C.H. Robinson announces executive hire to run new Program Management Office

With an eye on further driving its strategic priorities, Minneapolis, Minn.-based global logistics services provider and freight forwarder C.H. Robinson said last week it has made an executive hire, for its senior leadership team.

The company announced it has hired Jim Reutlinger, a Continuous Improvement and Lean methodology expert, to launch its new Program Management Office. Reutlinger’s official title is Vice President, Enterprise Strategy Program Management.

C.H. Robinson said Reutlinger will report to Dave Bozeman, president and CEO, adding that the Program Management Office will focus on strengthening capabilities needed to further enable the company’s strategic priorities and drive significant growth for the company.

Before being named to this new position, Reutlinger was a consultant for C.H. Robinson, helping to provide counsel on ways to augment operational business efficiencies. And the company noted that Reutlinger has more than 25 years of experience in sales, operations, customer support and mergers and acquisition activities, and is an expert in Continuous Improvement and Lean methodology. Prior to establishing Reutlinger Consulting, LLC, he held several leadership roles at Danaher Corporation, most recently as Vice President, Global Professional Services, where he led high double-digit growth organizations while expanding operating margin through leadership in highly technical landscapes such as product support, technical support and custom services.

“C.H. Robinson is at an important inflection point and we are making moves that will help accelerate our progress as a company,” said Bozeman in a statement. “As the market becomes increasingly complex and our customers continue to face supply chain challenges, we have the ability to go to market and support them like no one else can, offering end-to-end solutions through a global suite of services and unmatched scale. Bringing in additional bench strength for Lean management, Continuous Improvement and operational expertise will help us drive growth and success in our strategic priorities and set us up in pole position. We are excited to have Jim on board as an official member of the Robinson team, where he’ll continue to deliver valuable insights and perspectives to help us improve and grow in 2024 and beyond.”

A C.H. Robinson spokesperson told LM that there were various factors driving the decision to open up the new Program Management Office, noting that global supply chains are increasingly complex, coupled with its customer’s needs being increasingly complex, and customers expecting the company to deliver on those needs with the highest quality and the most efficiency.

“Dave [Bozeman] has said since he started that he intended to bring Lean management principles to C.H. Robinson, and a key part of that philosophy is listening to the people closest to the work about what’s succeeding and what’s not,” said the spokesperson. “He issued a ‘What’s Impeding Your Speed?’ challenge to our employees in August, hoping to get maybe 300 responses and was excited to instead get more than 3,000 ideas for improving our processes and how we can help our customers and carriers. That’s just one of many inputs Dave sought as he assessed our products, people, processes and portfolio in his first six months as CEO, and as he’s done ‘go-sees’ across the business. He’s listened to our customers, our investors and our partners. Jim Reutlinger has also worked alongside Dave and our senior team as a Lean consultant. Bringing Jim’s expertise in house and creating a strategic Project Management Office is a commitment at a key inflection point for our company as we take actions to accelerate our growth and make sure C.H. Robinson is ready to take full advantage of the next market upcycle.”     

When asked what this new office will focus on an address, as well as what its main benefits are for customers, the spokesperson explained that the Program Management Office is designed to accelerate enterprise-wide priorities and will work with leaders across the company to drive execution of key initiatives that will help deliver the kind of service and solutions that carriers and customers need and expect in an ever-evolving landscape.

“We’ve been prioritizing and steadily implementing the ideas for efficiencies that our employees put on the table, as well as greatly accelerating a number of strategic projects that helped us reach our goal of improving productivity by double digits in 2023,” said the spokesperson. With a Lean leader, a Project Management Office and our talented team, we can drive Lean principles and continuous improvement deeper into the organization and continue to emphasize removing repetitive manual work from all our processes. This is good for customers and carriers, because it enables our supply chain experts to spend more time focusing on the more strategic work that helps them and us grow and deliver even better results.

The spokesperson also said that thanks to generative AI, C.H. Robinson will be able to do this kind of innovation faster.

“For example, some customers don’t have the technology to directly connect with our Dynamic Pricing Engine and therefore request price quotes manually,” she said. “Humans on our staff used to have to read those emails. Now we’re using an AI agent to read the email and connect all the unstructured data in the request, so those customers can get an automated truckload quote in under a minute.  We were already doing automated quotes for customers whose technology is integrated with ours. Tackling these email requests is a good example of continuous improvement and removing those last pieces of inefficiency from a process.”   

Like many freight transportation and logistics services providers, C.H. Robinson was impacted by lower demand, excess capacity, and high inventories in 2023. For the third quarter of 2023, it reported a 27.8% revenue decline, to $4.3 billion, and gross profits were down 28.9%, to $626.6 million. The company’s fourth quarter and full-year 2023 results will be released on January 31.

Bozeman said in the company’s third quarter earnings release that C.H. Robinson’s focus on continuously improving the customer and carrier experience and removing waste from its workflows will result in a company that is quicker, more flexible and more agile in solving problems for our customers, providing better customer service and creating operating leverage and profitable growth.