On-demand business insights
A global logistics and transportation management company was hoping to better leverage their data assets and a Snowflake cloud data warehouse to improve operational efficiency. To solve their problems, Ollion deployed a real-time analytics solution that integrated data from key systems across their organization. This platform helped the company improve decision-making and several key performance indicators.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
A global logistics and transportation management company knew they weren’t optimally utilizing their data to achieve strategic goals.
THE SOLUTION
Ollion analyzed the company’s operational data to identify bottlenecks and operational issues.
THE OUTCOME
Using the latest company data, the client now enjoys on-demand business insights for logistics and transportation management, which has led to better decision-making and strategic planning.
The challenge
Despite a strong belief in the power of data, the client struggled to maximize the value of their data assets. Systems and information were poorly integrated, leading to blind spots in the evaluation of customer, carrier and representative performance.
After a thorough audit of the company’s technology, the Ollion team identified critical data in five systems. The silos created by the disparate source systems were slowing effective data analysis and contributing to several chronic problems at the firm, including poor decision-making capabilities and a lack of clear strategic focus.
The solution
The company’s leadership wanted to better measure decision-making factors – such as customer data, time of day and time of year data, and more – to develop business insights for logistics and transportation management. This would allow them to increase deal profitability and competitiveness.
To help them achieve these goals, Ollion delivered an end-to-end, real-time extract, transform and load (ETL) solution customized to the company’s day-to-day operations. One notable feature was a data vault modeled integration layer to unify the vast differences among their multiple data sources and enable quick, efficient ETL loading processes.
Working alongside our client’s development team, we ensured the seamless integration of all necessary data into their new system, providing decision-makers with all the timely insights they’d hoped to achieve.
By using the cloud to build this capability, Ollion was able to help our client minimize infrastructure management resources and costs.
The outcome
Our client now has instant access to production dashboards built on top of their centralized, real-time data platform. These dashboards have helped company leadership effectively identify and rally team efforts around areas of improvement and potential growth.
This success has not only helped our client but is now also helping their customers. Based on the success and enthusiasm for their new data analytics platform, they began offering self-service business reporting services to their clients. The platform enabled more effective customer engagement and also allowed them to monetize their data by offering analytics as a service.
The new system Ollion built allows our client to track the following metrics in real time:
- Revenue
- Expenses
- Profit
- Cost-per-pound and cost-per-mile
- Lead time
- Popular lane routes
- Actual vs. forecast figures
- Carrier on-time performance
- Time between different lifecycles of each load (e.g., the time it takes to win a bid, book a load, deliver a load, etc.)
This project’s success has also piqued the interest of other business groups within our client, who are eager to build similar systems to meet their own needs.
What’s next
As next steps, Ollion will continue to add new data sources to the solution while helping the company’s leadership identify possible ways to expand the system. Ollion also plans to develop a customer portal, which will be central to their new managed services branch. This portal will provide reliable, data-driven business reports based on our client’s services.
