Success of the industry goes hand in hand with innovation and efficiency

By tradition, ING recently launched the “Transport & Logistics Outlook”, a sneak preview of the trends for the coming year. And not only ING but also ABN AMRO shared their perspective for 2018. What are the expectations according to the economists? Will the sector be able to continue the positive flow of last year? Well, if we may believe ING and ABN AMRO – yes we can. They expect that many logistics service providers will prosper in 2018. The banks even predict a growth for the Dutch market of 3.5 percent for the sector and a turnover increase of 5 percent. The demand is improving on all fronts.

[“Transport sector has the tide on their side” ABN AMRO]

In order to prevent us to become too big for our boots, ING is also warning us of a number of challenges that the sector will face. Consider, for example, the recruitment of sufficient and qualified staff, managing the rising costs and the improvement that many companies still have to “make” in areas like productivity and profitability.

[“Large volume- and revenue growth in all subsectors, but also increasing costs” ING]

Because despite the economic growth, many logistics service providers are not able yet to realize higher tariffs due to increasing wages and (if applicable) fuel prices. So the profit will have to be achieved particularly from a logistics process that runs like a well-oiled machine.

But how do you ensure that you can streamline your processes more efficiently and increase productivity in order to benefit from the expected growth? According to ING, the realization of the required efficiency improvement goes hand in hand with increasing intelligence supported by data and ICT that ensure a higher utilization and load rate.

[“Profitable growth is mainly related to innovation and efficiency” ING]

Do you want to get started with data and IT – but don’t know where to start?

When you’ve decided you want to improve the occupancy and load rate and you’re convinced the combination of data and ICT will be your partner in crime in order to achieve this, the next question probably pops up: which areas should I particularly pay attention to?
After all, you are already the owner of a huge amount of data. But how do you extract the right information in order to be able to make trend analyzes, and set targets to – not unimportantly – drive efficiency and improve the quality of your services?

In order to help our customers on their way, we have mapped out the most important KPIs for logistics service providers based on a survey among our customers. Think about, for example, the occupancy rate, turnover rate, stock per period, OSCOT and order pick performance. But also the load rate, the margin per type of transport and revenue per period per truck. Subsequently, we translated these KPIs into a number of predefined data sets and dashboards that can be used with Power BI that help you translate data into comprehensible reports. This way you know exactly where the efficiency can be improved, where the “financial bleeders” are located and where you can give a positive boost to productivity. Sounds pretty attractive right?