How can ERP systems improve cross-border logistics and customer experience?

In this episode, “ERP Success: Logistics & CX” with Industry Expert Omar Akilah, SVP Product Strategy from Infios, and our co-hosts Jason Rowland and Nick Agnetti discuss the importance of

✅ Visibility

✅ Optimization, and

✅ Orchestration

in aligning technology with global trade operations, improving logistics execution, and delivering better customer outcomes.

Learn more about this topic:

• Asendia USA: Request a sales quotation
• Infios - Relentlessly making supply chains better.

Omar Akilah | LinkedIn

Omar Akilah is a proven transformational leader with a deep understanding of how to bridge the complexities of the supply chain with the demands of modern commerce. With extensive experience driving end-to-end innovation - from inventory visibility and buy-online/pick-up-in-store models to ship-from-store, last mile delivery, and operational execution to promise - he ensures every commerce touchpoint is seamlessly connected and optimized.

Omar brings a unique ability to translate tactical challenges into strategic advantages, using supply chain interconnectivity as a lever for go-to-market success. He is known for identifying re-engineering opportunities, aligning cross-functional teams, and building scalable capabilities that deliver real customer value. A strategic and conceptual thinker, Omar consistently leads with purpose - pushing boundaries to introduce new ideas and spark meaningful change.

His areas of expertise span Product Management, eCommerce, Direct-to-Consumer innovation, Last Mile strategy, global logistics, omnichannel fulfillment, and 3PL integration. He also has deep experience in ERP, WMS, and TMS implementations, helping organizations optimize transportation, warehousing, and distribution across global networks. With a collaborative leadership style and strong execution focus, Omar continues to drive measurable transformation across retail, logistics, and the broader supply chain ecosystem.

If I try to do everything monolithic, if I try to move everything in one stack, I'm going to miss out because nobody does one thing. Excellent across all the functions.

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Go Outside the Box with Asendia USA.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Outside the Box with the Cynda USA podcast with my co host Jason Rowland.

Hey, welcome back to Vegas.

And we've got a very special guest today, Omar

Akilah.

Akilah, Senior Vice President of OMS for Infios.

Yes sir.

Thank you for joining. So the topic today is going to be about ERP systems, cross border logistics and the impact to delivery and customer experience.

So Omar, could you tell the viewers and listeners a little bit about yourself and Infios, please?

Absolutely. So I've been in the supply chain and logistics world for about 25 years.

I started my, my career at a third party logistics provider, then worked for Apple for nine years. An end to end supply chain, went to Target and led their digital transformation by online pickup store, same day delivery.

A lot of the same things we did at Apple as well and then basically got into software. Right. So you know my, my entire career was about enabling end to end processes.

How do you stitch together the supply chain to enable the customer experience?

And then I, we saw a gap in the market that, you know, customers were conforming to software as opposed to software conforming to the strategy in the new world. So we created a startup. That startup was bought by Blueyonder and then we joined Infios, our COO at Ariama and us, we have a long history together.

Okay. And what we're doing at Infios is bringing together supply chain execution.

So the category, so if you think about it, right, supply chain management across planning and there's execution, but on execution there's a lot of silos there, right? So you have management, you have warehousing, you have transportation compliance, right.

So Ed and all of us saw a very large gap in the market to bring together order warehousing, transport together on the execution side. Think of the world today, everything is disruption, right?

With tariffs, with technology and everything else, supply chain execution is always on the front line.

So as you were kind of putting that all together and offering a product, what do you think were some of the things that stood out to you? That brands struggle with even after they get their, their network set up. Right.

They might choose the right providers, might choose the right partners, but with cross border they, they sometimes they just seem to struggle.

Well so I think to your point, especially on cross border, you are typically kind of consumed with the cross border lane. Right. Customs compliance, how do you get it from and to. Right.

And that sometimes comes at the expense of the technology and the need to stitch together in order to execute that.

Right.

So while I'm figuring out, you know, my customs regulations and a lot of companies focus heavily on global trade and compliance and that kind of thing, they kind of, I think miss against the technology of how do I connect inventory availability to promising.

