Advancements in tender data science and paid market data now power SONAR SCI (Supply Chain Intelligence) Lane Acuity. SONAR Lane Acuity provides lane-level insight into market stability and rate benchmarking.
What is it?
Lane Acuity allows users to compare their contract rates to their peers as well as market through cohort benchmarking. That promotes a better view of what’s happening within the market and how to navigate short-term RFPs or annual contracts.
Lane Acuity provides insights into market stability, by lane, helping participants identify rate and capacity risk on a lane. Think of it as a volatility score for a given lane, throughout the year. The higher the score, the more consistent the rate and capacity are on a given lane. The lower the score, the more likely a given lane will experience routing guide instability.
A low score is indicative of market instability on a selected lane, determined by historical tender activity and rate volatility. A higher score suggests that the lane has a very predictable pattern of rate consistency and tender acceptance.
If you are looking for routing guide stability, think of Lane Acuity as a volatility score, with a high score being good and a low score being bad. Volatility is the polar opposite of stability, so insights into volatility empower enterprise shippers to make transportation procurement decisions starting on day one and increasing routing guide compliance.
Paying above-market rate in a low-volatility environment suggests overspending. Paying below-market rates in highly volatile lanes could lead to additional costs.
This information comes from a combination of tender activity and historical contract rate transactions, from a pool of $80 billion worth of actual paid contract rate invoices. This data has been collected over a 4 year period, broken down into shipper industry cohorts. When paid contract rate data is combined with tender activity on a given lane, we can accurately predict when and where routing guide failures are likely to occur.
Getting started With Lane Acuity
Download the template, upload your O/D pairs, and Lane Acuity will perform a comprehensive analysis to attain optimal pricing strategy. That gives you the best view of transportation spend and mitigates transportation procurement risk.
Drilling down deeper into the lane
Users can drill into the resulting lane overviews to see additional current pricing overviews, including the current market rate.
Peer and cohort group shows a better comparison for how the user’s rates align within its true competitors by not comparing dairy distributors to electronics providers as an example.
As an example of its use, some markets, like the Pacific Northwest, tend to stay fairly stable. However, it becomes erratic near peak season. SONAR SCI Lane Acuity shows those risks and their effects on rates. In those cases, it may be necessary to increase the rate by $0.02 to $0.03 per mile to maintain strong compliance when disruption, even short-term disruptions, occur. Compliance management plays directly into how an enterprise shipper applies Lane Acuity insight.
SONAR SCI Ongoing Development
The advancements of SONAR SCI Lane Acuity come with a future-ready plan. They will continue in the form of additional app releases to complement the SONAR value proposition and build a stronger case for freight data to navigate the market at a granular and holistic level. SONAR SCI is also available as a standalone product with an included SONAR Starter platform that includes Critical Events, the predictive rates of SONAR Lane Signal and Pre-Built Global Pages.
To request a SONAR demo click here.