Before listing the top features and achievements of 2020, I'd like to extend a huge THANK YOU to the entire XBE community for partnering with us to achieve so many great things during the past year. Without you, none of this would matter.
By almost any measure, 2020 was our best year yet. We supported 138% more activity vs 2019 - over 661K trucking hours! Since our first full year of operation in 2017, we've enjoyed compounding annual growth of 157%. All the while, our customers are managing many more of their business processes on XBE than before, leading to significantly higher value and exciting new opportunities. We're ready to double again next year (notwithstanding challenges getting out to meet with new customers due to COVID).
Speaking of, the pandemic taught us (forced us!) to stay connected in new ways with customers every day, even when apart. Since the XBE team is distributed around the world, we're used to collaborating remotely, and so we leveraged some of the same tools that we depend on internally. Most importantly, we added Slack channels for each customer. We experimented with this in 2019, but made it a standard part of our onboarding process in 2020. It's been a great success and we're looking forward to adding additional integrations between the XBE app and Slack in 2021 to make auditing and exception management more automated and professional. In addition, we did our best to replace our COVID-cancelled Horizon conference at the last minute with remote content. It wasn't the same, but it wasn't bad, and gave us the idea for these newsletters (which seem pretty popular). This is the 6th newsletter that we've sent, and we'll keep it up. While we didn't see customers in person that much this year, we've never felt more connected.
On the product side, it was a remarkable year of big new features and enhancements. We published our 100th release note of the year today (we couldn't leave it at 99!). In addition to these release-note-worthy new features and enhancements, we deployed bug fixes, performance enhancements, and little polishing touches every day.
It was hard to pick favorites, but here are our top 10 new features of the year:
- Speed! Speed! Speed!
- Job production plan monitoring with enhanced driver movement analytics and real-time actual trucking surplus metrics
- Medium-term schedule review and management
- Crew requirements and scheduling
- Job production plan activity feed, comments, and alarms
- Trucker report cards
- Incident management and reporting expansion
- Aggregate hauling enhancements including flexible shifts, new service type unit of measures, and automated approvals
- Lineup expansion including rate previews and comparisons, shift builder, dispatch statuses, fulfillment error notifications, and a new driver move workflow
- E-Ticketing including inspection and rejection
The pace of new releases will continue to be brisk in 2021. We have a long list of high-value projects to complete, and we are making good use of the slower winter months (as you may have seen through recent release note activity). Our technical debt is low, and that allows us to continue to innovate rapidly while maintaining quality.
Finally, while I have your attention, let me thank the entire XBE team for their great work this year. Milind, Benjamin, Colenso, Pankaj, Chandra, Shirish, Juliana, Grant, Kayla, Katie, Matt, Cinatra, Stephanie, and Theresa. They're the best!
Regards,
Sean Devine
Founder & CEO