Scaling Parcel Networks: What Oscar Gladman Learned on Both Sides of the Carrier Table

Oscar Gladman has sat on both sides of the carrier table. He spent 14 years at FedEx in sales and leadership, then founded Shipalytics, a SaaS platform that helped small and midsize shippers make sense of parcel spend. He led parcel strategy at Geodis and Kenco Group, and now he is vice president of parcel distribution at Crane Worldwide Logistics, where he is building the company’s dedicated parcel solutions business from the ground up. In this episode, he talks about what two decades in parcel taught him about people, procurement, data, and where the industry goes next.

People, service, profit

Gladman’s biggest takeaway from FedEx is cultural. Fred Smith’s people-service-profit philosophy, the idea that taking care of people produces outstanding service, which produces revenue, still guides how he leads. “Logistics is a people business,” he says. “People serving other people.” Data matters enormously, and the episode gets deep into metrics, but he recognized early that relationships are the core of the work. The other FedEx lesson is discipline: execution and consistency, habits he carried into every role since.

Buying capacity instead of selling it

Moving from carrier sales to the 3PL side flipped Gladman’s job description. At FedEx he sold capacity. Now he buys it, then optimizes it. The transition, he says, has been more fun. His years managing enterprise sales reps give him an edge in negotiations: the carrier reps calling on him now do the job he used to manage, so he knows exactly how they think. Relationships stay collaborative, but every decision still needs a business justification backed by data. One more difference: at a $100 billion company, turning the ship is slow. At smaller organizations he can move fast and have a bigger impact on customer problems.

The US and Europe play very different games

Gladman oversees parcel for Crane in both the US and Europe, and the contrast is sharp. The US market is vast and dominated by FedEx, UPS, and USPS, with regional players growing but still limited in traction. Europe is far more fragmented: dense geography, shorter zones, strong postal infrastructures, and many more regional options that shippers actually use. Transit reflects the density. Gladman looks at European data and sees ground, ground, ground, but nearly all of it moving in one or two days. The fragmentation cuts both ways. More carrier choice means more opportunity, but integrating with 80 carriers of varying sizes is hard. The big integrators have reliable APIs and technical standards; a small carrier in the south of Italy may or may not answer when you ask for a price, a transit time, and a zone. First-mile injection into those regional networks is the shared struggle on both continents, and Gladman thinks Europe is a little ahead of the US in building solutions for it. Sustainability is the other big difference. In Europe it is front and center: serious measurement of carbon footprint, electrified fleets, and delivery modes the US barely uses. Gladman saw bicycles delivering parcels all over the Netherlands. Parcel lockers, which never took off in the US, are mainstream in Europe. American consumers, he notes, are pickier: the package has to land on the doorstep.

Why surcharges exist

Ask about the pages of US accessorial charges, delivery area surcharges, residential fees, dimensional weight, and Gladman gives the integrators a fair hearing. Regional carriers love to advertise “no surcharges,” and for their business that is honest: if you only move 1-to-10-pound packages between major metros, you do not need many surcharges. But FedEx and UPS pick up 1-to-150-pound packages and deliver to every zip code in the country plus 210 countries. Delivering a 130-pound transmission in an odd-shaped box to a rural address genuinely costs more than dropping a 4-pound box in Midtown Manhattan. “They kind of get a bad rap sometimes,” he says. The surcharges map to real services.

Procurement: performance first, cost second

How does Gladman buy transportation in a market with more capacity and softer demand? Performance is the foundation and cost is the lever. Give him the best rates in the world, he says, but if the carrier cannot deliver the packages, there is a problem. The right balance depends on the customer: high-value fragile goods mean service is the priority, full stop; low-cost goods with low service expectations leave more room to chase price. Either way, decisions have to be data-driven and revisited constantly, because the environment changes fast. The KPIs he watches split into cost and performance. On cost: average base charge, total accessorial charge per package, invoice accuracy and audit recovery. On performance: on-time delivery above all, plus contract commitments across carriers so volume shifts stay strategic, and carbon emissions, where the nationals are getting better at supplying usable data. The biggest KPI of all, he says, is customer success rate: what did he promise his customer, what did they promise their end customer, and did the delivery experience hold up?

Parcel tech moves from visibility to decisions

For roughly a decade, Gladman says, parcel technology was about 80 percent the same: visibility, dashboards, data points grouped and displayed. Software vendors pitched “AI” for years, but when he tested it, it was basic math in the background. The last year and a half changed that. With generative AI in broad use, vendors are finding practical applications, and the direction is clear: from visibility to decision automation. Being shown you are doing something wrong every day does not fix the problem. The next step is the system telling you what is wrong, recommending the decision, and eventually making it for you inside a rules-based framework. He also sees AI making the vendors themselves faster: feature requests that took nine months can now ship in days.

The SMB knowledge gap

Shipalytics, the company Gladman founded, came from something he heard constantly at FedEx from small and midsize shippers: “I can’t make sense of your invoices.” Carriers hand SMBs spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of rows and 38-page PDF proposals full of discounts off list rates, then expect the customer to figure out whether the deal is actually better. These businesses cannot afford the legacy audit firms that serve enterprises. Gladman wrote the idea up during his MBA, shelved it, then built it years later as a self-service platform meant to give SMBs the same analytical tools enterprise shippers had. His one regret about the business model: he priced it like a nonprofit out of empathy for the customers, and learned that great technology plus great service has to charge to survive. The passion stuck. At Crane, he says, earning the trust of smaller customers through transparency is still what drives him.

What the next five years look like

Gladman’s prediction: dramatic change, driven by outsiders. DoorDash and Uber, companies with massive market caps and gig networks, are getting serious about parcel. Other companies are stitching regional networks together into viable national alternatives. The biggest barrier for regional carriers was never service, it was access: they could not reach every business in the US. Gladman expects diversification options to move far down-market over the next five years, past the enterprise-only world they live in today. Meanwhile UPS and FedEx are cutting costs and leaning out, which he reads as strategic preparation for a tougher fight. He has spent years doubting the “death of the duopoly” story, and he still believes no one will match the nationals’ infrastructure. But this time, he says, they will be genuinely challenged.

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This post is based on the Logistics Remix episode “Scaling Parcel Networks” with Oscar Gladman, Vice President of Parcel Distribution at Crane Worldwide Logistics. The views are the guest’s and the host’s own.