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Toys, Tech & TMS: How A & A Global Plays to Win
Episode 1478 • 10th September 2025 • Supply Chain Now • Supply Chain Now
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In this episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott Luton talks with Brett Johnson, IT Director at A&A Global, and Shannon Vaillancourt, President and Founder of RateLinx, about A&A Global’s journey to transform their shipping operations. Brett details how they addressed inefficiencies in their old TMS, implementing RateLinx’s flexible toolkit to streamline processes, reduce costs, and scale operations without adding staff.

The conversation explores how A&A Global overcame challenges like manual data entry, slow carrier onboarding, and inaccurate rate quoting through powerful integrations like ScanForce, Cubiscan, and mobile printing. Brett and Shannon also highlight the role of Lean Six Sigma practices in driving continuous improvement and achieving significant cost savings, faster shipping, and enhanced efficiency.

Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Intro

(01:39) Meet the industry leaders

(02:46) Challenges faced by A&A Global

(05:56) Issues with previous TMS

(08:30) The need for speed and efficiency

(13:42) Selection process for a new TMS

(18:03) Integration and implementation

(27:55) The new car vs. new software analogy

(29:42) Challenges with previous TMS

(30:44) Choosing RateLinx and ShipLinx TMS

(32:29) Implementation philosophy

(37:29) Automation and labor cost savings

(45:42) Advice for IT and operations leaders

Resources:

This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated show page at: https://supplychainnow.com/toys-tech-tms-1478

Transcripts

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[00:00:30] Voice Over: Welcome to Supply Chain Now, the number one voice of supply chain. Join us as we share critical news, key insights, and real supply chain leadership from across the globe. One conversation at a time.

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[00:01:37] Scott W. Luton: So I want to get to work and we’ll welcome in our esteemed guest here today starting with Brett Johnson, IT director with A&A Global, an incredible company that started back in 1938 and it’s transformed into a powerhouse of industry where A&A is a leading toy and novelty distributor. Now, Brett brings a ton of technology and leadership experience to the conversation today. And when this Maryland resident has a little free time, you’re going to find Brett enjoying the outdoors biking and camping and many other things. So joining Brett today and back with us once again, 30-year industry veteran and the innovative founder and president of RateLinx, Shannon Lincourt, who provided the powerful tech behind A&A’s transformation. And hey, when Shannon isn’t moving mountains out in the industry, he’s one of the biggest true fans of the sport of golf you’ll ever find. Want to welcome in Shannon and Brett. Hey, hey Brett, how you doing?

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[00:03:42] Scott W. Luton: Outstanding. And as we were talking pre-show, I think I can share this man, y’all have been moving a lot of those rubber duckies that we find in Jeeps everywhere. Is that right Brett?

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[00:03:55] Scott W. Luton: Outstanding. Well great to have you. I can’t wait to dive into the story. And for folks that may, Shannon, you’ve seen Shannon Vaillancourt with us dozens of episodes over the last few years. It’s incredible what he and the RateLinx team are doing. If you’re new to Shannon Vaillancourt, he’s a recognized innovator in supply chain performance, especially when it comes to logistics, data analytics. In fact, he and the RateLinx team have been reshaping the logistics landscape for years with some of the nation’s largest retailers, CPG manufacturers and many other industrial leaders like A&A Global. So Shannon, great to have you here today.

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[00:04:33] Scott W. Luton: I am too. So Brett, we want you to set the stage for us. Can you share what was happening at A&A Global that made you start going down the path looking for a new TMS?

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[00:05:49] Scott W. Luton: That posed significant roadblocks and challenges. I want to dive a little bit deeper before I get Shannon to comment here. Tell us more about the other roadblocks that A&A Global faced with your previous shipping systems that really told you in red blaring lights maybe that you need a much more flexible and integrated TMS.

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[00:06:55] Scott W. Luton: That support and care, which we’re going to talk about in a second. But it sounds like to me, Shannon, this is a big common theme from some of our other conversations, finding the right partners that can help you scale. As you heard there from Brett, man, they’re growing and delighting their customers at the same time. Shannon, do you hear stories like A&A Global’s often where companies are dealing with a really rigid and non-flexible TMS that has data and integration issues as well?

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[00:08:19] Scott W. Luton: And a software perspective. And we’re going to talk more about how you all managed to make implementation a lot less disruptive. So stick around folks as you get tips on that. Okay, let’s keep driving. Let’s talk about speed, Brett and Shannon. Speed man, organizational velocity, supply chain velocity is of the essence to keep your customers happy, really delighted while driving revenue. Right. Brett, what else was slowing down your shipping operations in that previous state?

