This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ 3PL Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: How to Use Data to Build a Competitive Advantage in Logistics
DETAILS: John Stauffer explains that more data has become accessible with growing digital capabilities since 2007 when freight operations began to become automated. Companies have learned to leverage large volumes of data to be more efficient.
KEY QUOTES FROM JOHN STAUFFER:
“I think leveraging data and understanding your strengths and weaknesses as an organization really unlocks a lot of power for the account management and customer-facing roles.”
“From a carrier standpoint, it’s also [about] leveraging data, understanding underlying carrier strengths and weaknesses, and selling those strengths back across to the sales side. Then acting as basically a sales arm on behalf of your carriers inside your organization to bolster that partnership.”
“Challenges that happen from rolling out data is, once you’ve understood the data and it’s cleaned and well understood across the organization, it’s about if the incentives within an organization are aligned with taking a data-driven approach to operations. A lot of brokers have commission plans that are looking solely at margin. And if that’s the case, then that’s going to drive behaviors that only look at the max profitability rather than service. So making sure that whatever the incentive structure that you have in place for your organization matches up with the overall data strategy that you’re trying to take is critical.”
“I think that there’s going to be rapid innovation. The amount of data that’s available across the industry today is overwhelming. So leveraging [automated] tools to quickly make sense of it much faster than a human can is going to be very powerful.”