Why Transportation BI Teams Should Adopt Decision Intelligence

“But we already have a business intelligence team.”

Transportation and logistics teams tell us this from time to time during sales calls. It’s almost always in disappointment because they’re looking for a solution like ours to enhance their efficiency, but instead, they keep running into internal opposition who don't see the need to invest beyond their current business intelligence efforts. It’s also an objection that is usually handed down from leadership, who are looking at software as a line item in the budget.

Let’s look at this objection from a different point of view.

Would you tell your sales team that they can’t invest in automation software because We already have a marketing team? Would you tell your accounting team that they can’t invest in ERP software because We already have a procurement team?

Probably not.

Just like automation software for sales and marketing or ERP software for finance and accounting, decision intelligence software augments existing business intelligence initiatives and helps teams work faster and more efficiently.

Faster and more efficiently. Sounds like marketing jargon, right? Let’s talk about what that really means.

?Business Intelligence Meets Decision Intelligence

?A study by Growth AQ found that decision-makers only use 22 percent of the data-driven insights they receive from their business intelligence efforts. This number doesn’t speak to speed, but it does reveal something about the lack of efficiency. Why invest in business intelligence if you don’t leverage the insights?

The study did not provide details on why they’re not using the insights more, but we have a few solid guesses:

1. Decision makers don’t get the insights fast enough.
2. They don’t get the right insights to leverage for decisions.
3. They don’t actually have a process for decision making.

This article on Forbes details the coalescence of the decision intelligence category. In short, decision intelligence brings together analytics and the process of decision-making in a way that traditional business intelligence just does not do. It encourages leaders to think about the outcomes they want to achieve and the decisions that need to be made to get there.

The article points out that the theory behind business intelligence has always been this: If companies invest in analytics, leadership will automatically leverage insights to make better decisions.

However, study after study shows that this just isn’t true.

Organizations that invest in business intelligence are indeed on the right track. BI teams are great at giving organizations deep insights into what has happened & why, but they’re often working against a business culture that either doesn’t really value data-driven decision-making or leadership teams don’t understand how to leverage the data.

?So, what is a BI team to do?

This is where decision intelligence takes over, and business intelligence teams are perfectly primed to lead the charge in this direction.

Decision intelligence gives BI a boost by bringing decisions – and the decision-making process – to the forefront. It even uses AI for things like decision automation, pattern recognition, anomaly detection and more.

Let’s be clear: We do not advocate letting AI make transportation decisions for you. At least not right now. What we do advocate is utilizing AI as a key part of your decision process.

Leveraging Decision Intelligence in BI Process

The aforementioned article states: Gartner's decision intelligence paradigm shift moves away from decisions as important but fuzzy marketing abstractions and towards decision-making as a concrete, measurable business process that needs to be managed.

?At Third Axiom, we believe business intelligence teams play a critical role in the management of the decision-making process. After all, who would do this better than the team trained to draw conclusions from business data?

?Axiom-One helps business intelligence teams do exactly that. Here’s how:

?It aligns your metrics and insights directly to your analytics goals.

True to decision best practice, Axiom-One starts with the end in mind. Our platform encourages organizations to establish clearly defined goals, think through what actions will drive them toward their goals, and determine what metrics they need in front of them to make decisions.

?How Axiom-One achieves this: Based on their goals, teams choose from dozens of prebuilt transportation data models to ensure they’re getting the right insights at the right time.

For example, let’s say you’re a 3PL aiming to maximize gross profit. This means you’re going to need to stay on top of shipment margins and customer volumes. Axiom-One allows you to track and predict carrier costs and identify anomalous shipping patterns for current customers.

It delivers insights faster for more timely decision-making.

Many transportation organizations wait until a quarterly business review to look at insights and make decisions. We believe this is one of the reasons why so many decision-makers fail to leverage data-driven insights effectively.

?How Axiom-One achieves this: We quickly get insights, recommendations and alerts into the hands of the right decision-makers with Zapier’s communication integration.?

It leverages AI to recognize patterns, detect anomalies and uncover goal-based insights.

This frees up significant resources on your business intelligence team. Now, they can focus less on time-consuming data analysis and more on managing the decision-making process. This includes staying on top of decisions-to-be-made, coaching leadership on how to properly leverage data to make better decisions, and then tracking the impact of the decisions.

?How Axiom-One achieves this: Our AI engine is constantly working in the background to discover insights that may be difficult to uncover with traditional data analysis.

?For example,?say you’re a shipper whose goal is to minimize costs and improve customer satisfaction. You will need to stay on top of carrier pricing and shipping times. Not only can Axiom-One predict costs and detect accessorial changes, our system can proactively warn your of incorrect warehouse sourcing, and monitor carrier performance statistics – such as on-time deliveries – with comprehensive carrier scorecards. ?

Moving toward decision automation

We said earlier that we don’t advocate for letting AI make your transportation decisions for you…yet. Right now, we advocate for increasing your data-driven decisions, making data-driven decisions faster, and leveraging AI to make it all happen. The next frontier in decision intelligence is, without a doubt, decision automation, but there are quite a few levels to master before you get there

Email us at [email protected] to get an intro to Axiom-One and learn what you can do to advance to the next level of your journey.

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