Business Intelligence for Logistics Operators: One Dashboard to Rule Them All

Logistics Operators must move beyond Excel and revolutionize data communication with their clients, securing their future and claiming their rightful place in the highly globalized and competitive international economic environment. Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, and Big Data form the dream team for controlling processes and machinery in the supply chain, enabling data sharing among participants, and creating an environment of collaboration and trust through the quality and timeliness of the information they provide. They offer the following competitive advantages:

• They provide 360º visibility across the supply chain, thus enabling quick analysis in the face of problems, unforeseen events, or collaboration errors.
• They integrate the thousands of Excel files that overwhelm supply chain companies (originating from ERP, CRM, WMS, TMS, etc. systems), accurately identifying trends, understanding each activity, and supporting documented decision-making.
• Clear and intuitive visualization of information, undoubtedly the best and most persuasive way to communicate quantitative information.
• Scenario simulations, prior to logistics production planning.
• Opening of databases, allowing the logistics operator’s client to request improvements in any service or quality indicator.
• Information transparency, with daily synchronization of KPIs between both parties.
• Significant differentiation from competitors and a favorable tool for renewing client contracts.

Therefore, tools and solutions must be configured bidirectionally, for the use and benefit of the logistics operator, yes, but also to offer information and analytical freedom to their clients. Ultimately, one system to rule them all. The principle is very simple and applies in both directions.

Client to Logistics Operator

• Logistics Operators have a multitude of clients with goods to handle in their warehouses.
• All of them send information in very different ways: through interfaces between IT systems, demand forecasts, additional product information, etc., and in various formats (Excel, text, emails). The more clients, the more diversity, which makes the information difficult to process.
• Latest-generation analytical tools unify and integrate all files and generate unified dashboards, so that Logistics Operators can manage them all in a single way.

The benefits are:

• Time savings.
• Information quality.
• Information security.
• Real-time control and visualization of what is happening with all of them, enabling the famous Business Discovery (driver of Kaizen or Lean processes).

Logistics Operator to Client

• The Logistics Operator already uses information tools regarding the current status of each client’s goods.
• What it offers us are analytical solutions for analyzing the goods that are within the Logistics Operators themselves.
• Right now, transparency is a very important value, because with a single system it achieves:

1. Providing valuable information.
2. Also empowering their clients to implement any improvement actions they conceive.

• This solution would be hosted in the cloud, and Logistics Operators themselves could bear its cost (€60-80/month per license) to improve their position in subsequent negotiations.
• By all having the same dashboard, typical discussions about what constitutes a “perfect order,” or a 98% service level, or what is considered a fault, would be avoided.
• All these concepts are established from the outset and both (client and Logistics Operator) adopt them to work with the solution regularly.
• By all working with the same dashboards, we create much more agile and leaner chains, but with real-time information capabilities.

LISDATA explains the tools for managing the data tide in Logistics Data Mining

• Information can be found in structured databases or unstructured texts.
• Through our Data Mining tools, our consultants achieve coherence in the information.
• Statistical methods and the analysis of different algorithms reveal behavioral patterns behind each data series.
• Cleanliness, coherence, and the relationship between different databases are fundamental for subsequent analysis using Business Intelligence.

Business Intelligence is a concept created to refer to traditional dashboards. At LISDATA, we view it from 2 different perspectives:

Static Dashboards

• These are used by company management and department heads to get a snapshot of their company’s or business area’s performance. They are predefined based on key performance indicators for the company, such as profitability, quality, inventory value, etc.
• They are given a format and structure so that they can be perceived uniformly throughout the company.
• They are linked to the databases of your ERP-WMS-CRM, etc.

Dynamic Dashboards

• These are mostly used by operational teams and consultancies for detailed analysis of specific circumstances.
• They follow a top-down development, starting from general schemes and arriving at concrete answers.

Business Analysis Ultimately, it’s not just about understanding the past or measuring the present; it’s also about acting to improve the future. In this sense, LISDATA evolves along the data analysis maturity path, from descriptive and discovery analysis to predictive and prescriptive analysis.

Predictive Analysis

• It indicates what will happen if the current course is maintained and how it will affect the business.
• The expert consultant performs scenario simulations. For example: What happens if I shift half of Monday’s load to Tuesday? What consequences would this change have on the number of operators, order preparation, transport routes, returns, etc.? What happens if I raise the price by 15%, sales drop by 10%, and costs increase by 35%?

Prescriptive Analysis

• Guides decisions to achieve optimal performance.

Big Data The significant increase in data produced by the digital explosion has presented companies with a vast amount of data (Big Data) that they cannot manage or analyze by “conventional” means. Indeed, the Internet Industry also feeds on machine information, analyzes it (often in real-time), and uses it for decision-making or operational adjustments. If this is your case, prepare for scalability and good performance, in the cloud, with Big Data technology and tools (Hadoop, Datameer, etc.), applying the famous principles of “divide and conquer” or “unity is strength.” Ultimately, at LISDATA, we believe that if 2012 could have been the end of the world and 2013 saw the end of privacy, without a doubt, data will dominate 2014. And also that the future will belong to companies capable of transforming data into products, solutions, or new business models. LISDATA, we think differently.