John “Jack” Peck of FastFetch shares his insights into the future of the distribution industry, and life lessons he’s gained along the way.

 
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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Jack Peck who is the president and CEO of FastFetch Corporation. Jack, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Jack:

– Well it’s a pleasure to be here.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to jump into today’s conversation and learn a little bit more about you and a little bit more about FastFetch. So to start with, for those who aren’t familiar with FastFetch, give us a little snapshot of who you guys are and what you do.

Jack:

– Okay, well my elevator pitch typically is, you know when you order something online and you hit the enter button, and two days later it shows up at your house? A lot of stuff happens between the time you press that button and it shows up. We’re responsible for part of that stuff. If you wanted to get more specific, FastFetch really produces software and hardware for order fulfillment in distribution centers and warehouses. We take orders. We do a lot of optimization, use a lot of artificial intelligence to get them out of the door quickly and accurately, in a snapshot.

Danny:

– Excellent. Well it sounds like that thing seems to be kind of important these days, especially as online ecomm is, I was reading a report how last year—because of the pandemic, so in 2020—the increase, it went up by 40% or something like that. I think we’re going to have some great things to be able to unpack here in the rest of this episode. But before we really dive into that, I want to know a little bit more about you. I want to know more about Jack. I want to know—take me back. How did you get into this space? Was it something that you studied in school? Was it as a kid, you were tinkering around with it? What was that?

Jack:

– Well things happen according to things you didn’t necessarily plan. When I was an undergraduate major, I was a math major. I did a lot of work. My PhD was actually in petroleum engineering and computer science, a combination of those which is a long ways away from distribution.

Danny:

– Just a little bit, yeah.

Jack:

– But you learn a lot about computers. You learn a lot about people. You learn a lot about research, innovation, entrepreneurialship, all of those things regardless of what the field is. When I went to Clemson University as an assistant professor, I looked for opportunities to do research. Some of those opportunities were brought to me by other people outside the university, and so I played on that and did a lot of work in social services, did a lot of work really for the governor’s office. I did a lot of work in Medicaid, the health department, did a whole bunch of work in mental health. That was primarily database work. Then around 1987 my kids were getting to the age where I was going to have to put them through college. I said, I better start earning some money outside the university. You do get opportunities like that during the summers in education when you’re looking for things to do.

So I started a company, Foxfire Technologies. Foxfire actually specialized in manufacturing systems, real-time shop floor control primarily for apparel manufacturing. Well when apparel and textile started moving offshore to the islands and to Central American and now of course to Asia, that opportunity started to dry up some, so we transformed the company into really distribution. Distribution still remains in this country because you want it to really get the distribution centers close to the customers. I transformed my sales into that. Now Foxfire continued on, did very, very well. Sold the company in 2007 to pull out the opportunities within Foxfire for doing a lot of research into really order fulfillment. And so pulled that out and formed a new company called FastFetch Corporation which, where we are today, and have concentrated on that. As it works out, about 60 to 70% of the labor in a distribution center is in the area of order fulfillment. So if you want to really help out in terms of getting things out faster and getting more done with the same people, that’s where you concentrate your efforts.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back a little bit with your story when you said you were at Clemson, and I’m not going to hold that against you. Sorry, Georgia fan here. No, I love Clemson.

Jack:

– You wouldn’t be happy with Clemson nowadays.

Danny:

– I bet. You said, hey, listen; I need to make this change. Walk me through a little bit of that decision-making process from I’m going to go start my own business. That’s a big jump.

Jack:

– It is. I had that entrepreneurial spirit—we didn’t call it that back in those days—really when I was a graduate student. When I was a graduate student I started a company. I did a lot of work. That was back in Louisiana, back in Lafayette, Louisiana. I did a lot of work in that area. I did a lot of consulting for Shell Oil, for Dow Chemical Company solving hard problems as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Then when I came to Clemson it was encouraged to do things outside the university in the area of research. Applied research is primarily what I did. I continued to do that. As a matter of fact, I started the computer science department outside the mathematical sciences department at Clemson because mathematics, although I was a mathematics major back as an undergraduate, not everything is mathematics in computers. There’s a lot of opportunity for things that are non-mathematical. And so I broadened my perspective, got into more applied areas as I’m doing today.

Danny:

– Excellent. What was that moment, though? I’m assuming you were pondering, though, for a while. Hey, maybe I should do this. Maybe I shouldn’t. Should I? Should I not? Then stability and all these different things, these roadblocks. There becomes a moment, I think, when every entrepreneur says, you know what? I’m going to go do it.

Jack:

– Yeah, well leaving the university was one of the moments, I suppose. But even before that it became really clear that I could not do all of the things I wanted to do on a university salary. At one point in time I had a son at Carnegie Mellon. I had a daughter at Davidson. My wife was at Emory working on an advanced degree, and I had another son at the Naval Academy. Now he paid for himself on the five-year plan after graduation, but the sum of the tuitions exceeded my take-home pay from the university. All of a sudden you say, I’ve got to do something here. I’ve got to make a change and do some things that I’m really not accustomed to doing. And so I made that change at that point. Really when I took early retirement from the university I was able to then devote 100% of my efforts to a new business.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. Fast forward two, three years, and look at this. I imagine it feels like that. Right?

