Schneider acquires Watkins & Shepard and Lodeso in separate deals with common goal

Taking steps to augment its final mile service offerings, truckload, intermodal and logistics services provider Schneider said this week it has acquired two separate companies to take the next steps on that front.

Green Bay, Wis.-based Scheider has acquired:
-Watkins & Shepard, a Missoula, Montana-based provider of LTL, truckload and logistics services for difficult-to-handle goods, which was established in 1974 and has more than 1,300 employees, including almost 800 drivers in 20 U.S.-based terminals; and
-Lodeso, a Zeeland, Michigan-based final-mile logistics solution provider, focusing on the delivery of overweight, oversized, and difficult-to-handle goods, with its proprietary technology to handle supply chain complexities within the national home delivery sector. Lodeso has more than 50 employees and almost 600 U.S.-based agents.

Financial terms of these acquisitions were not disclosed by Schneider.

Schneider officials said that Watkins & Shepard and Lodeso will compliment its Final Mile+ service, which focuses on customized, home, commercial and retail delivery with white glove service.

In terms of the specific service offerings each acquired company offers, Watkins & Shepard has a 99.3 percent claims-free service, coupled with a seamless first-to-final mile service and continuous visibility for customers, which enables Schneider to offer customers a single tariff and invoice, integrated tracking and reverse logistics capabilities.

And Lodeso’s proprietary technology’s continuous delivery tracking throughout the supply chain enables delivery agents, customers and other parties to handle issues proactively.

In an interview with LM, Mark Rourke, Schneider executive vice president, chief operating officer, explained that with retail being a major part of Schneider’s business based on its prevalence and place within the economy, with the bulk of its retail customers focused on how to grow their e-commerce channels in able to effectively compete with the large e-commerce retailers.

“The pain points they were dealing with were not for things going through the parcel networks, which is pretty efficient and fast with great service and reliability,” he said. “It was more to do with over-dimensional things that did not fit through that network or work well or perhaps were not palletized as cleanly to be able to go through an LTL network as efficiently. It is not just stuff like apparel or consumer goods people are buying, as much as it was stuff like furniture, home goods, and exercise equipment. These things are coming through that channel, and people have gotten so comfortable with the shopping experience through the online part of the retailer that was set up very well and efficiently. But they did not have a good connection to the back end, which was a supply chain move in terms of visibility and how the experience is for the customer. That was a screaming need in the market to us, especially with a national scale, which is why we are focused on serving that need.”

Schneider’s Final Mile+ has been around in both a retailer and consumer manner in different configurations for nearly a decade, with more customer engagement in recent years. Rourke said Schneider kept expanding the offerings reach and configurations based on geography to geography and not in the form of an aligned national network. But with Lodeso’s technology it can now better manage the back end for moving oversized products and see where they are throughout the whole delivery process, with the service akin to what is provided by major e-commerce retailers.

This combination is how Schneider brings scale to moving oversized goods, as opposed to the slower and more methodical geographic organic expansion, he added.     

In regards to the integration of these companies into Schneider, Rourke said bringing them into the fold provides more scale, with an information flow tied to a physical flow being a differentiator from a sales and customer standpoint.

“They are connected to the shipper and carrier on the delivery side, and we can bring in more capital and resources to broaden the reach of the footprint, it is almost like adding water and watching it grow,” he noted. “A big difference for us is being able to manage the information flow in a way that we are effectively managing the physical flow of the product so that we become that back end of retailer that for so many today is a black hole around multiple providers, invoices, connection points. We cover that back end so much more efficiently for all players, including the shipper, consumer, and carrier. And we now have network partners that are going into places we are not from a customer standpoint and it all feels the same. Not everybody has that information flow that customers are so desperately asking for.”