It’s no secret that logistics companies face a multitude of decisions with countless factors to take into consideration each day. To remain competitive, logistics companies need to focus not only on how to become more data-driven, but more importantly, on how utilizing technology can reduce their workload. Tableau logistics dashboards are a great example; by quickly making sense of the large volume of data rapidly coming in, they enable people to reduce the time spent wrangling data. They also centralize key information in one location, enabling companies to dedicate their efforts toward making decisions that directly increase their profit margin.
Want better supply chain and logistics dashboards? Our modern data and analytics experts are here to help. Schedule time with a specialist.
Summarizing millions of data points into actionable information is one of the key reasons why companies, especially those dealing in logistics, should utilize Tableau. With vast amounts of data flying around, you need to be able to understand and act in real time or you will find your company falling behind competitors. Using a logistics dashboard to optimize profitability is a keyway to achieve this.
Tableau enables you to categorize and visualize the information as it comes in, so you can easily see the important details without having to sift through the minutiae. For example, if you wanted to proactively notify customers of any potential delays in shipments, you could create a logistics dashboard to track KPIs such as the average delay time by carriers for each customer. The dashboard below does just that. This also provides a clear argument to reassess business relationships with carriers who experience regular delays over a long period of time. Both of these actions would ultimately increase profitability by satisfying customers so they continue working with you and ensuring valuable business relationships.
Need more convincing of these benefits? Seagate, a company that manufactures and distributes data storage products internationally, uses Tableau for exactly this reason. Check out their story.
Not only does Tableau condense data into clear and actionable insights, but Tableau logistics dashboards provide tools that highlight key factors impacting business decisions in one place. These types of dashboards are leveraged by industry leaders for everything from ensuring flights are on time at Southwest Airlines to identifying the most profitable customers at AmeriPride.
Tableau’s flexibility allows you to analyze any business solution your data supports in a variety of visuals ranging from detailed shipping maps to tables or bar charts. Tableau allows you to create a “one-stop shop” where you can answer a variety of business questions using one dashboard with accurate, up-to-date information.
Take the dashboard below as an example. Factor Freight Solutions uses this logistics dashboard to optimize profitability by reducing the cost of routes they are taking. It combines information such as the cost over time, specific routes associated with the costs, and the average weight of the load. This Tableau logistics dashboard could answer key questions such as:
Which routes are losing the most money?
Which routes do we frequently travel that could be optimized?
Which routes should we increase our charges on?
Which routes should we reroute or adjust?
How does weight impact the cost of my route? What would the optimal weight be?
Tableau makes it easy to create a dashboard that optimizes profitability and allows your employees to work efficiently. The dashboards highlight and summarize key information, allow analysts to respond to events in real time, and ensure that your analysts aren’t losing time by surfacing key information in one place.
Now that the business value of a Tableau logistics dashboard is clear, you may be wondering where to start. The first step is ensuring that your data is organized, reliable, and accessible in a data warehouse. After that, developing your dashboards requires identifying your KPIs and business goals, then building a dashboard that surfaces information relevant to achieving them.
2nd Watch has a vast array of experience in preparing logistics data for analysis and developing Tableau logistics dashboards. You can contact us here to get started today.
P&C insurance is an incredibly data-driven industry. Your company’s core assets are data, your business revolves around collecting data, and your staff is focused on using data in their day-to-day workstreams. Although data is collected and used in normal operations, oftentimes the downstream analytics process is painful (think of those month-end reports). This is for any number of reasons:
Large, slow data flows
Unmodeled data that takes manual intervention to integrate
Legacy software that has a confusing backend and user interface
And more
Creating an analytics ecosystem that is fast and accessible is not a simple task, but today we’ll take you through the four key steps 2nd Watch follows to solve business problems with an insurance analytics solution. We’ll also provide recommendations for how best to implement each step to make these steps as actionable as possible.
Step 1: Determine your scope.
What are your company’s priorities?
Trying to improve profit margin on your products?
Improving your loss ratio?
Planning for next year?
Increasing customer satisfaction?
To realize your strategic goals, you need to determine where you want to focus your resources. Work with your team to find out which initiative has the best ROI and the best chance of success.
First, identify your business problems.
There are so many ways to improve your KPIs that trying to identify the best approach can very quickly become overwhelming. To give yourself the best chance, be deliberate about how you go about solving this challenge.
What isn’t going right? Answer this question by talking to people, looking at existing operational and financial reporting, performing critical thinking exercises, and using other qualitative or quantitative data (or both).
Then, prioritize a problem to address.
Once you identify the problems that are impacting metrics, choose one to address, taking these questions into account:
What is the potential reward (opportunity)?
What are the risks associated with trying to address this problem?
How hard is it to get all the inputs you need?
RECOMMENDATION
Taking on a scope that is too large, too complex, or unclear will make it very difficult to achieve success. Clearly set boundaries and decide what is relevant to determine which pain point you’re trying to solve. A defined critical path makes it harder to go off course and helps you keep your goal achievable.