Jack:

– Absolutely. And it was a good move.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about over your journey. Obviously there’s a lot of experiences, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of challenges, but also a lot of achievement. Is there something that comes to mind, a particular milestone that you overcame, or maybe a mentor, somebody that’s really helped shape you to help bring you to where you are today? What comes to mind?

Jack:

– Gee, that’s an interesting question. I guess it really—two people had the most influence, I think, in the early days. One would be my major professor in graduate school who was really a pioneer in the computer field. I got to do some things as an undergraduate that most undergraduates around the country could not do. There were no computer science programs. He had the ability to really inspire others, and I was one of those he inspired, I’m sure. The second was probably a gentleman who was the head of the Appalachian Two District Health Department. When I was in my early days at Clemson, he came to me and said, look, I have an idea where we really ought to link together all of these state agencies with a common system with a database using online terminal access, and there weren’t terminals back in those days. We had to develop a lot of software to make all of that come together and have all the state agencies working together. That was a research project, but he gave me the inspiration to do things that had not been done in fields I had not ever worked in and learn a lot in the process.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. It sounds like, and I’m beginning to see now. It’s helpful to see the evolution and where now, what you’re doing over at FastFetch. Let’s jump into that a little bit now. What are some of the big challenges that you’re seeing in the industry?

Jack:

– Okay, that’s a good question. Well ecommerce is the big one, of course. As you pointed out early on, COVID accelerated that whole move toward ecommerce. People couldn’t get out of their houses. They had to order stuff. And they finally figured out, this is a pretty good idea. So all of a sudden it’s booming like it never has. And companies that haven’t gotten into it, well, a lot of them have fallen to the wayside as you know like Sears and a few others of that nature. Amazon, of course, having a leader who actually said we’re going to make this work and we’re going to solve problems that people want solved, well those kinds of things really helped a lot.

We saw this coming early on. We’re taking a different approach. There are a lot of people that are doing advanced robotics, that are doing automated storage and retrieval systems that are very expensive. And those are fine if you have big companies can afford it. But over half of the distribution centers in this company are not big companies. And so what we’ve said is we’re going to make people more efficient. We’re going to get a 3, 4, or 5X increase in productivity out of the people you have. You’ll always have some people. So that’s what our goal is, and we’re going to make it affordable for even the smallest companies that are running vending companies that have a warehouse that might be 600 square feet. We want to make it scalable so that you can go to the largest companies at the same time. Those are the kind of solutions we’re putting together, and of course we’re seeking patents that have been granted several patents in the area which allows us to seek some protection against the larger companies that might want to invade our territory, if you will.

Danny:

– That never happens.

Jack:

– Well, we hope it happens.

Danny:

– What are some of the learnings or some things that have, with the pandemic, for FastFetch as a company and with the industry in general that you’ve learned and you’ve seen?

Jack:

– Well turnaround is the biggest thing. People get an order in; it has to be picked very, very quickly and accurately which means that you can’t—if I have a warehouse for example that’s 2 million square feet, well it takes over an hour just to walk the perimeter of that warehouse. If I have an order that requires a little of this and a little of that, and it’s all over the place, I can’t be walking around just picking stuff up out of the shelves and putting it in a box. That isn’t going to make it if I have 100,000 orders a day. I can’t have 100,000 people in my warehouse doing that, or 50,000. You have to have very clever techniques and do a lot of optimization, do artificial intelligence in order to guide people through the warehouse in a way that they can pick many orders with one trip through the warehouse so that we will do a lot of optimization. If we’re using a cart, for example, that might have 50 orders on it, I’d like to select those 50 orders out of many, many thousands so that I will minimize the walking through the warehouse to pick them. And so those are the kind of solutions we’re doing. There’s a lot of mathematics behind it, actually.

Danny:

– I can only imagine.

Jack:

– And so those are the kind of problems we like to solve. They’re not traditional, go-get-it problems. They’re go, be very clever in how you do it.

Danny:

– Yeah. Where do you see the industry going from here? Hopefully the pandemic—whether we’re over it, or in the middle, who knows? Where do you see things going now that we’ve gone through COVID?

Jack:

– One of the things that I see coming are drones. There’s been a little bit of talk about that over the last few years, but people want not two-day delivery; they want same-day delivery. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to have something like a drone that in big cities in particular to be able to take the items to the customer. And in order to do that, the distribution centers are going to have to be within about a 50-mile radius of the customer because they have to go out there and come back. If you have to have distribution centers, you’re no longer going to have one on the East Coast, in Chicago, and then on the West Coast. You’re going to no longer have those. You’re going to have micro-fulfillment centers. You’re going to have distribution centers, smaller ones, all over the place within, like I say, a 50-mile radius of the customers.

