Orca Intelligence
Powering Supply Chains with Technology for Smarter Savings

When Marco Grossi and Matt Grossi laid the cornerstone for Orca Intelligence in 2016, they decided to push the core value of “continuous reinvestment” to the top of their agenda. As an industry that is antiquated and hesitant in terms of adopting technology, the logistics and supply chain sector has rarely witnessed the granular-level permeation of data analytics. Based out of Toronto, Canada, Orca is a full-fledged freight audit provider that has transformed the status quo of the supply chain operations of its clients by creating tight-knit relationships and keeping pace with innovative technologies like AI and machine learning. “We’ve custom-built an industry leading, efficient, interactive and all-encompassing system that prioritizes and houses clean data and, in turn, saves money for our clients,” explains Marco Grossi, Partner, Orca Intelligence.

Before setting out, Orca performs a close current state analysis of the client’s business workflow and understands the processes, data and information involved. Getting intimate with clients’ business processes allows the Orca team to customize their system and pull the relevant and necessary data to the clients in their interactive supply chain dashboards, thereby providing a clear perspective for their day-to-day decision making. Unlike contemporary supply chain solution providers, their customer-centric approach has been unique. Marco adds, “Customer experience is the most important thing for us and we treat each person in our client’s organization as an individual customer.” To that end, the company interviews every single stakeholder in the client organization’s supply chain, logistics, transportation, and finance teams. Understanding the client’s business up close enables Orca to gain an edge over competitors and deliver a solution that is built exclusively for that client. This showcases one of Orca’s core objectives: to truly understand the client and the problems they are trying to solve and serve their customization needs.

Contributing to its exclusivity, Orca is serving the latest attraction of clients: SKU analysis reporting. Orca has the ability to match and pull SKU data from clients ERP systems that customers would provide.

Based on this data set, Orca is able to deliver an exceptional and detailed analysis that is drawing a higher level of interest from senior executives within companies in particular. This is purely in sync with the firm’s belief that each customer is different and needs a unique solution. The system was built to understand the logic of the complex rules and transportation processes every customer has. Marco adds, “We’re adding extra layers to the process and making it more of a customized tool, rather than a generic freight auditing system. What we are moving towards is automating more and more of the finance divisions’ tasks [i.e. auditing for payables, invoicing for receivables]. By taking on more of a process automation role for our clients, we gain intimacy, which leads to trust, and ultimately what we are after is becoming a fully integrated partner for full business and supply chain analytics to each and every customer we have.”

Unlike most freight audit providers that limit their offerings to auditing transportation providers, Orca extends its services by collecting more data for the client in their warehouses, allowing them to drill down into the costs surrounding warehousing, distribution, and storage, in addition to transportation and logistics costs. The brothers say they are currently working on tapping into the other side of the industry, where they see a huge opportunity in carrier and broker process automation. The Orca system uses AI and machine learning to process all the invoices and compare contracted rates from hundreds of carriers every day. The company is truly focused on saving clients’ time in the data gathering process and at the same time, facilitating businesses with interactive dashboards to empower them with supply chain and business analytics. The brothers, in conjunction with the CTO John Turner, have extensive experience in supply chain, which has allowed them to understand the breadth and depth of shipper, carrier and broker needs. Orca is extremely optimistic about their future as they work to leverage their vast experience and continue to create powerful solutions for their clients.

With reinvestments as the key driver for growth, Orca wants to increase automation to 96 percent in order to lower their overhead costs and ultimately drive more dollars into reinvesting in technology that will be useful and valuable to end users. Having secured a considerable portion of the market share in Canada as a promising freight audit firm, Orca aims to further their reach and expand into the US market. For the two Grossi brothers, it doesn’t seem like it’s money they are after, it truly seems like they are passionate enough to prioritize change in an industry that has needed it for so long. “We need to change the way everyone looks at their respective supply chains. There is so much data within every supply chain, and nobody has really focused on sifting through and harnessing it to create powerful daily insights that help all parts of an organization. What we are after here, is collecting all the data we can, and customizing a system that improves the speed to decisions in a way that makes each senior executive feel comfortable and confident about his/ her daily business decisions.”