How ‘Intelligent’ is Your Business?
Graphic courtesy TMW
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Are you investing in “BI?” You undoubtedly recognize the acronym for “Business Intelligence” and, like most transportation professionals, agree it is a crucial strategic tool for any asset-, non-asset-based or blended operation.
But how you and your industry peers define and leverage BI might vary dramatically. For some, it represents little more than visual replications of an established set of KPIs. For many, BI remains largely a backend process through which data is aggregated and retrieved for reporting purposes. For a growing number of transportation enterprises, however, business intelligence represents an exciting new pathway to increased understanding of potentially thousands of variables that help determine an organization’s competitiveness and profitability.
Even the industry’s BI thought leaders would likely agree they are still in the very early stages of a journey that could ultimately revolutionize their businesses. In a sense, therefore, the progress made in this journey by any fleet, 3PL or broker can determine how “intelligent” they really are in an age of ever-rising data volume, variety and velocity.
“Like most transportation companies, we have access to tons of data that is not being analyzed in an interactive manner.”
“Like most transportation companies, we have access to tons of data that is not being analyzed in an interactive manner,” says Kent Parkinson, chief information officer for Royal Trucking, West Point, Mississippi. “But we’re now on a path to move beyond spreadsheets as we apply modern tools that will help provide a much deeper understanding of our business.”
Royal, like thousands of carriers, is still comparatively early in its BI journey, perhaps just two or three steps into what author and consultant James E. Cates calls the “Ladder of Business Intelligence.” Cates’ BI maturity model comprises six levels of organizational resources and fluency in managing information:
Level 1 – Facts: Disorganized, largely irretrievable data points
Level 2 – …Read the rest of this story
