Whether you run a transport company or a fleet that services your distribution, your daily analytics will be crucial for your decisions to have a positive effect on your business. From Dashboard overviews to the granular detail in more complex reports, Diver will steer you through the day-to-day processes of making the correct decisions that will impact your bottom-line.
Operations that run a variety of vehicle types will find it essential to compare the cost-effectiveness of running a rigid, versus an artic or van, and in order to do this you will need to collect the true cost per unit delivered data from a variety of sources:
- Your transport system for fuel costs, mileage, maintenance and repair costs
- Your GPS system for vehicle speeds, distances, deviation from route, idle time etc
- Your payroll system for driver costs including overtime for routes that take longer than expected owing to lengthy dwell time
- Your warehouse system for despatch figures – by pallet, case or trolley
Your finance system or sales system for revenue figures by item or product
Diver can integrate with all of these diverse systems and automatically bring them together in one place where you can create daily reports that analyse ALL the costs associated with each delivery.
Once you have the true cost per delivery only then can you start to take action to streamline your transport operations by optimising:
- Delivery routes
- Pallets, cases, or trolleys per load
- Frequency of delivery
You will know, for example:
- Which customers to target to try and improve the delivery volumes where your vehicles are running at less than capacity.
- If you should alter a delivery route to add in more drops using a bigger vehicle, or create shorter routes using smaller vehicles.
- If you should take advantage of a pallet network or sub-contractor to get your product to places that it is not cost effective for you to run to in your own vehicle.
This is not a once –off exercise – customer orders change and routes/vehicle types may need to vary regularly. Diver will take the pain out of analysing the situation on a day-to-day basis with automated reports that help you wade through the quagmire of data, to get at the actionable information.
PODs (Proof of Delivery Dockets)
In addition Diver can automatically link your PODs to invoices without the requirement of a document management system. Reconciling and chasing PODs is a key part of your ability to manage your cash flow. With Diver exception reporting is made simple so you can focus on the outstanding items.
Damaged Goods
When margins are tight you need to minimise any damages, as they not only cut your overall margin but they disappoint your customers’ expectations. Keeping a close eye on complaints, returns, and the costs of redeliveries will enable you to review your operations where necessary and make sure your warehouse staff or customers preparing pallets for collection are following guidelines for safe packaging.
Diver can combine returns data, and claims data related to damages and allow you to set relevant KPIs in this area.
Vehicle Maintenance, Repairs, Fuel and Mileage
To ensure you are getting the best value from your fleet, with the help of Diver’s analytics you will know what each and every vehicle costs to run. By extracting the fuel volumes, repairs data and mileage information held in your vehicle maintenance system, you can monitor easily the performance of each vehicle and driver – and compare makes/models in the fleet as well as spare parts like tyres and other consumables.
You will understand enough about your fleet to know which make/model/type of vehicle performs the most efficiently, and if that performance is affected adversely by individual drivers if there are clear exceptions to the average performance of a vehicle type
Business Intelligence Insights for Transport Operations
Running or hiring a fleet of transport vehicles or you will want to study some or all KPIs on the following:
- Freight cost per unit shipped
- Transit time
- Turnaround time
- Average cost per delivery
- % of orders delivered with damaged products/items
- Average corrective maintenance time per truck
- % of deliveries that are delivered correctly first time
- Damages as % of throughput
- Average age of fleet
- Optimise Load Fulfilment (OLF) %
- Ontime delivery and pickup [Load, stop and shipment]
- Empty miles
- % of truckload capacity utilised
- Dwell time as % of transit time
- % of voyage deviation
- Quantity per shipment
- Vehicle time utilisation
- Fuel cost as % of total costs
- Additional charges (e.g. demurrage, redeliveries) as percent of total freight
- On-time pickups
- Freight bill accuracy
- % PODs received by target date
- Profit per truck
- % of agreed delivery times reached
- Ratio fixed versus variable costs per truck
- Average variable costs per truck
- Ratio corrective versus preventive maintenance costs per truck
- Amount of fuel per pallet/case or trolley
- Average number of stops per trip
- Accidents per 1,000 driving hours
- Claims as % of freight costs
As a distributor you will want to know things like:
- Can I compare costs per delivery, by delivery method?
- Are some of my delivery routes more cost effective than others?
- How can I combine a view of vehicle maintenance costs with staff costs from payroll to get an overall picture?
- How do my delivery operators compare against each other?
- Are there better times of day or night to drive certain routes?
- Can I offer better rates to customers who will order more volume, less frequently by looking at what-if scenarios?
- Can I reduce my carbon footprint by altering my delivery routines?
- Can I compare on premises sales with delivered sales and their associated real costs?
- What is my real margin when comparing different sale types?
- Are there significant differences in the performance of my sales people owing to differences in geography?