By Josh Dunham
TRANSFORMING DATA INTO DECISIONS You’ve got the data, but do you know what to do with it? Here's what to take into account.
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n this era of powerful data science, it’s easy to forget that just a few years ago, parcel shipping data remained locked in a proverbial black box, with shippers and consultants poring over spreadsheets and carriers’ invoices in an effort to understand shipping costs after the fact. With carriers’ data in different formats and costs subject to a constantly changing web of surcharges, rules, and fees, parcel shipping remained the least understood line item in many budgets — one virtually untouched by popular business intelligence solutions. Powerful parcel shipping platforms changed that. But shippers in many companies have yet to deploy it and fail to use their shipping data to answer fundamental questions, such as: What and where am I shipping today? Where am I going in my shipping strategy? Where can I generate savings, and how can I gain efficiencies? Can I predict what is likely to occur in the business and prescribe effective action?
The ability to act on real, actionable shipping data makes it possible to answer such questions and more while enabling shippers to become the driver of a powerful paradigm shift, one that enables them to take proactive, predictive, and even prescriptive action not just as it relates to shipping, but across the enterprise. Many businesses are at this point today — one that enables them to do far more than optimize parcel shipping spend. Importantly, such businesses are able to act on the valuable insights within their shipping data to improve the performance of teams across the organization, including those responsible for operational, financial, customer service, and sales and marketing efforts and strategies. The shippers behind these efforts share practices that enable them not only to gather the right data, but to turn it into decisions that move the business forward. Turning Shipping Data into Decisions Starts with Five Steps Shippers that effectively use their data all have several things in common. As a
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group, they take deliberate steps that enable them to transform data into decisions. More specifically, they abide by five considerations all shippers can learn from. They: 1. Identify the right data and automate its collection: You may have tons of data, but do you have the right data to deliver real shipping intelligence to your organization? Make sure you are gathering the right information and automate its collection to ensure that it enables you to proactively act on the insights within it. What data you collect and how often you gather it significantly impacts how actionable it is and how you can use it to make data-informed decisions. 2. Make sure data is ready: You have identified the right data sources, but is the data ready for use? Make sure your data from numerous sources, often multiple carriers, is clean, normalized, and formatted for maximum utility. Advanced shipping platforms do this, but shippers should still take steps to ensure that they are using quality data in their efforts. This means that data must also be maintained.