Business Intelligence, or BI in logistics refers to the process of managing huge volumes of data generated during the course of operation to derive meaningful insights from them, which in turn helps an organization make strategic business decisions in a timely manner. is the process or set of processes that allow managing the volume of data generated by the business to be transformed into valuable information that allows greater control of the operation and facilitates strategic decision making.
These processes are facilitated by a variety of BI tools that allow an organization to better control its operations by streamlining and automating information flows in real time.
What is Business Intelligence in logistics for?
The nature of the logistics and supply chain sector is such that it automatically generates a mammoth amount of data on daily basis. Data is generated by the multitude of functions in the industry such as warehousing, transport, logistics, freight, etc. There are other actors involved as well such as clients, customs, ports, administrations, and the workforce to name a few.
Amidst all this swathe of information, there’s always the probability of losing some important information that could hamper decision making, probably because of:
- Complexity involved in data collection
- Data present on different platforms
- Difficulty in reporting
- Updating information by manual means
The difficulty experienced in preparing up-to-date and reliable reports based on the gathered data often hampers quick decision making.
A reliable business intelligence company can take care of these problems, using big data, and tools to analyze that data to help businesses remain fully aware of how the business is evolving.
Benefits of Business Intelligence in logistics
BI offers a lot of tangible benefits for the companies operating in transport and logistics sector, and this is precisely the reason a lot of organizations are investing in logistics software development to manage their business, and make it more efficient and competitive.
Some of the more important benefits offered by BI are enumerated as following:
Business intelligence solutions bring down labor costs
One of the most important benefits of BI applications in logistics industry is its ability to significantly lower the human effort required to produce myriad number of daily, weekly and monthly reports. Lowering labor costs is considered to be one of the most significant advantages of BI. This is done through:
- Automating the entire data collection process
- Automating report generation
- Time and money are saved as there’s no need to train employees in saving data in Excel
- Report designing tools are simple and help in quick report designing.
Business intelligence and analytics eliminate information bottlenecks
Another major benefit offered by BI solutions is that it lessens the need to ask the staff to extract data for report preparation. It reduces information bottlenecks in a variety of ways such as:
- Users can build customized operation-specific dashboards related to their area of operation.
- Provide KPI and other associated information
- Autonomous reports
- Data analysis can be done without specific guidance from IT experts
Collaborative work
Business Intelligence promotes higher level of collaboration, which in turn makes it all the concerned employees to actively participate in making reports. The report analysis is quickly done, and problem detection is made rather easy.
Facilitates better decision making
A modern business has to make tons of decisions every day, varying in complexity, importance and impact. One of the most important benefits offered by a BI system is its ability to aid in quick and correct decision making including:
- Offers up-to-date real-time information allowing management to make quick and more prudent business decisions.
- A comprehensive analysis can be done through the drilling down functionality
- Decisions are made in real quick time as data from a myriad number of sources are corralled in a single dashboard.
BI provides actionable data
Another important benefit offered by business intelligence solutions is their ability to derive meaningful insights from the data in hand. BI tools make data more purposeful by:
- Making data more collaborative facilitating easy sharing of relevant information between different departments.
- Reports and information are shown in real-time thus allowing the management to thoroughly analyze operations at any given time.
- Users can design reports themselves for better understanding
- Trends allow users to quickly spot issues and rectify them before they become problematic.
Conclusion
A host of challenges such as increasing competition, rules, and regulation complexities, rapidly climbing fuel costs, and constantly changing consumer expectations have made it incredibly important for organizations to expand and grow their business operations. This has significantly enhanced the dilemma as to go for either maximizing profits or cost-cutting. Amidst increasing competition and rising costs, organizations working in the transport and logistics industry have been struggling to offer a consistent brand experience while minimizing operational costs. This has compelled leading companies in the transport and logistics industry to take the help of top-notch business Intelligence company to leverage the benefits of BI solutions for maximizing their brand outreach and profit.