Team Behind the Tech: Sergio Torres

In this edition of Team Behind the Tech, we spotlight Sergio Torres, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Descartes’ routing, mobile, and telematics (RMT) solutions. Sergio's journey in logistics began with a passion for using technology to solve complex operational challenges—a passion that continues to drive innovation and growth at Descartes.

Since joining Descartes in 2001, Sergio has been instrumental in integrating and advancing our routing solutions. His leadership has been key to developing technology that addresses our customers' intricate needs and sets the industry standard for route optimization.

Over the last 23 years, Sergio has led a dynamic team that shares his commitment to innovation. Together, they have crafted solutions that empower businesses across diverse industries to navigate the complexities of logistics with ease.

His deep expertise and the collective knowledge of our team ensure that we provide the most advanced technology on the market—designed to meet the unique needs of our customers today and into the future.

Discover how Sergio and our expert team are dedicated to solving your most challenging routing issues with the best technology available.

As the Senior Vice President of Product Management, I oversee the creation of our product and technology vision for our solutions.

My role is to ensure that our products are not only innovative but also meet the practical needs of our customers. I consider information from many sources, including market trends, customers, and prospects’ requirements to help create a roadmap for this vision.

When I started in routing back in the '90s, it was mostly an offline process. Companies would optimize their routes separately and then relay the information to drivers using paper manifests. Today, delivery route optimization is a critical component of operations, essential for delivering products to customers.

The digital revolution of the 2000s brought about real-time information, fundamentally changing our approach. Now, our systems are not only integral to delivery route planning but also to execution, ensuring seamless customer service.

One of the most significant evolutions has been our leadership in cloud-based routing technology. Descartes has been a pioneer and leader in this area. Our solution scales horizontally to handle large order volumes while maintaining real-time performance. This scalability extends to the optimization process, which uses elastic scaling concepts to efficiently manage bursts of orders, ensuring that planning remains smooth even under high demand. This provides businesses with the efficiency, adaptability, and real-time capabilities needed to excel and meet customer demand in today’s fast-paced logistics environment.

Another major evolution has been the integration of mobile solutions with routing systems, creating a deeply interconnected network. Descartes was one of the first vendors to offer a true end-to-end solution, meeting the growing demand for single-source technology providers. This connection is vital as customers have become more demanding, expecting timely deliveries, often with same-day service.

Our technology has always been ready to meet these expectations, enabling features like same-day optimization and reservations. This means customers can schedule and self-book deliveries on the same day, thanks to our advanced optimization algorithms.

Descartes’ technology not only offers these capabilities but also scales with the size of the company. This scalability ensures the business continuity our customers require, making our solutions a core component of their operations path.

AI and ML have become critical to enhancing the precision and performance of our routing, mobile, and telematics solutions. Initially, we used ML to learn from customers' historical data, improving transit times, service times, and geocoding accuracy. Today, our route planning solution leverages AI to create optimal configurations that meet both global and local planning needs while ML fine-tunes these configurations to account for factors like driver efficiency, vehicle type, and regional differences.

We can simplify this configuration process for customers by analyzing data and returning tailored configurations that align with specific business goals, eliminating guesswork. Fleet professionals can evaluate multiple scenarios and apply the best one to enhance operational efficiency.

Looking ahead, AI and ML will continue to empower fleets with data-driven insights for continuous improvement, helping them meet customer demands with greater accuracy and reduce the need for manual configuration.

Our product roadmap is primarily driven by customer feedback. We gather insights from our customers, prospects, and market trends to understand the evolving requirements. This feedback helps us identify key areas for improvement and innovation. We also consider security and compliance trends, ensuring that our products are up to date with the latest standards.

When we develop our roadmap, we don't limit ourselves to what we can achieve organically with our resources. We also explore potential integrations with partners and consider acquisitions to enhance our offerings. This comprehensive approach allows us to prioritize initiatives that will benefit our customers the most.

We focus on a range of KPIs to demonstrate the value of our delivery management software to our customers. Our applications provide robust reporting capabilities covering metrics such as route efficiency, miles per stop, time per stop, number of stops per route, vehicle utilization, total elapsed time, transit times, time windows achieved, and route compliance by drivers. Additionally, driver engagement is a crucial KPI for ensuring driver satisfaction and efficiency.

From Descartes’ perspective, we prioritize reducing critical incidents and outages, shortening development cycle times for support tickets, and reducing delivery lead times for customer enhancement requests. We also gauge customer satisfaction through Net Promoter Scores and customer satisfaction surveys. This comprehensive approach helps support our efforts to meet customer expectations.

We ensure stability and reliability by prioritizing security and compliance in every release cycle. A portion of our capacity is dedicated to technology updates, performance improvements, and maintaining security compliance, which we manage through our technology backlog.

This approach keeps our solutions up to date with the latest operating systems and third-party components, ensuring that innovation doesn't come at the expense of stability and reliability.

We collaborate using a product management platform to capture ideas, link dependencies with other product features, and track design proposals and timelines through to completion. We also use other channels to engage product managers in evaluating ideas and innovations, addressing questions like: “Can we reuse what you've already developed?” “Does this project offer value to your products?” “Can we implement it as a common service?”

One of the most memorable experiences was working with a retailer to help reduce the resources they needed (planners) and also increase revenue on their deliveries by offering premium delivery windows with dynamic delivery appointment scheduling. Although it pushed us to the limit, not only in terms of functionality but also performance, I was proud of being part of providing that solution to the customer.

Connect with Sergio: Interested in reaching out to Sergio about your logistical challenges or just want to get to know him better? Connect with him on LinkedIn.