Home City Ice, CIO: Technology is a Huge Driver in our Strategy

Home City Ice, CIO: Technology is a Huge Driver in our Strategy

Chris Hickock, CIO, Home City Ice, speaks to David Hammond, Senior Account Executive, Parallel Technologies, about the unique challenges of delivering ice and how the company leverages technology to make things more efficient.

Hickock says that most of the company’s upper management today comes from a delivery truck background. He, too, started by operating a delivery truck, gradually learning to manage plants, train staff, handle clients, and moving up all the way. He was exposed to the technology side once the company needed to implement a CRM along with a few other things. And as the tech implementation expanded, so did his role in the company’s IT department.

“I didn't come up through the IT ranks. That's pretty common within the organization. We are experimenting with bringing in people from the outside,” he says.

The company put the IT leadership role on the C level about a year ago, making Hickock the CIO. “It demonstrates the importance they see in technology as a driver and as a differentiator. It makes a clear statement that technology is a huge driver in our strategy,” Hickock adds.

Speaking on the challenges of the business, he points toward the seasonality aspect. “We'll do 70% of our sales in a four-or-five-month window, being able to be responsible and scale up when busy season first begins to hit in May or June, and then scale back operations to where they need to be toward the end of the season. You can imagine the demands of managing a seasonal workforce, making sure that everything —from a technology aspect for the operations, and from a business perspective — is ready for those peak four or five months.”

He explains that it is difficult to transport ice on a truck because it’s a low-price item by weight.

“A lot of groceries at your local grocery store come in on a semi. Ice by weight is a very low-price item and so, these groceries say, ‘I'm not putting that on my truck, you can deliver it to my store.’ So, we're going to the last mile for each of these stores. With managing that logistical beast, it's very easy to overspend, overdo, overservice, and that doesn't help inventory rotation,” he adds.

He further shares that the company rarely outsources its logistics to maintain a strong grip on customer service. “If we were just delivering on a mass-pallet-drop-quantity basis, you can do that fairly efficiently with a third-party logistic. But when it comes to servicing our customers and getting ice into stores, we find that it's very difficult to train that same level of customer service because, at the end of the day, all we do is take a bag from the truck and put it in a box inside of the store.

According to Hickock, one of the company themes is that the employees are floor wipers too, from top management all the way down. 

“We're willing to go in and wipe the floor. So, we find that for a short period of time, it's difficult to onboard someone, a third party, to get that whole piece of it. I want to make sure if you're in Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Orlando, Florida, you're getting the same experience from us. We find the best way to do it is, let's do it ourselves,” Hickock concludes.

Related Stories

No stories found.
CDO Magazine
www.cdomagazine.tech