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[00:09:39] Brett Johnson: And like I said before, as transaction volume increased, the instability just became a bigger problem and it kept slowing down. And we were at a point in some of our busiest days when we’ve got shipping processors that are waiting sometimes a minute or more for data to transmit. I’m not talking about the process of weighing the boxes and putting the labels on, I’m talking about they would click the button and stand there for a minute waiting for something to load on the screen and you just multiply that across all of those shipments every day. And it was a terrible time sink. It wasn’t all just technical issues. The previous system did have some limited reporting tools. Again, what it felt everyone needed the most, not what we needed specifically. So most reporting came to it as custom SQL reports that we would have to invest time to do. And the sales team had rate quoting tools, but the rate quoting tools produced inaccurate results and that caused issues. And another issue we had with the previous TMS was that they would charge you per LTL carrier to rate shop. So let’s say we’re shipping to someplace where you could potentially have 10 or 15 different LTL carrier options to choose from. We didn’t have access to see those. We could only see the options we paid to see. And so that was an issue as well.

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[00:11:42] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’ve seen this from day one. I remember back in the early nineties, I remember one of the very first installs I ever did, so this was back when this will date me, but this is back when UPS and FedEx made a change. Actually it was UPS, it made a change. So back in the day you never had to capture ship to address or anything. Believe it or not, when you were doing your UPS because there was no such thing as PLD uploads or anything like that. And we had to add the three-digit zip code we had to capture. And I’ll never forget, I was on site and we make the upgrade and the customer’s out there with this stopwatch, God, he’s got stopwatch and he’s like timing it. And that’s just from the shipping side. So my whole life, it’s been burned into my brain.

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[00:13:25] Scott W. Luton: I like that man. We could dial in your response there in so many different ways, but speed, speed, speed and the market and the requirement for speed is like never before and it will continue to grow up. And then secondly, paying a penalty to optimize your supply chain, that’s no fun. I’ve got to do away with that out in the marketplace. Alright, so Brett, let’s get to the selection process. I always love diving into selection process because while selection of due diligence has been around since the caveman days, still there are ways we can do it better. What were your non-negotiables during the selection process as you were looking for a TMS solution?

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[00:14:16] Shannon Vaillancourt: Manual, it wasn’t the manual anymore, it was the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, love minutes.

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[00:14:34] Brett Johnson: Well, I mean stability and reliability in the sense that I talked to you about those delays, that was a big impact, right? The LTL and the parcel teams we have in our warehouse have significantly different workflows. Both of those workflows needed fewer manual steps, less user entry, less room for user error. The sales team needed a rate quoting tool that produced results they can trust that were accurate. The reporting and the dashboarding tools we use now are faster, more user-friendly because not everything is custom. And obviously getting technical support going from a provider that had sort of the traditional help desk queue where you get stuck at tier one, the TMS software equivalent of have you tried turning it off and back on again? Where with RateLinx, we have a dedicated account team. I’m always speaking to the same people every time. They are super accessible and responsive and they know my environment, which saves a ton of time when there’s an issue you have to troubleshoot.

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[00:16:11] Shannon Vaillancourt: Yeah, that’s often the leading reason why they’re talking to us. It’s either about support, making sure that they get what they need or the fact that they’re not getting what they need and that’s causing them to now look for another solution out there. This is a mission critical application. If A&A Global can’t ship their product out the door, if this system stops them from doing that, they can’t invoice their customer, they can’t collect and then it’s going to ruin their reputation with the customer, which has a large impact. So if anything does go wrong, whether it’s just a question about something, you got to be able to respond to it very quickly. And that’s why we’ve really made sure that we keep a real dense amount of expertise in the area with the type of ERP that Brett has because his ERP has some little nuances to it that you have to understand and that’s where from the integration perspective to provide the speed, we’re doing things for A&A and that ERP that we don’t have to do for any other ERP. I mean it just, it’s not needed. But again, we have that capability so we can provide what looks to be a very seamless, very quick interface. And then if there’s any questions, he’s got the same team that he talks to that understands, you have to understand because it’s just different how we have to deal with it.

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[00:18:11] Brett Johnson: I mean it’s absolutely critical and we needed a system that could plug into the existing tech stack. We didn’t want the tail to wag the dog here and replace a bunch of components that were working well for us just to fix something that wasn’t working well for us. Right In 2024 and 2025, the whole organization took on the process of Lean Six Sigma training and process review. A lot of people are familiar with, it’s fantastic. And we wanted to resolve workflow problems by exploring integrations such as the Cubiscan tools, the rate estimating tools in our e-comm store, a mobile shipping label printing project, and many more projects currently in queue. And that opens a lot of doors for us.

