Leveraging the power of data is critical to enabling more effective management of any workflow. While this is true across an entire organization, substantive improvements in transportation management presents some unique but ultimately rewarding challenges.
There is an old poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge known as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The 29th stanza reads:
Water, water every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
This sea-faring poem perfectly encapsulates the situation experienced by many teams tasked with managing transportation. Systems like ERP, TMS, and WMS enable capturing increasing amounts of data and – despite the buzz around analytics employing technologies like AI, machine learning, and blockchain – many companies have no way of effectively consuming all this data and developing actionable insights from any of it.
Whether you’re managing your data in spreadsheets or have a sophisticated control tower, your data journey will always be an ongoing process of discovery and evolution.
Transportation departments are in a difficult position.
Because it’s difficult to break from all-consuming daily management tasks and find the time to think strategically about how you should be managing your network, your transportation team may be having difficulty improving your processes. You may understand what you need, but the demands of a compelling data journey towards actionable insights seem out of reach. In some cases, the know-how to build a strategic plan and execute a data initiative may not yet exist within your team.
Start with a plan for the journey
Before you begin, it’s vital to plan your journey and have the desired end in mind. If you don’t know the destination, it’s impossible to see if you’re on the right path.
1. Define your what and why
You must first clearly define your objectives or the “what.” Are you trying to improve your carrier management program, gain better insight into performance, or manage budgets? Determining what you’re looking for is crucial to your success. At the same time, your ability to answer specific questions will improve over time. So, be open to changing your expectations of what can be accomplished. Why you need these insights is equally essential. Once you define the “why,” you can determine which KPIs are critical and which ones aren’t.
2. Define the who
You need to define who needs to see which metrics, the level of detail necessary, and what they’ll do with the information. You need to identify a team with the skill set to generate the KPIs, interpret them, and act on them. Not everyone will need exceptional data analysis capabilities, but they must be data-literate. If this is lacking, you need to progressively invest in developing your team’s data literacy. It will be one of the best investments you’ve ever made.
3. Define the how
Most importantly, you must define how you will use the data available. Your answers to the what, why, who, and how questions will inform your choice of technology for compiling the data, creating visibility, and developing actionable insights.
The “how’ is what we will expand on in this post.
A deeper understanding of the how
After defining the “how,” you can set off on the journey by finding where the data resides. It’s common for data to be held in raw form as captured by siloed systems. These include TMS, ERP, freight payment, WMS, outside databases, and spreadsheets, et al., at varying levels of detail. Disagreements usually exist about the accuracy of the data, and the relationships between different data sources most probably haven’t been established. It’s up to you to identify and bring all these various data sources together.
1. Cleansing is the key to trustworthy data
The first and most crucial phase of your analytics journey is to establish trust. This phase is not only the most important but, quite possibly, the longest. You must reconcile the cardinality, accuracy, and relationships between different data sources. You can use tools such as Tableau Prep and Alteryx to establish a continual data cleansing process. Creating a data cleansing workflow is essential. You don’t want your team to spend hours or even days every week cleansing data. Once you establish a workflow that captures each data cleansing step, it becomes a matter of a button click each week to thoroughly cleanse a dataset.
2. Reports inform your constituencies
With trusted, clean data, you can start producing reports and distributing them across different teams in this phase. Perhaps you had these reports previously, but now they have more authority and fewer gaps than when they were spreadsheet-based. You can also leverage business intelligence (BI) tools here.
3. Diagnostics provide insight into your operation
The diagnostic phase brings understanding into what’s happened. This is beyond the routine reports in phase two because it helps you stratify the data and see the underlying relationships. You can drill down to deeper levels of data and pinpoint the root causes of your issues. You’ll need sophisticated dashboards that allow several team members to collaborate. BI tools such as Tableau and Power BI are extremely useful in this phase.
4. The predictive phase sheds light on the future
So, you’ve developed significant comfort and familiarity with your data and you’ve accumulated a sizable, comprehensive dataset. Now you can start introducing predictive modeling and machine learning into your analytical repertoire. Based on historical precedence and defined exception nodes, you can predict outcomes with a significant level of confidence.
There are several AI and Machine learning tools that you can leverage here. Transportation management can take full advantage of this phase due to existing repetitive process flows.
5. Proactively mitigate risks with predictive modeling
Once at this phase, you’re able to determine how you can manage exceptions and mitigate risks. Modeling will play an essential role in answering “what-if” questions. The journey you began has led to this stage where you have an elevated confidence level in your analytical insights. You can make significant, investment-grade recommendations and start acting upon them in a matter of weeks instead of months and years.
We live in an era where we swim in a sea of numbers, but we’re often unable to consume and make full use of them. To quote Coleridge, it’s a case of “Water, water every where, nor any drop to drink.” While the journey can seem overwhelming when contemplated in its entirety, it always commences with the first step. Just taking the more straightforward initial steps will start to provide insights into your transportation management process, driving instant ROI, and creating a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. If you’ve already started down this path, it’s essential to continue moving forward with development. Your organization can only accomplish these substantial improvements in transportation if management fully believes in it and is willing to invest the time and resources needed. And, while this journey has its challenges, it’s – without exception – extremely gratifying.
Evolve your transportation management program by harnessing your data. Reach out to us and see how Chainalytics will help you put data to work. Using one-of-a-kind tools and approaches like digital assets and managed analytics services, we consistently deliver actionable insights and measurable outcomes to our clients.
