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