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[00:19:09] Brett Johnson: Got some great stuff.

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[00:19:29] Brett Johnson: Well, ScanForce is our WMS system and it’s fantastic. We’re very happy with it. It runs on the Android handheld scanners that the order pullers in the warehouse use. It runs on touchscreen monitors at our packing stations, on our packing lanes. And as an order moves from our ERP into ScanForce for the picking and packing processes, it will then move into RateLinx for shipping. So the mobile printing I mentioned, the mobile label printing I mentioned, was actually a partner project between ScanForce and RateLinx. It was something that was actually inspired— it was actually inspired by the company that gave us our RateLinx reference call before we signed the deal. And we said, man, we’ve never thought about that before. And what that means is our parcel department has just this year shipped probably over a hundred thousand full case items, meaning they come straight off of the truck onto a shelf in the warehouse, straight off the shelf and put a FedEx label on and get it out the door.

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[00:21:25] Brett Johnson: We invested in our first CBIS Scan S9 and that’s a piece of equipment that’s a pallet dimensioner and it ties in with a pallet wrapper and a pallet scale. So as you are wrapping and weighing your pallets, the CBIS Scan is capturing the dimensions and then we store that data and we use that data to calculate the appropriate freight rates for any given LTL shipment. And our RateLinx team used the RateLinx toolkit to build an integration that can pull all of that detail that the Cubiscan is capturing into their ShipLinx shipping client software. And we just transmit that and pass it right onto the carriers. And not only that, we worked with RateLinx on a very highly customized bill of lading to show all this data that we’ve been capturing to put it right in the carrier’s faces, but we also needed to make sure that the customers could see the data that they need on the bill of lading for their sign off.

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[00:23:25] Scott W. Luton: Wow.

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[00:24:41] Brett Johnson: But those customers need to be presented with all the possible options and they can choose the best option for them based on their delivery needs. Another thing that makes our rate estimate process a little more complicated is how we calculate the amount that we’re going to bill a customer. There are a lot of conditions in there and RateLinx has to be able to acknowledge and apply them. And we know that all of this is going to work in e-comm because everything I just described has already been built out as a rate quoting tool internally for our sales staff when they’re putting orders into the ERP, it already exists. We’ve been using it for months, it’s fantastic. So we were able to transpose much of that work and logic into Salesforce relatively quickly.

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[00:25:42] Shannon Vaillancourt: I guess it sounds like before us they used to have to ship uphill both ways I guess or something careful just like that. What’s interesting is because our solution is cloud-based, but we’re doing all of this integration inside their firewall, so we’re not opening up any ports or anything like that in their firewall, but we’re still leveraging the cloud part of our system, but we have these integration toolkits that sit inside the firewall to do all of this stuff and just like the mobile printing, the other customer that he saw that, they have a completely different ERP, right? So it’s not like it was another customer with the exact same ERP and that’s where we’re able to take those components and kind of almost copy them over into the environment that A&A needs and they can almost use it out of the box.

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[00:27:52] Shannon Vaillancourt: In this industry, what makes us always different, and I always joke about this but it’s true, is you think about when you go buy a new car, everybody’s excited, right? It’s a new car, everything’s going to be great. Finally get rid of that old car where I just wasn’t sure if it was going to make it anymore. You get the brand new car, it’s always going to start. You never worry about it. With software, it’s the opposite. Nobody wants the new software, new software is not great, it’s not tried and true, the bugs haven’t been worn out. It’s this physical thing and I got to ring out the bugs out of that new software and it’s like that’s why our reusability and kind of putting these pieces together allow Brett and his team to really be confident with whatever they dream up because we probably have come across something like it. So we’re not doing that much really new code and that allows us to deliver very fast as well.

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[00:29:17] Shannon Vaillancourt: I mean we’re talking anywhere from days to a few weeks depending on the scope of the project. I mean the actual integration itself doesn’t take very long. You’re probably looking at a few days and then it just comes down to the testing and the training and then the go-live. So we’re able to deploy a lot of this stuff in weeks.

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[00:29:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: Not months.

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[00:29:47] Brett Johnson: Maybe that’s a trick question because I think the short answer is all of the projects I mentioned if they weren’t impractical would be completely impossible. With the previous TMS, that off the shelf approach means that it’s really hard to get new features put into standard product for general release. It can take anywhere from months to years and sometimes you have to pay to play. So yeah, I would say probably not even doable.

