In a fuel delivery business, profitability is heavily dependent on operational efficiency, and attaining the best possible efficiency means juggling many variables and making constant adjustments. You collect data with every delivery, but by using that data to its fullest potential, you can find huge opportunities. Manual analysis of data can seem overwhelming, but this is the perfect task for business intelligence (BI) reporting.
Bring the Delivery Exceptions to Your Attention
BI reporting can help direct your attention to the right places so that you don’t waste time. Rather than looking at every delivery, you can investigate only deliveries that fall outside your acceptable range. Deliveries that are too small or too large, made too many days before they were scheduled or too many days after, are just some examples of important exceptions that deserve investigation.
For example, if you make a delivery that is below a certain threshold, such as 20% of ideal, that delivery can trigger an email notification to management. It can also appear on a report with other delivery exceptions and be automatically sent out at a scheduled time to specific personnel.
Notifications and reports like these help streamline activity, bringing focus to only those things that need attention. It’s management by exception and it is efficient. It helps to not only create efficient deliveries in the future but to use your management’s time in the most efficient way.
Watch Your Driver Productivity
Individual delivery transactions are important, but so is the productivity of your drivers. BI reporting lets you see an up-to-date analysis of all your drivers’ activities. Things like average stops and gallons per hour, runouts, and partial fills help to keep management informed and on top of activity. You can even take the analysis one step further by including the hourly rate per driver and truck to see the cost per stop, mile, and gallon delivered. Now you know what drivers to focus on for improvement.
Keep a Close Eye on Your KPIs with Dashboards
Driver productivity is just one of the measurements needed to effectively manage a delivery operation, but there are also a number of other key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch. Having all of them available on a dashboard gives true visibility and a quick picture of the entire operation. It can be constantly available on your home screen or emailed however often you choose.
It’s the ease of pulling data out of your system into easily digestible formats that makes BI reporting so important to management – and customization is just as key. Every fuel delivery operation is unique and needs to see their data the way they want to see it to help them be the most effective and efficient. This could include analysis in the form of grids, pie charts, line graphs, heat maps, and more- whatever visual tells the story accurately and quickly.
No More Manual Spreadsheets
Some organizations pull out KPIs through manually crafted spreadsheets with data pulled from multiple sources. This not only is extremely time-consuming, but it poses a risk to the data integrity. Any manual processes introduce the possibility of errors and ultimately trust in the reports. BI reporting bypasses this risk by pulling the data right from the source, and, at the same time, requiring no employee time to assemble it. It’s all automatic.
Quick Drilldown to the Details
KPIs help with a high-level picture, but dashboards and reports can also offer drill-down capability, so you can get right to the root of a problem. For example, a dashboard that shows 10 runouts today can give you the ability to click on those runouts and see the account details for each. You can investigate to help to ensure it doesn’t happen again and then reach out to the customer to show your concern and effort to remedy the issue.
You Already Collect the Data. Use It!
Business intelligence reporting is an essential tool, enabling you to take full advantage of all the data you already collect to help you become the most efficient company you can be. From dashboards that keep a close eye on your operation, to exception reporting with easy drill-down capabilities, to automatic notifications to be informed of issues immediately, BI reporting helps you stay informed and manage your business better than ever.
With BI Reporting you can work smarter, not harder.
To learn more about ADD Systems’ BI reporting solution, Atlas Reporting, contact us at sales@addsys.com or 800-922-0972.
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