How C.H. Robinson uses GitHub

C.H. Robinson, a third-party logistics provider serving over 124,000 customers worldwide, transformed its software development practices by adopting GitHub as the foundation for collaboration across its global engineering organization.

Company Overview

• Industry: Logistics/Transportation
• Company Size: 15,000+
• Location: Eden Prairie, MN (with offices in Amsterdam, Kansas City, Melbourne, Shanghai, and Warsaw)

Key Results

• 92% of new hires experienced with GitHub
• 162% increase in weekly deployments
• 4,000+ active repositories

The Challenge

With over 900 engineers distributed across the globe and the IT team growing by 20 new engineers per quarter, C.H. Robinson faced significant challenges in scaling development practices. Before GitHub, the organization lacked visibility into code developed by other teams. There was reluctance to share and reuse code because it raised questions about who was responsible for future maintenance.

The Transformation

C.H. Robinson chose GitHub to drive a fundamental shift in how the organization works—moving from locked-down code to open collaboration. The team adopted innersource, applying open source best practices to proprietary software development.

The transition began in 2015 with an eight-person architecture development team running an experiment to reimagine the company's software lifecycle. When the experiment proved successful, the approach spread rapidly across the organization. GitHub quickly became home to nearly all of C.H. Robinson's code.

As adoption grew, the team discovered that most engineers were already familiar with GitHub, making onboarding seamless. When surveyed, 23 of 25 new hires reported having GitHub experience. The platform also became a recruiting advantage—engineers increasingly view source control as a necessity rather than a differentiator.

Building a Unified DevOps Pipeline

With all code and documentation centralized on GitHub, C.H. Robinson built a standardized DevOps pipeline using industry-leading integrations:

• Project management: ZenHub
• Automated UI deployment: Octopus
• Static code analysis: SonarQube
• Testing and production: Cascade

This integrated approach allowed engineers to focus on code rather than context switching. In about five minutes, any engineer can now have a compiling project in the appropriate tech stack that pushes through to production from the start.

Scaling Development Practices

Engineers now build smarter by sharing, templatizing, and reusing code across the organization. New projects leverage templates, libraries, and tech stacks via the GitHub API that are supported organization-wide, reducing hours of work to minutes.

The team uses GitHub APIs to automatically manage permissions, set access controls, and enforce security requirements. They also process and interpret response times to code changes and other metrics as an integrated part of their workflows.

Impact

The integrated DevOps pipeline and innersource workflows have delivered measurable results:

• Reduced time and budget spent across engineering teams
• Decreased costly incidents through manual and automated code reviews
• Accelerated releases with more developers working in alignment
• Moved from quarterly releases to a DevOps framework supporting incremental value delivery
• Increased deployments per week by 162%

GitHub serves as a single source of truth where engineers across the organization can reliably share processes, learn best practices, and find projects to reuse. By connecting the organization's engineers to code, expertise, and each other, GitHub enables C.H. Robinson to do their best work at scale and continue creating exceptional customer experiences.