Success Stories: Transportation Analytics

Situation

Johns Manville is a global manufacturer of construction materials products, with $3B annual revenues.
To service the North American market, the company spends approximately $20MM per month on transportation and freight related costs.
The client had made a significant investment implementing a new Transportation Management system (SAP TM), which was collecting substantial amount of data, however not all of it had been utilized for useful and actionable information.
The internal Supply Chain and Logistics department had identified numerous initiatives for investigating and analyzing data, in search of areas to focus on improving costs and negotiating leverage with transportation providers.

Solution

Johns Manville Client engaged Brainspire for two purposes:
- Build an analytics/visualization dashboard platform to support transportation analytics
- Provide coaching and mentorship to internal resources, to develop skillsets around data analytics approaches, database tools, and visualization packages.
Brainspire worked with the client to identify where and how data is stored in the source TM system and designed queries using SAP tools for extracting data.
Brainspire collaborated with other internal IT resources to define the ETL schedule for loading data from the transactional source system (SAP TM) and into an existing SQL Server DataMart.
In close collaboration with the Supply Chain and Logistics department, the team identified core KPI’s and metrics to measure department and transportation provider performance.
Brainspire resources and internal client IT analysts built multiple dashboards and visualization tools using Tableau to present data in an easily interpreted visual format.

Benefits

A key metric identified by the client was Tender Acceptance rate. A “tender offer” is when a transportation provider is offered the opportunity to accept and transport a load on behalf of the shipper. The client has negotiated contract rates with various transportation carriers. Also there are times when a load must be tendered to the “open market” on a spot bid basis, rather than at a contract rate.
The team delivered a “Tender Acceptance” dashboard, providing insight into the carrier acceptance rate. Waste is introduced into the transportation processes in both dollars and time, when carriers decline loads. The dashboard provides visibility into both aggregate performance, as well as performance of individual carriers and specific shipping lanes. This data provides information about the impact of lead time and the cost of not achieving the optimal or first choice carrier.
Another key requirement identified by the client was to provide insight between their transportation service charges and how they compare to overall market rates during the same time period.
Utilizing a data source from a 3rd party data provider, the team delivered a “Market Comparison” dashboard. This dashboard contains visual tools to identify specific shipping lanes where the client has either negotiated rates that are favorable when compared to the overall market, or where the client is currently spending over market rate to service certain destinations. At the time of delivering the solution, when comparing the most recent month of transportation spend, the dashboard identified over $1MM of recurring monthly savings and highlighted the specific transportation lanes that provide the most potential for negotiation and improvement.
Other dashboards and visualizations were created to provide additional insight into shipping volume, rate of utilization of automation tools, and other KPI’s identified by the client.