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[00:30:44] Brett Johnson: Well right off the bat we knew why we needed to leave the previous TMS. It was time to tear up to a bigger product, to something that was more powerful and more flexible and in our ERP’s ecosystem there really weren’t a lot of options. So we knew that we were going to be building an integration that probably didn’t exist yet. And as we spoke to many software providers out there, including some very, very large ones, we were pretty disappointed in the lack of flexibility from some of these enterprise-tier TMS offerings and many of the products were disqualified during the initial discovery calls. We’d hit a technological or design impasse or often we’d ask really specific technical questions and bring up specific concerns and we’d be met with somewhat generic pre-sales responses that didn’t give us a lot of trust. Now with RateLinxs, Shannon himself was involved in the conversations from day one and I mean that in itself is a big positive considering the level of support that we were coming from at the time. To have Shannon in there himself, I felt like he approached the project with an engineer’s mindset trying to solve a problem. He was not approaching it as a salesman trying to close a deal and ultimately RateLinx came to the table with a plan that was the best fit for us and what we needed and gave us the highest level of confidence to move forward by far. Not taking anything away from folks out there trying to make a deal happen, y’all know that, but I love that peer into Shannon’s mindset because it has been a common thread through our conversations here over the last few years. Shannon, let’s talk implementation for a minute. It’s one of my favorite parts of our previous conversations. Could you keep it real? What’s your philosophy on implementation? Because we all know a lot of these projects, TMS projects or others, they stall out or take forever or oftentimes they never deliver.

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[00:33:39] Shannon Vaillancourt: I always have to tell people here when they’re doing the specs, I said, look, it’s not about you being right in the spec, it’s putting down what you think they said and what you think we are going to deliver. And then you got to collaborate with the customer and they’re going to look at it and go, oh yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted here, but that part I need this little change made. And then you make the change so that way when we implement, it’s just faster and I think that’s what we’ve learned and then it’s supportable because now I’ve got all this documentation so it’s like I don’t have to crack the code open to look at anything. I just look at the spec and it pretty much tells me how this whole thing is supposed to work and then you can pull the technical stuff out of it and make it a user guide for the end user. It’s a two for one. I learned this a long time ago. That’s where being an implementer I think really helped me. I used to be the one that would go on site, do the install and then have to support it. And it’s hard to do without the proper documentation.

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[00:35:06] Scott W. Luton: I like it. No guesswork and no switcheroos. And Shannon speaks about that with passion and quite a track record. Brett, again, I love the no switcheroos keeping it real. What you set out to build is what ultimately is delivered that’s so important across the technology space. But freight audit, I understand you added freight audit just a few months into the overall journey here. What drove that decision and better yet, what changed?

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[00:37:02] Brett Johnson: The second most common scenario is when the carriers were ignoring accessorials that we were clearly submitting on the shipment and that was a little bit more complicated. RateLinx had to work behind the scenes with each carrier to correct those data mapping issues. And now we’ve resolved most of that. Again, we’re seeing a lot more automation and fewer exceptions as we go forward.

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[00:37:58] Shannon Vaillancourt: I think it really just comes down to belief. Unfortunately in the freight industry, what I’ve seen historically is everyone just feels like that’s just the way it is. That there is no better way and there absolutely is a better way. I wish I had a better answer for it. It’s like why are they doing it? I mean there’s no good answer that I could think of, but I think they just feel like that’s just what they have to do. And the other thing that Brett said that’s interesting is a lot of times you kind of get caught up in what you’re doing and you lose track of is it valuable or not? I’ve had discussions with customers where they tell me about the manual that they’re doing and then I start asking them questions about, well, how often does that happen? And they’re like, oh, that happens 30% of the time.

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[00:40:12] Scott W. Luton: First off, I do find your mathematical ability amazing. I was struggling to follow you along there. My lesser math skills, math with two Fs and secondly, kidding aside, majoring in the minors, we’ve got to be really careful about majoring in the minors and know where the juice is worth the big squeeze. It costs so much, especially on return on energy from our workforces and our leadership teams. So Brett, I think these next couple of questions are going to be a couple of my favorites that I want to pose to you. I want to talk about impact, impact, impact. So you wanted your shipping operations, as we’ve established, to be faster, easier, integrated and more agile. With the new TMS integrated into your ERP and your broader tech stack that you were speaking to earlier, were you able to handle the transition without increasing your IT or operations staff?