Make sure that I actually account for, you know, the delays I may have, the promise that I give to the customer so that it's not just a, a siloed approach, that it's a connected cross.

Yeah. Because you need to meeting those SLAs and cutting down on that dwell time and that lost opportunity to meet your SLAs is, is major.

And it's one of the things that as these carriers continue to evolve, there's a market for that problem.

It starts from the click. Right to your point. It's not just about the execution execution side. It's about the customer engagement side.

For sure.

When you're interacting with the customer. Right. You need to be able to give them the right promise.

Yeah. Set the standard.

So okay, that's. That was an interesting question and answer. But is.

So is cross border logistics really problem or is it something deeper technically going on in terms of the tech stack or whatever an organization might have going on?

What's awesome about you is that question. I don't, I don't see any of it as a problem. It all is opportunities. Right. But I think to your point, logistics plays a very heavy. Right.

For sure.

Logistics without the connective tissue around it. Right.

Stitching them together so that you are providing the right visibility, you're rate shopping amongst the right carriers, you're stitching together the lanes the right way, all in a compliant manner. Right. It's not just about a single solve. Got to connect execution together for sure. And what ERP does best in my opinion, financial account.

Right.

You need execution systems around the ERP to do the operational. So where ERP falls short is let's just take inventory. In an erp, inventory is all about financial accounting of that, right?

Yeah.

In an operational inventory store, it's all about how much inventory I have available right now. Available. What's available near you. An ERP can't respond to that on the front end of a website in the time that it takes to render a page.

So when you think about cross border shipping and you're on a website that's facilitating this, it needs to get that answer in less than 10 milliseconds because the page needs to refresh. You're going to make a call to the ERP to get that answer.

So that's where a connected ecosystem around the ERP that can handle all the operational load and let the ERP do the financial accounting, the, you know, basically everything that it does really, really well.

Accurate information and inventory data in the customer's view, really quick.

So in the tech space and talking a little bit more specific towards what we're discussing today, you know, there's a couple words, orchestration and optimization. So why is orchestration more important than optimization in global e commerce?

Amazing. So again, I think the answer is both. They're not, they have equal weight.

But on the optimization side, there is more of an impact to your bottom line because if you don't optimize correctly, that equals transportation cost or that equals extra handling cost, or that equals, you know, anything in the realm of cost. So you optimize to try to make the customer experience better, that is faster. Yep.

While containing cost, orchestrate is all about making sure that things are happening in the time that that optimization assumed it would take. Right. Because when I'm optimizing, I'm generating promises. If I don't orchestrate the ecosystem to those SLAs and I fail.

So they're just hand in hand, if that makes sense.

Is it a chicken and an egg scenario? To an extent.

So if you're forcing me to give an answer first it's optimized first, then orchestra.

That's what I would, that's what I.

Would optimize because the optimize is to set the promises.

Then you optimize around where the customer is and where is it going to go and, and all of the things that are in cross border logistics, the delays that could happen, et cetera, you build that into the promise.

Then you hand that to the orchestration engine to orchestrate and load those SLA so that it can pass it downstream to all the systems that need to execute.

Love it.

So I guess my question then kind of as we shift there from the orchestration standpoint, companies that get that right, companies that are able to scale quickly, what are they doing right and better.

And faster than anything else, what they're doing well is they're building the right modules to connect. Right. So if you think about it, in order to do this well, you have to understand what modules do I need to plug in and what part of my.

If I try to do everything monolithic, if I try to move everything in one stack, I'm going to miss out because nobody does one thing excellent across all the functions.

So the companies that are doing it extremely well have figured out the pieces of the technology as well as the processes, as well as the logistics that need to operate, you know, on their own and then connect into the next step. And that's where, again, I'm going to geek out. When you think of.

I love it, you think of the agentic side, what's coming there now you put agents and assists on top of it to try to understand what should have happened and what is happening and try to correct it before you even know. So it's absolutely. Some companies that are succeeding are figuring that out.

The learning perspective.

Right, that makes sense.

Yeah.

What capabilities need to be modular versus hardwired? You know, when you're entering, let's say. Let's say you're just. Right now you're only a US brand, but you want to go to Canada, UK and Australia. So.

So what capabilities need to be modular versus hardwired?

