Business Intelligence in logistics industry

Day by day logistics companies collect a wealth of valuable information to their database which can be used to improve their business. Business Intelligence in logistics industry should be a priority in every company in the field, however, many of them don’t know how to use data in their favor and end up not using them at all.

That is one of the biggest mistakes a logistics and freight forwarding company can make. Especially now with COVID-19, it’s even clearer that the companies in the logistics and freight industry need to invest in automation and digitization, which comes from Business Intelligence usage. 

• Business Intelligence: is the collection of databases that drives a company to make tactical business decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports.

What is the importance of Business Intelligence in logistics?

Like any other business, developing a good relationship with your customers and partners is extremely important, the happier your clients and partners are the more they will come back to make more business with you. 

There are many ways to establish a good partnership with your forwarder partners, unfortunately, there are also a lot of ways to lose a forwarder partner. But what if you knew what you could do to increase your client’s and partner’s retention? I believe you would say you would do it, am I right? Investing in a BI for freight forwarder will help you with that.

Knowing the volume of cargo you are exchanging with your partners and knowing the amount of profit you are generating is a great way to start improving your partnerships. That is when Business Intelligence will assist you, in leading you to make the right decisions and to understanding where you should take chances and where you shouldn’t. 

Another important touchpoint a Business Intelligence tool can help you figure out is if you are leading a commodity in a specific country, or city. If you understand that you are, you can start taking even more customers on that field, and to do so you can show them the great work you’ve been doing so far. 

So, the big importance of Business Intelligence in logistics is to know the best ways to improve your business – through incontestable data – how to do it, when to do it, and with what partner.

To learn more about making data-driven decisions watch the video below

How can Business Intelligence help logistics companies?

Using Business Intelligence in logistics and freight forwarding companies helps in getting insights into issues or new opportunities you might have in the business, and the ways to improve them. 

For example, the problems you might encounter with your partnerships, you might find out that one of your customers is giving you much more cargo than you are giving him, or the other way around. Along with transport routes, documentation problems, on-time deliveries, etc.

Contrariwise, you can find out that you are missing a big business opportunity with some of your forwarder partners, or a potential new commodities field. 

To sum up, Business Intelligence can help logistics and forwarder companies to make better decisions by presenting both current and historical data in their business context in order to help the companies to run more efficiently. 

A few ways that Business Intelligence can help logistics and forwarder companies make smarter, data-driven decisions:

• Discover issues or opportunities in your partnerships;
• Visualize ways to increase profit;
• Optimize business operations with partners;
• Predict business success.

If you are looking for a Business Intelligence tool that will guide you through the profitability you are making with your forwarder partners, Parnity has a great one that allows you to visualize the amount of profit you are making with a forwarder and the business you are exchanging per month with centralized information. Click here to know more.

How Business Intelligence can benefit logistics and freight forwarding companies?

As mentioned before, the biggest advantage of using Business Intelligence inside your forwarding company is the ability to improve your freight business through data. However, there are more benefits to its use, check it out:

• Automated reports leading to faster decision making

Implementing Business Intelligence tools to your logistics and freight forwarding company helps reduce employee effort and time spent on multiple reports generation, along with the errors that can be made when managing spreadsheets. 

• More accurate information

Usually, logistics and forwarder companies have a person to take care of generating reports, and sometimes it can lead to mistakes and delays. With a Business Intelligence tool, you can avoid potential errors due to miss leading calculations, and information. 

Using a BI tool you can define Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and provide related information to get the results. Therefore, Business Intelligence solutions improve efficiency by reducing information blockages. Along with that, it allows you to make faster decisions to improve your freight business. 

• Effective decision making

Business Intelligence tools provide insightful databases through a data model, thus avoiding conflicts and unmatched reporting data. BI solutions have a big influence in leading your forwarding company into making data-informed decisions in real-time, due to its centralized information. In addition, it offers a detailed investigation of the available information. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right fit Business Intelligence tool for your logistics and freight forwarder company will allow you to make data-driven decisions in real-time, which leads to optimization of various processes inside your organization, and the improvement of your partnerships. Remember, if you are looking for a BI solution that enables you to check profitability between forwarder partners check Parnity’s solution, called Partnership Analytics.