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[00:42:25] Scott W. Luton: Brett. I love it. I love it. I’m really excited about what all this means for your team and the new opportunities for them. And going back to Lean Six Sigma folks, a lot of our audience knows what Brett’s talking about, but at its simplest level, the relentless pursuit of the elimination of waste and the relentless pursuit of the elimination of defects, especially with processes that take place thousands or billions of times, right? Big gains that can be had by picking and choosing your spots. Alright Brett, I want to keep going down the impact before I get Shannon to comment here. I bet this is music that Shannon Vaillancourt’s ears share some examples, a little more examples around your labor cost savings. Brett?

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[00:43:39] Scott W. Luton: A year. Oh man, Shannon Vaillancourt, that’s incredible. I love when we get down to tangible bottom-line impact and all that seems to be, at least to my ears, to be really big-time cost savings powered, at least in large part by simply finding the right TMS partner for A&A Global. Would you say, Shannon, these results are one-off or are they pretty common?

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[00:44:55] Shannon Vaillancourt: Let me talk to some people here and all that. But it was just, that’s where we talk about don’t work the drive-through with the customer. It’s like when they pull up and they ask for stuff, I’m always curious, what do you use that for? Help me understand. We want to make sure that we’re delivering the right solution and it also helps us as we’re doing it, be the user to make sure that when they get in front of it, it’s going to work the way they’re expecting to. So that’s how I’ve always been taught to do this stuff.

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[00:45:51] Brett Johnson: Looking back over the last year or so, which has been a pretty huge year for us, I can say that the Lean Six Sigma process has made just a giant impact on the way that we evaluate processes and projects and measure their success. That’s key, right? You have to measure the performance of your current state. You have to be honest with that evaluation and create truthful metrics and baselines so you are able to measure your improvements in success once you’ve made your choices and moved forward. In addition, you have to have input and you have to address the concerns of your stakeholders, your end users, even down to the person pushing the buttons at the keyboard and putting the labels on the boxes. If you don’t do that, it will come back to haunt you. And Shannon and I actually had more than one conversation like that where I just kind of, as well as some of his staff where I give him the problem and he pulls an ASAP from his back pocket with the solution that I didn’t know he had. And then we cyber high five. But don’t let the limitations of your environment today put any restrictions on the potential of your environment tomorrow. And again, Lean Six Sigma and the tools and processes we learned with that really helped us overcome that.

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[00:47:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: I think Brett kind of hit it right on the head there with one, they’re used to working with a provider that in our words, just takes orders. They don’t come up with solutions. And I think a lot of that’s the business model. A lot of the other providers out there, they get paid by the hour, so it behooves them to get some convoluted thought from the customer. And that’s where the customer typically will solution for them. And the provider loves it because it’s a bazillion hours that they’re going to charge ’em for knowing all well that it’s not really going to solve anything, but they don’t care. And then once they get down that path, then they’re going to have to pay them to unwind it all. That’s not how we work. We don’t charge those professional services. So it allows us, I think, to have a different relationship with our customers and it is more solution-focused and it’s very collaborative. That’s what I tell customers for. It’s like, are you looking for a collaborative relationship to help you with solutions? Just like what Brett was able to do with one of our customers where he talked to them and saw that they were doing something even though it was a completely different ERP and he was able to bring that solution in-house to help them as well. And it’s like that’s what we do. We’re not always the expert, but we’ve got a lot of customers that probably are,

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[00:49:44] Brett Johnson: You bet.

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[00:50:30] Shannon Vaillancourt: Well, what I’m focused on right now, when we get into October, it’s football season.

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[00:50:35] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’ve got a SU defending conference champs, and then the bears have a new head coach. And I’ll tell you what, man, after watching on Sunday, we have a NFL caliber offense.

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[00:50:51] Shannon Vaillancourt: I’m like, oh my God. And the Pope is from Chicago. This has to be something, right? It has to be a sign.

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[00:51:47] Brett Johnson: Thank you.

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[00:51:52] Shannon Vaillancourt: Always. And thank you Brett, really appreciate it as always.

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[00:51:57] Scott W. Luton: And I’m pulling for those bears just for you, Shannon. We, we’ll see how the NFL goes. But folks, you heard a great case study here today. What an incredible one. Here’s your homework. You got to take just one thing. Brett and Shannon gave us lots to think about, lots to do, take something to do with. But take just one thing at least and do something with it. It’s all about deeds, not words. That’s how we transform industry. We transform our organizations. And my favorite part about this is we help provide opportunities for our hardworking team members and make their days a lot easier. So with all that said, on behalf of the Supply Chain Now team Scott Luton challenge and you do good, give forward, be the change that’s needed. We’ll see you next time, right back here on Supply Chain Now. Thanks. Bye.

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