Step 2: Identify and prioritize your KPIs.
Next, it’s time to get more technical. You’ve determined your pain points, but now you must identify the numeric KPIs that can act as the proxies for these business problems.
Maybe your business goal is to improve policyholder satisfaction. That’s great! But what does that mean in terms of metrics? What inputs do you actually need to calculate the KPI? Do you have the data to perform the calculations?
Back to the example, here are your top three options:
Based on this information, even though the TTC metric may be your third-favorite KPI for measuring customer satisfaction, the required inputs are identified and the data is available. This makes it the best option for the data engineering effort at this point in time. It also helps you identify a roadmap for the future if you want to start collecting richer information.
RECOMMENDATION
As you identify the processes you’re trying to optimize, create a data dictionary of all the measures you want to use in your reporting. Appreciate that a single KPI might:
Have more and higher quality data
Be easier to calculate
Be used to solve multiple problems
Be a higher priority to the executive team
Use this list to prioritize your data engineering effort and create the most high-value reports first. Don’t engineer in a vacuum (i.e., generate KPIs because they “seem right”). Always have an end business question in mind.
Step 3: Design your solution.
Now that you have your list of prioritized KPIs, it’s time to build the data warehouse. This will allow your business analysts to slice your metrics by any number of dimensions (e.g., TTC by product, TTC by policy, TTC by region, etc.).
2nd Watch’s approach usually involves a star schema reporting layer and a customer-facing presentation layer for analysis. A star schema has two main components: facts and dimensions. Fact tables contain the measurable metrics that can be summarized. In the TTC example, the fact-claim tables might contain a numeric value containing the number of days to close a claim. A dimension table would then provide context for how you pivot the measure. For example, you might have a dimension-policyholder table that contains attributes to “slice” the KPI value (e.g., policyholder age, gender, tenure, etc.).
Once you design the structure of your database design, you can build it. This involves transforming the data from your source system to the target database. You’ll want to consider the ETL (extract-transform-load) tool that will automate this transformation, and you’ll also need to consider the type of database that will be used to store your data. 2nd Watch can help with all these technology decisions.
You may also want to take a particular set of data standards into account, such as the ACORD Standards, to ensure more efficient and effective flow of data across lines of business, for example. 2nd Watch can take these standards into account when implementing an insurance analytics solution, giving you confidence that your organization can use enterprise-wide data for a competitive advantage.
Finally, when your data warehouse is up and running, you want to make sure your investment pays off by managing the data quality of your data sources. This can all be part of a data governance plan, which includes data consistency, data security, and data accountability.
RECOMMENDATION
Don’t feel like you need to implement the entire data warehouse at once. Be sure to prioritize your data sources and realize you can gain many benefits by just implementing some of your data sources.
Step 4: Put your insurance analytics solution into practice.
After spending the time to integrate your disparate data sources and model an efficient data warehouse, what do you actually get out of it? As an end business user, this effort can bubble up as flat file exports, dashboards, reports, or even data science models.
I’ve outlined three levels of data maturity below:
Level 1
The most basic product would be a flat file. Often, mid-to-large-sized organizations working with multiple source systems work in analytical silos. They connect directly to the back end of a source system to build analytics. As a result, intersystem analysis becomes complex with non-standard data definitions, metrics, and KPIs.
With all of that source data integrated in the data warehouse, the simplest way to begin to analyze the data is off of a single flat extract. The tabular nature of a flat file will also help business users answer basic questions about their data at an organizational level.
Level 2
Organizations farther along the data maturity curve will begin to build dashboards and reports off of the data warehouse. Regardless of your analytical capabilities, dashboards allow your users to glean information at a glance. More advanced users can apply slicers and filters to better understand what drives their KPIs.
By compiling and aggregating your data into a visual format, you make the breadth of information at your organization much more accessible to your business users and decision-makers.
Level 3
The most mature product of data integration would be data science models. Machine learning algorithms can detect trends and patterns in your data that traditional analytics would take a long time to uncover, if ever. Such models can help insurers more efficiently screen cases and predict costs with greater precision. When writing policies, a model can identify and manage risk based on demographic or historic factors to determine ROI.
RECOMMENDATION
Start simple. As flashy and appealing as data science can be to stakeholders and executives, the bulk of the value of a data integration platform lies in making the data accessible to your entire organization. Synthesize your data across your source systems to produce file extracts and KPI scorecards for your business users to analyze. As users begin to adopt and understand the data, think about slowly scaling up the complexity of analysis.
Conclusion
This was a lot of information to absorb, so let’s summarize the roadmap to solving your business problems with insurance analytics:
Step 1: Determine your scope.
Step 2: Identify and prioritize your KPIs.
Step 3: Design your solution.
Step 4: Put your insurance analytics solution into practice.
2nd Watch’s data and analytics consultants have extensive experience with roadmaps like this one, from outlining data strategy to implementing advanced analytics. If you think your organization could benefit from an insurance analytics solution, feel free to get in touch to discuss how we can help.
