5.5 Advantages of Cleaning Your Transportation Data
The jury is no longer out; The Age of Data is here. Data beat Ken Jennings and it knew what I would buy online a month before I did. But how can it improve your supply chain today?
Why should you take the first steps in cleaning up that dusty, old spreadsheet deep in the catacombs of your company shared drive? The answer is simple and the benefits abound. That’s because we can no longer think of data as an afterthought or a receipt. It is the single most accurate indicator of the future health of your supply chain. Here are 5.5 key benefits for starting on the road to powerful and meaningful data capture.
Visibility
Between accruals, accessorials, invoices, and claims, it can be hard to keep tabs on where your budget has gone before being rescued by audit at the end of the term. Too often, the same goes for your product itself. Not only can clean data keep you out of the dark in the present, it can shed a light on where your freight is headed in the future. The impact that data brings, not just to the location of your freight, but the status of your payments, allows you to further leverage its impact cross departmentally.
For those who already have clean data and know where their money and inventory stand, you may be able to further visibility with recent advances like geo tracking, IoT (Internet of Things), and chain of custody protocols.
Optimization
For many companies, there are opportunities for major savings by optimizing how orders find their way to customers. Clean data can help determine when loads should and shouldn’t be consolidated, driving simple savings by way of dictating mode.
Data can also help in more subtle ways with intelligent routing by considering
the feasibility of multi-stop loads, pooling, and other overlooked ways to
drive savings. Unless you have a clear log of shipment locations, weights, and
volumes, these optimizations can’t be realized.
Negotiation
Clean data can also generate savings before your product is even ordered through negotiations. Good data gives carriers a clean picture of how your freight moves. If a carrier determines your freight fits nicely into their network, they will likely propose more competitive rates than they would have without the evidence. The opposite holds true for carriers who aren’t a good fit, which can save the cost and pains of poor service down the line. In addition, as your supply chain evolves, you’ll may be able to better predict which service partners provide the most value for your needs.
Communication
Turning your business into a well-oiled machine means synchronization across all divisions, which means supply chain knowledge should no longer be held isolated in your warehouse. Precise and readable data is key in relaying information across systems. With useable data, the sales team can keep customers better informed on where products are and when they’re coming. That makes for happier customers and a happier bottom line.
Internally, if your CFO asks your transportation manager what their annual freight spend is, and how that breaks down into lines, line items, and SKU numbers; that transportation manager can not answer that question accurately. You can’t improve your processes if you don’t have a true representation of what your current process actually is.
Future-proof
The data you capture today – and the way you capture it – is directly connected to your capacity to keep up with the changes many expect to see across the sector. From AI to the Internet of things and blockchain to automation, a host of advances in tech are primed to make their mark in logistics and they all have one thing in common: they need good data to run effectively. You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear and you can’t turn bad data into desirable outcomes.
It’s Free
We know that the first step to checking your data can be the toughest one, which is why we will do it for you. If you think your data could use a once over, we can give it a look and point you in the right direction. If you think your data is spotless, we can give it a look and give you an A+ report card to put on your CFO’s fridge. It’s free either way. Start the scrub at day01.io
