the market, we also see that customers' expectations are still very high. Customers demand better visibility, predictability, and tailored products so they may use our carrier according to their requirements.

Today, trying to meet the ever-changing expectations of customers is a challenge for everyone. The demand for transparency in shipment and faster time to market is an all-time high. We at Yellow are happy to have been chosen by Home Depot as the LTL carrier of the year, as well as by DHL and Walmart as the 2020 carrier of the year for our service. I believe that the constantly shifting expectations are driving us to be more innovative in that area.

What are some interesting and impactful projects or initiatives that you're currently working on?

To meet our customers' expectations. We, today, focus on the "One Yellow" journey, which will help us in becoming a regional carrier with a national footprint. Our goal is to help customers track shipments across all our brands and provide improved shipping status with events that are captured throughout the shipment life cycle

We are also working to ensure safety by implementing an industry-leading safety and risk platform. This will contribute to maintaining the safety of drivers and frictionless reporting of all accidents or chemical spills in accordance with all relevant laws and regulations.

“The labor shortage is perhaps the largest issue facing carriers and logistic companies. To address this, we have opened our own driver academies”

We're entirely redesigning the digital experience with software from top vendors in this field. The cutting-edge platforms we are developing will enable us to understand how and what the clients desire across all of our channels.

How do you envision the future of this space?

It's a great time to work as a technologist in our industry now. Moreover, we are already seeing the industry accelerating the use of AI and ML insights in various aspects, from all the way from planning to back-office automation. Moving forward, there will be more AI and ML use cases which will help the human workforce in working more efficiently by augmenting some of the trivial tasks so that they can spend more time effectively on value-added tasks.

What would be your piece of advice for budding professionals in this field?

Have an operational attitude with a customer-first mindset. We must understand our customers and their requirements and share that across the organization, including sales, service, marketing, and operations. Doing this helps to establish a good foundation for your digital transformation journey.