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Using Transportation Analytics to Increase Route Profitability

With the transportation industry’s tight margins and fierce competition, small gains in efficiency can translate into substantial increases in profitability.

You’re probably using software to plan routes, optimizing for miles driven, fuel consumption, driver time, delivery time, and other conspicuous targets for more streamlined operations.

Syntelic’s Route Planning and Load Planning applications excel at honing these aspects of your warehouse and delivery operations.

But what about route profitability?

• Do you know which routes are gold mines and which are losing money?
• Can you identify driver or customer issues that make specific routes less profitable?
• Do you know what adjustments are needed to make a route profitable?

You’re likely collecting all the information you need. But without an analytics system designed for the transportation industry, it’s difficult to turn your raw data into insights you can confidently act on.

Data-Driven Transportation Decisions for Route Profitability

Various software applications and services provide analytics for logistics companies and the transportation industry as a whole. However, few transportation analytics systems are built from the ground up for trucking operations.

Syntelic’s Transportation Analytics marries an intimate knowledge of transportation operations with powerful tools for analyzing, visualizing, and zeroing in on the information you need to continually improve your trucking business.

Our Transportation Analytics application aggregates the data you collect, including:

• Route plans
• Load plans
• Warehouse records
• Driver logs from electronic logging devices (ELDs)
• Driving behaviors (OBD data), such as idling time
• Location information (GPS data), such as actual routes
• Delivery times (base time plus unloading)
• Labor, fuel, and other overhead costs
• Customer information

Without Transportation Analytics, you have these sources of information, but they’re scattered across multiple systems. It’s challenging to assemble the pieces to understand how to improve your fleet operations.

Syntelic’s Transportation Analytics provides:

• Customized reports and powerful ad-hoc reporting
• Central dashboards that put key information at your fingertips
• Sorting, filters, calculations, and drill-downs to zero in on what you need to know
• Visualizations that help you understand your data

Route Profitability Calculations

Let’s dive into route profitability to get a better idea of how Transportation Analytics can help your business.

It’s a basic question: “When I send this truck out with these deliveries, is the route making me money?” And the calculations—at least in principle—are not overly complex:

Revenue – Costs = Profit (or Loss)

A route’s income includes the cost of the goods delivered, a delivery fee, and any surcharges, such as a rush fee.

A route’s costs include:

• Your cost for the goods delivered
• Fuel expenses
• Tolls
• Driver pay
• Vehicle and trailer maintenance
• Warehouse costs
• Other overheads, such as insurance and office charges

These categories can vary greatly depending on the load size, distance driven, delivery time, traffic patterns, etc. Driver pay may have multiple subcategories, including pay per mile, per stop, per case or pallet, or any combination of these factors. You may also have different pay for drivers based on seniority.

Boosting Route Profitability

Syntelic’s Transportation Analytics application can analyze all these factors and let you see which routes are profitable and which are losing money. You’ll also be able to see why a given route is a money drain and point the way to potential solutions. 

For example:

• Order quantities are too small—set minimum order quantities.
• Stops are too far apart or too far away—set appropriate delivery fees.
• Deliveries take too long—set appropriate fees for complex deliveries or customer delays.
• There are too many empty miles—incorporate backhauls into your route planning.

Of course, you can also use this feature of Transportation Analytics to make money-making routes even more profitable.

Syntelic Software: Increasing Profitability in the Transportation Industry

Syntelic’s trucking industry applications are great on their own, but a powerful synergy comes from using them together. Our full suite of transportation route optimization tools includes:

• Route Planning lets you effortlessly optimize each truck’s route and stops, working with dynamic routes or a master route schedule.
• Dispatch Planning lets you automatically build packages for a week’s routes, accounting for your business’s key parameters.
• Load Planning lets you generate load plans in seconds that maximize loading and delivery efficiency and comply with Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations.

Our Transportation Analytics application brings everything together, providing both big-picture insights and the ability to isolate outliers and problem areas. We can connect to our applications or software you already use, including OBD, ELD, and GPS systems.

Because each transportation operation is unique, we customize every implementation of our software. Contact us today to learn more about how Syntelic’s Transportation Analytics can increase your company’s profitability.