That's amazing. So inventory. Right. So when you think about inventory, inventory availability, where is the inventory? Where is my customer?

So that to me is a module that cannot stay within the erp. It's got to be externalized, it's got to be operational so that you can plug that into wherever you need it. Right.

The second part is definitely the compliance piece. Right. Understanding. Right. The rules about going in and out, the eligibility, all of that, that can be.

Again, in my, in my experience, that's a separate module as well. Right. If you think about eligibility, capacity, the rules around that. Right. That, that's its own thing. Optimization, another module. Right.

So to me, those are the three. And then you have the orchestration layer. The orchestration can be a module or it can be within the ERP itself. Right.

And then of course, you want to stitch together the visibility of the. Of the transport, the inventory coming in. You want to stitch together those other components.

But I think the essential, essential modules are around the inventory, the optimization, the promising. Right. And then of course, the compliance.

One of the things you've spoken about already is that promise. Right?

Yep.

What are you telling your customer you're going to follow through as we go through that? Accuracy, analysis why is it seems so much harder on the cross border as opposed to domestic to get that promise? Down to the good question.

That is an amazing. Because of the disruption and the volatility of the downstream decisions that need to be made that may not be in.

Your position you have no control over.

And that frankly changed day to day in today's world.

Right.

There's a tariff today. There's not a tariff today. No. I just think. I just think we live in a disruptive world.

Yeah.

Is there a tax solution there that.

Though or is that.

There is. It's the visibility component. Right. So if you actually understand that. Look. And this is where traditional machine learning.

So I know we were talking about AI. So on AI, if you think of really where. And again I'm not going to geek out too much. It really needs to all come together.

For the whole LLM it was about the predictions, the forecasts. Like right. Then you had optimization, now you have the LLM. Those three need to come. Yeah.

If your guess is wrong at the beginning.

So I can learn from the past. Right. On this particular lane that's going into Canada or wherever.

Where.

Where has it typically. How long has it typically taken? And use that in the promise to my customer. That's the forecast. That's where machine learning will help me.

If you build the right systems that are adaptable, they can understand when things may happen, build a confidence factor for it and then adjust your promises accordingly.

Yeah.

So the key is in a disruptive world being able to adapt and react to what's happening.

Yeah. How do you.

From the, from your vantage point, how do you see the implementation of AI in these LLMs impacting the cross border execution of that over the next couple of weeks?

I think I gave one example of it. I think, you know, when you think of the predictive nature of AI, I think we'll see a lot more.

And you guys have been around the logistics space before, you know, the rush if you will, towards agentic and towards LLMs. Right. There was a big push on the machine learning side and in logistics there was like okay, is it really worth. Right.

The return by getting the returns on the investment. I think now bringing it all together you will.

So you know, using predictive to understand how long something typically takes or you know, what the behavior is typically going to be. Right. Plugging that into then an agentic layer that can react and adjust promises, adjust settings, adjust. Right.

Then getting into an execution and orchestration arm I think is absolutely yes.

Because even if it leads to you shaving a day or two off of.

An sla, increasing, decreasing along with the visibility coming in, your customer becomes whole, your, your supply chain comes whole. And then when you put the optimization layer on top of it, you're figuring out how to adapt and react. Right. So something's taking time.

Maybe I replace that for the. Again, so there's, there's a lot of different resolution paths once I have a physicality connect.

When you look at Infios, the solution that you have out in the market today.

Yep.

How do you separate yourself from maybe others that say they're doing something similar? And then what would be a good ICP for Infios?

The reason that we exist. Right. Is to bring tier one capabilities. So when you look below that ICP. Right.

When you look below tier one and that ICP from let's say 200 million to about 5 billion, who's there who can actually help customers stitch together order, transport, warehouse, process, execution as well as all the rules that, you know, that's, that's where we see ourselves thriving. You know, again, without getting too cliche on the marketing. We meet our customers where they are.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you both, Appreciate it. Absolutely.

All right, everybody, you just heard Omar from Infios talking about ERP systems, cross border logistics. We talked about AI and the impact of delivery and customer expectations and experience.

Thanks for joining Outside the Box with Asendia USA podcast.

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