Every quarter, Descartes’ Employee Excellence and Innovation award is presented to a deserving Descartes employee. Based on peer nominations, the award recognizes Descartes employees for their contributions in helping to make Descartes’ customers, partners, and fellow employees successful. Eligible Descartes employees must have demonstrated ‘Excellence’ by performing their job with integrity and to the highest professional standards, exceeding expectations while achieving exceptional results for external and/or internal stakeholders, and ‘Innovation’ by sharing valuable ideas to develop new or better processes, tools, methods, systems, products or services in support of Descartes’ mission.

I’m pleased to announce that Descartes’ Excellence and Innovation award winner for the second quarter of fiscal year 2018 is Ian Wills, Account Executive from Westborough, Massachusetts. Ian joined us as part of the Oz Development acquisition and has worked tirelessly to improve the handoff process from the sales team to the services team, for the benefit of customers, while also building strong and positive relationships with our partners.

Fleet management is often overlooked as companies examine ways to improve performance while keeping their costs down. But fleets can be a competitive differentiator for companies that compete on delivery service, if businesses take the correct approach to fleet management. Yet what shapes the thinking, strategies and tactics of the top performers? How are they leveraging rapidly evolving fleet technologies to improve the value of the fleet without prohibitively increasing costs?

Descartes went looking for those answers by surveying 130 companies with fleets across the globe to determine how leaders think differently and the results point to a definite linkage between management’s perceived value of the fleet and overall financial performance. We've compiled these results in a 55 minutes web seminar, recorded on Nov 30th, to provide you with a valuable opportunity to gain insights into the behavior of top performers, and to compare the results with your own organization’s perspective and performance.

The rapid global expansion that low-cost airline Norwegian has experienced is requiring the company to better engage with the wider air cargo community that can benefit from the bellyhold capacity in its expanding 787 Dreamliner fleet. To facilitate this higher level of engagement, Norwegian is using Descartes’ cloud-based Global Air Messaging Gateway solution to help standardize and automate electronic air cargo communication. 

Without a comprehensive omnichannel strategy that includes advanced parcel shipping capabilities, ecommerce retailers and SMBs alike can be left with escalating costs and poor delivery execution that can impact customer satisfaction. Descartes ShipRush solutions help address this problem with cloud-based tools to integrate with front-end commerce systems and parcel shipping providers for seamless package rating, labelling, tracking and postage processing. With Descartes ShipRush solutions in addition to Descartes OzLink application integration solutions Descartes pixi* warehouse management solutions, omnichannel retail and SMB customers have a broad set of technologies to streamline ecommerce, warehouse and shipping processes.