Historically, one of the main problems of decision making — professionally as well as in people’s private lives — was the lack of reliable data. In recent years the situation has turned into its opposite: there is so much data available that it has become hard to see the wood for the trees. Fortunately, technology now allows us to combine high quality data with industry knowledge and experience from many sources, and to process and present this in usable and actionable form: this is Customer Dashboards.
The end of the Excel era?
Until a few years ago, the data required to support business decisions could be managed by spreadsheet software — which itself represented a major step forwards compared to pen and paper calculations. But modern information technology has both increased the volume of available data exponentially and shortened the decision making timeframe.
A private investor with a diversified portfolio used to receive a weekly statement from his bank or broker through the mail. Armed with this he would place buy or sell orders by phone or fax with his broker to execute the following day: always trading at a disadvantage using old information. Now, the same investor has access to real time information through a website or mobile app, presented to him in easily understood form.
The power of this approach resides not only in the visualisation technology, but also in the intelligence embedded in the representation. The customer doesn’t need to be a financial wizard to decipher the meaning of the numbers, because the bank’s financial experts have created visualisations that are the most useful for his situation.
Customer Dashboards for the logistics industry
Our customers have seen the volume and accuracy of data available to them increase significantly over the past few years. Using this detailed and real time information on cargoes, modern supply chain management systems have developed new milestones and KPI’s. But so much data, so many KPIs, however necessary when analysing the root causes of a problem, isn’t necessarily helpful in day to day operational decision-making.
The logistics expertise we have gained over two decades working with customers across industrial and geographic sectors, helped us to transform the increasing mass of data into real, actionable insight and knowledge, presented typically through a dashboard to give live users exactly what they need to make effective decisions quickly.
Looking forward: Customer Dashboards 2016
The dynamics of business are continually changing: last year’s analytics and responses may no longer be relevant. Our customers are investing in resources and infrastructure to make their supply chains more resilient and more cost-effective, and logistics providers such as Damco must track or even lead these evolutions. Our current dashboards support functionalities that were unthinkable even two or three years ago and Damco continues to incorporate the latest possibilities with a major upgrade, to be launched later this year. More details will be published on future blogs. If you want to explore the potential of customer dashboards for your particular situation, you may get in touch with me at praful.waghela@damco.com
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