Visibility and Analytics for Transportation Management
A company’s shipping and transportation logistics operation is a place of action and high pressure. Shipments are never-ending and there is little opportunity to step back and analyze what is happening. Transactional data can be difficult to extract and assemble into meaningful information. As a result, sufficient analysis of performance and costs, which are significant, does not get accomplished often enough, if at all.
Now there is a way to gain visibility and actionable insight into your shipping operations and transportation logistics. Varsity delivers access to organized historical data that, when combined with your analytics software, empowers customers to take control of their order fulfillment/shipping operations.
Unlike many other parts of the enterprise, shipping and transportation operations have frequently not had sufficient access to underlying data. Varsity Logistics’ TransData datamart eliminates this obstacle to accessing organized, well-defined, and highly detailed historical shipping and transportation carrier data to power your analytics and carrier negotiations.
Transdata
Shipping and Transportation Datamart
Ready Access to Your Shipping and Transportation Carrier Data
Preserving and actually getting data from your system is perhaps the primary obstacle to having valuable decision-support information. Often, history is not stored consistently or is not stored at all; data and field definitions are often murky at best. The IT time and programming costs associated with pulling together correct data, to be able to generate just a few simple reports, can be very high (up to person-weeks or person-months and many thousands of dollars!).
- Varsity’s TransData datamart economically overcomes these problems and provides open, easy access to rich, organized and well-defined historical data–all without costly programming.
- TransData maintains daily history for nearly 100 crucial data fields, most representing significant shipping and transportation performance parameters (see PDF Download on right).
- Data is automatically extracted nightly from transaction files on the IBM i (AS/400) Power system and is processed and then stored in the TransData database files, also residing on the reliable, secure IBM i (AS/400) Power System.
- Historical data preserved in TransData can be accessed using the TransData file/field layout (data dictionary) and a range of different tools as preferred within your organization. These include IBM I series Query®, DB2 Web Query®, Microsoft Access®, NGS-IQ®—virtually any tool capable of ODBC/JDBC access).
- TransData enables access to detailed historical data that was not available before. With such access, queries can be written against the data (using your preferred query tool) and the extracted data can be processed into decision-support information using your own preferred analysis/reporting tools (Excel®, Crystal Reports®, Cognos®, NGS-IQ®, etc.).
Benefits
- Empower management end-users with powerful information and, when combined with your analytics tool, frees up the need to routinely schedule and deploy IT programming resources to generate the data.
- Have all possible information in your hands in order to prepare for and gain valuable leverage in carrier negotiations, thus driving better agreements and lower carrier costs.
- Monitor trends to identify important changes and developments in on-going operations that require response and action.
- Slice and dice shipment/transportation carrier information in almost any way imaginable to gain visibility into shipping/transportation operations and costs by various dimensions, including carrier, service type, geography, distribution center, and customer (to name a few).
- Take control of shipping/transportation operations and significantly reduce costs, improve performance, and enhance customer satisfaction.