How to make data-informed decisions in your forwarder

Technology is changing the way freight forwarders operate. The digital tools make forwarder’s life faster, easier, and more accurate. And the most important factor to make your forwarder company successful is through data analysis. Analyzing data is fundamental to help you make data-informed decisions in your forwarder. 

Because having global coverage is crucial to freight forwarders, knowing the performance of each partnership your forwarder has should be a top priority. And that must be based on real data, not on what you think is working and what isn’t.

How to know if a partnership is good or not

If you are analyzing your partnerships through complaints, compliments, or your opinions you must stop now and change the way you are managing your freight forwarder business. 

Evaluating a forwarder partnership is more than just knowing if the shipments got on time, it’s about knowing the profit generated with a partner, the volume of cargo you are exchanging with your partners, the amount of business exchanged per month, and which criteria (modal/city/expertise) you have more business exchanged.

Once you have access to all this data information you will be able to know if your forwarder partnerships are indeed good or not. And that data will give you the power of improving your relationship with your partners and start making more profitable partnerships. 

Parnity has an analysis tool that will help you to understand all these important databases.

After all, what does it mean to be data-informed?

It means that you should use data to improve your forwarder business along with your other expertise and experience. With a data-informed strategy, data is just one part of your decision-making process. 

Being data-informed means that you are going to use data in your freight forwarder to help you understand the performance of your forwarder partnerships and inform new possibilities of tactical strategy to improve your partnerships.

When you are data-informed you are able to contextualize strategies to understand the success or failure of your forwarder partnerships. 

Once you are data-informed you can test the quality of your partnerships and understand each and every single component that makes a forwarder partnership successful or not individually, and their evolution.

How to make data-informed decisions

To start making data-informed decisions in your forwarder you must begin by:

1. Gathering all the data in only one place;
2. Defining your forwarder’s KPI’s (Key Performance Indicator) measures the performance and success of your freight forwarder business;
3. Analyze it regularly, establish a timeframe;
4. Add context to your data analysis; 
5. Create actions based on the analysis; 
6. Measure the impact in the next period.

Once you start implementing these 6 steps in your freight forwarding business you will be able to visualize the results of your team’s effort and understand what works and what doesn’t. And that will give you the power to improve your business operations and be more successful.

Your KPI’s must be based on the SMART strategy, and that means:

Ok, but where and how can your freight forwarder, measure and analyze all the data your forwarder company provides to you?

Data analysis tool for you to improve your business

The best way to keep track of all the information of your forwarder company is through platforms and systems. Parnity has a Business Intelligence tool, called Partnership Analytics that can help you with that, to know more about it click here.

Parnity’s Partnership Analytics – a Business Intelligence tool created to help freight forwarders to visualize all the business data between their forwarder partners. This feature allows forwarders to understand if they are making win-win partnerships.

With Partnership Analytics you are able to view:

• The volume of cargo sent to your partner and the volume received
• The profit generated with that partner
• The amount of business you have exchanged by month
• Which are the criteria (modal/city/expertise) that you have more business exchanged

Our Product Manager, Thais Faria talked more about being data-informed on the Forwarders Online Conference, and how Parnity’s analysis tool can help you with that, to see everything watch the video below.