FreightWaves SONAR hosted a webinar Wednesday discussing its new shipper data consortium with Charles Odom, director of logistics at Halliburton.
Supply Chain Organizational Reporting Engagement (SCORE) has been designed to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of both service and rates. Members can contribute data to get custom insights into their shipping operations. At the same time, the supply chain industry gains reliable, comprehensive data backed by experts.
Nick Persin, director of partnerships at SONAR, and Jarred Porter, director of customer success at SONAR, spoke with Odom about his experience with the platform.
“We use SONAR as a way to monitor the market as well as ongoing changes from both a micro- and macro-level perspective,” Odom said during the webinar. “We use it to look at not just trucking, air or ocean pricing, but also capacity and large trends across the world so that we can be better informed when making our decisions.”
Why a consortium?
Odom said organizations like Halliburton benefit from sharing their data to build a shipper consortium.
“From our perspective, if you’re able to gather enough data, you can make some really good models to forecast potential changes of market conditions and make better decisions,” he said. “From a math perspective, if you’re aggregating more and more data and using correlation theory, the models can actually get more and more accurate with the larger datasets that you’re able to put in.”
Using the example of an Apple Watch, Odom said not everyone in the world wants one, but the people who do need to be able to use it for more than just telling time.
“The software is kind of similar to that in that an Apple Watch will tell you how many steps you’ll take in a day, what’s your blood pressure [or] you need to take additional steps,” Odom said. “It only works if you put the appropriate data back into it as well. If you don’t tell it, ‘Hey, I ate 13 Big Macs in the last week,’ you’re not going to be able to get the output that you need to run a healthier lifestyle. I think that’s kind of where we’re at with the software. If we’ve got the consortium, and we’ve got the appropriate amount of shippers participating and adding data into the mix, you’ll get better- and higher-quality data back out.”
Where data helps
Odom said one great thing about SONAR is that it takes the data and puts it into a single platform where business leaders can make decisions in real time.
“There’s real-time data being fed in,” he said. “You can look at the historical [data] and you can also add some pretty unique insights to it, particularly with your Bollinger Bands and moving average. That way you get an idea of what it’s doing to the price over an extended period of time instead of what it’s doing just today.”
Odom explained that one can compare their business or peer group with the market rate and enhance their decision-making.
“It’s not about going in, looking and saying, ‘hey, it’s exactly within one penny of an index,’” Odom said. “Rather than going in and looking at five different indexes over a series of time and pulling that data in, you can look at it all at the exact same time. You can use it to make the informed decision that you need for not only today, but for the future. You’re looking at those macro level trends and perspectives over time, and you just don’t get that in any other platform.”
He added that having that data available can give business owners more confidence that they’re taking the right action.
“Particularly with the segment we work in, some of the most dangerous situations [occur] if you sit around and don’t make a decision or judgment call, or just leave the freight sitting on the dock somewhere exposed,” Odom said. “Whereas if you can look at what’s going on in the market, and you can make the decision to buy at that rate or hold off and communicate externally to your stakeholders the reason behind that, at least you’re doing something.”
The data can also be leveraged to look at ongoing trends and determine when the best time is to go to market and run larger bids. Odom said the key is leveraging the data to react to what’s going on that day rather than relying on gut instinct 100% of the time.
Is it secure?
SCORE adheres to International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) principles as a standard of data collection and production for benchmarking purposes.
It also ensures that customer data is handled with the utmost security and confidentiality with a Service Organization Control 2 certification for developing benchmarks and bringing transparency to the industry.
SCORE road map and how to participate
To join the data consortium, schedule a discovery call and book a 30-minute meeting with Nick Persin (npersin@gosonar.com).
SONAR anticipates initial data collection will take roughly 30 days per consortium member to work through the legal process and paperwork, and connect technical resources to ensure a reliable data stream.
After that, Phase 1 will begin for a 12-week process to deliver initial outputs. Phases 2 and 3 will see an additional 12-week process to build API outputs and connect those to SONAR and Supply Chain Intelligence user interface products for customer use.
Data collection will be ongoing during Phases 2 and 3, and SONAR will continue beyond necessary IOSCO principles for minimum required reports to deliver rate returns.