Megan Huber spent ten-plus years in supply chain roles at CPG brands including Olipop and Simple Mills, most of it in procurement via strategic sourcing and materials planning.
She advised Waystation from its earliest days before joining the team full time.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
I recently made the jump from working in supply chain for CPG brands to Waystation AI. Waystation helps CPG companies — food, beverage, supplement, and pet food brands — turn supplier quotes, documents, and emails buried in their inboxes into one organized procurement system, without changing how they already work. Here’s why.
I’ve seen the problem firsthand
I’ve spent the past ten-plus years in various supply chain roles, a majority of the time in procurement in some fashion via strategic sourcing and materials planning. Throughout that time I noticed one major trend — no matter where I was, email and spreadsheets were (and remain) king. I myself have spent an embarrassing amount of time collecting and organizing data from disparate systems, trying to make it into something even slightly automated and scalable to allow me to be more effective at my job.
Extend that out from one individual to the full procurement organization at a given company. I’ve seen my own and adjacent teams lose hours to their own manually tracked tasks and constant back-and-forth, dealing with the process gaps no one has the time to fix. And while they’re dealing with all this tedium, the business has to run, too — and that takes priority one hundred percent of the time. I always joke that supply chain is 20% strategic work and 80% fire drills, but the unfortunate reality is it’s not a joke — it’s just a day in the life.
Enter Waystation. I was connected with Ryan Caldbeck, Waystation’s CEO and founder, a couple of years ago when the company was just taking shape. I acted in the capacity of an advisor before I joined full time, and it was exciting to help shape the product — but even more so to witness those first customers’ reactions to what was being built. Waystation has truly picked up on the procurement pain points and turned them into a product that will save (and already is saving) teams real time, effort, and money.
This team builds deliberately, not defensively
What stands out to me isn’t the product roadmap, it’s how it gets built. I had a firsthand view into this in my capacity as an advisor, but since joining I’m even more struck by this fact. Everyone on the team spends real time understanding what procurement and supply chain professionals actually want — not what they think they want, and not what’s easy to build. This distinction matters, because it means the product is something procurement professionals will actually find value in. And the intuitiveness and ease of use means they’ll continue using it. The product is actually solving their problems.
That said…
The roadmap is genuinely exciting
It’s built around eliminating the friction procurement teams have learned to live with. It’s the kind of roadmap that comes from a team that (as mentioned above) invests the time speaking with procurement professionals and thoughtfully considering their needs. The product evolution has been incredible to witness. Seeing customers try out new features that will immediately have an impact on their day-to-day — and their realization of this — makes me even more excited for what is to come.
Everyone here has a hand in shaping the direction
This isn’t a company where product decisions happen in a silo. The whole team is involved in shaping where we go next, and individuals are given real room to contribute ideas and see them through. Regular conversations with current customers, prospects, and inputs from all Waystation teams are carefully considered when deciding where we build next.
I’ll close with an anecdote I shared with the Waystation team right before I joined. I was very proud of myself for an “automated” report I had just wrapped up building that I thought was going to solve a problem for me in the role I was in at the time. I had a moment in that conversation where, as a supply chain professional so used to the fact that everything is done manually, I didn’t even realize the report I had created was nowhere near actually being automated — just a little less friction required to update. What Waystation wants to do is deliver that information with the refresh of a page, the click of a button. It’s rare to find a problem this real and a team that is committed to solving it the right way. I’m glad I get to be a part of it.
