Real Transportation Intelligence:
6 Key Questions Your BI Solution Should Answer

A better understanding of your daily transportation operations begins with implementing a business intelligence (BI) solution that can help you glean better insights and drive strategic, proactive decision making. Your TMS is filled with an abundance of data that you can use to answer even the most complex logistics questions. The key is unlocking that reservoir of data, analyzing it, organizing it, and delivering the transportation intelligence you need to the right people, internally and externally.

The best BI solutions can harness the torrent of data flowing through your TMS and transform that data into usable knowledge and insights that can shine a spotlight on areas for improvement, monitor key performance indicators, and answer your most critical transportation questions. You no longer have to extract data, pull it into a spreadsheet, and sort through it manually.

We recently reached out to some of our MercuryGate customers and asked them which questions they want answered most. Many of them told us they know they have the data required to answer these critical questions, but find themselves challenged with retrieving the data and actually doing something meaningful with it.

Here are some of the questions that we received:

1. What is the average transportation cost for shipping item Y via LTL for Customer X, year-to-date?
2. When I consolidate shipping orders onto a single truck, what is the average cost for moves originating from Mexico? In USD cost, not Pesos.
3. What does my total 2017 TL freight spend look like, by month, for Customer X, vs. the same period one year ago?
4. How many times have I had a tender reject from Carrier X in 2017, and for what reason?
5. How many containers did I ship to Europe destinations last month?
6. What is my average per-route margin over the last six months when I optimized through pool point P and used Carrier X?

Do any of these questions resonate with you?  And, do you have the solution available to answer them, and answer them in a timely manner? Whether you have an existing BI solution or are evaluating solutions, challenge your software provider to answer these questions and deliver the answers in a way that lets you take immediate action.

The truth is that business intelligence for transportation management is no longer a “nice to have” if you want to keep up with the demands of modern commerce and take control of your logistics operations. Now is the time to adopt a solution that allows you to generate more value from the data you already have, accelerate insights, and reduce the costs of data collection and analysis.

MercuryMaestro is the latest in business intelligence software built specifically for transportation services and fleet operations, and it is embedded in the MercuryGate TMS. With this embedded BI solution, your team can view insights in context, and they don’t have to export the data to a separate program for further analysis, which disrupts workflow at best, or can halt the process altogether.

Getting answers to your most complex questions faster with the ability to dive deeper to explore relationships within your data. That’s really what you need, right? With MercuryMaestro, you will get a level of data insight that is unprecedented for the transportation and logistics industry.

Ready to learn more?

Watch this on-demand webcast to see an in-depth demo of MercuryMaestro and see first-hand how you can use advanced business intelligence to empower your organization to turn raw data into business-critical insights.