And if you’re doing that, you can’t afford really expensive technology. You’re going to have to have less expensive technology that can be replicated in these smaller distribution centers. So that’s where I see things as going. And you see a little bit of that even with some of the—we’ve had retail stores which have been doing that for years, so I see retail stores—right now there’s something called omni-channel fulfillment. And with omni-channel, it started out saying we’re going to have the retail stores do a little bit of distribution because the clerks aren’t always busy. They’re going to fill some orders and ship them out. I see it happening just the opposite. I think you’re going to see distribution centers doing a little retail and primarily acting as showrooms for the products. What we’re going to be seeing now is a transformation of retail into distribution. That’s what I believe is happening.

Danny:

– I think absolutely, and I think it’s interesting too when you’ve got there’s a whole challenge with how— it’s interesting I think how retail has prior, before COVID, there’s been a big shrinking of it. Ecomm has been on the rise. You look at stories like traditional malls, malls across America that are now just abandoned. Here in Atlanta there are several that have been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And the question has been, what’s going to happen to that space? Something’s going to happen to revitalize. Do you think maybe that’s an answer from a micro-fulfillment standpoint where that’s the deployment piece? You were talking about drones and being able to deliver those to people if you’re within that 50-mile radius. Possible solution right there.

Jack:

– Absolutely, and I think that’s what you’re going to see. You’re going to see those big retail stores and malls, as you say, being transformed into distribution centers. They’re already 50 miles apart in major cities, so it’s not going to be that big of a deal to have a drone fly out of there to the customer in the larger metropolitan areas. It’s going to be a long time before you see it in Montana and Idaho, but that’s not where most of the people are.

Danny:

– That’s super interesting, talking about drones and all that. We’ve had some previous guests have talked about how they’re deploying drones for inventory inside warehousing. They’re outfitting using some computer visioning technology or even outfitting with RFID scanning. I think it’s an interesting application, but certainly as time goes on and the cost of this technology drops, probably the biggest hurdle right now is power from a payload perspective. What can you move? If you’ve got big, heavy things, that’s a little bit of a problem. Weather is also another little bit of a challenge.

Jack:

– It is.

Danny:

– Then the FAA is probably the biggest. But anyway, that’s—

Jack:

– I guess an example of what I’m saying is that many people go to computer stores. Your retail computer store —I won’t name them— but they’ll go to a retail computer store. They’ll see what they want, and they’ll go home and order it online, won’t they?

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly, or do it while they’re there in the store.

Jack:

– Absolutely. And so as I say, retail stores are going to have to start doing distribution, and they’re going to have to be competitive. Clerks are not very good order fulfillment people. They’re clerks in the retail stores. I think you’re better to leave the systems and the personnel, they will have skills, really, in distribution more so than clerks or salespeople.

Danny:

– Yeah, I think that’s cool to think about. Maybe it’s like the Jetsons, but on a smaller scale where you’re going to see packages and things flying around and all that good stuff. Throughout this, you’ve led this organization for a while. What are you doing currently, or a practice maybe that you’ve had since day one to really continue to stay ahead of your peers and to really keep marching forward and keeping yourself, your mission and your vision alive? What are some of those things?

Jack:

– Well we probably put more than 50% of our time and our resources into research and development. We look at problems that are out there. They may have been solved, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been solved in the best way. We look for new ways of solving problems, new problems, and I think that’s fun, personally. If it weren’t fun, I would be spending more time out on the lake or out on the ocean. It’s fun to do that, and the people that work for me are very talented. We have a really good group of people, and they have fun doing it. That’s why they’re working here. And as a result of having fun, we’re able to pay them pretty well, too.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Well it sounds like you’re very passionate about what you do. You know an awful lot about it, and it sounds like you’ve got some great solutions to be able to help companies to be able to solve some of these big challenges that they’re facing. As I’m wrapping up, I want to give you the last word, the last opportunity to say anything you want to share with our audience.

Jack:

– Well I guess I would say work is important, and putting beans on the table is important, but do take time to smell the roses, a little cliche. Do take time with your family. Do take time on your hobbies. Do take time doing some reading. There will be a time when that will be perhaps all you’re going to be doing, so you better practice that as well.

Danny:

– All right, I lied. Last question: you mentioned hobbies. I wasn’t going to ask you this, but you brought it up. What are your hobbies?

Jack:

– Oh, gee, bunch of them. I guess if I were to put one of them up at the top, I’d say traveling. My wife and I have been fortunate to go to China, the Galapagos, Machu Picchu. We went to Antarctica last year. Been to Argentina. Been to Namibia. We took a nice river cruise down the Danube from Prague to Budapest. We took another one from Moscow to St. Petersburg, so I think traveling not only is it fun, but also it wakes you up and makes you aware of what other parts of the world are doing that’s—you may not have been fully aware of.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly. I love it. That’s fantastic. Jack, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great getting to know a little bit more about you, about FastFetch, seeing how you view the world and these challenges that the industry is facing and also hearing about what you think, talking about the future. I love that.

Jack:

– Well I’ve really enjoyed it.

Danny:

– Thank you again. Alright, well that wraps up today’s episode with FastFetch Corporation. We were talking with Jack Peck here. If you want to learn more about them—they’ve got some really great solutions—you can go to fastfetch.biz, B-I-Z. And you can check them out to learn more about them.

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