The unwritten rule across any industry is that majorly disruptive forces are constantly at play, revamping the way companies think about technology, conduct business, and look to the future.
That is, of course, true for the logistics industry where emerging customer needs and requirements along with technological trends are impacting the sector to a great degree.
From employing new technologies to delivering value faster to shifting regulations that require new strategies and tactics to ensure compliance, logistics companies must stay plugged into new and emerging data-driven trends to beat the competition and grab a larger market share.
Data Integration in Transportation and Logistics
In the transportation and logistics industry, data is stored in multiple platforms such as on-premise ERP and cloud-based systems. Organizations rely on myriad data points in order to effectively forecast as well as streamline operations and enable real-time visibility of order and payment status, customer communications, carrier locations, and network capacity.
The transportation and logistics industries are currently facing a plethora of operational challenges in their daily functions, such as mismanagement of capacity, traffic congestion, and supply chain disruption. Data integration solutions allow them to overcome these challenges and deliver value at the speed of business.
Simply put, companies can leverage modern data integration technologies to automate processes, build data connections faster, and integrate new customers and partners – to improve ease of doing business and deliver delightful customer experiences.
Data integration allows data analysts and data engineers to facilitate maximum efficiency and optimize analysis of high-velocity sensor data and enterprise data, thus delivering time-sensitive information without delay.
These solutions empower even non-technical business users to instantly build data connections in a secure and easy way. With unique self-service and AI-enabled mapping functionalities, users can monitor and use bi-directional, complex customer feeds to facilitate better decision-making and ultimately deliver the promised value to customers. While self-service functionality enables business users to onboard, integrate, and use customer data faster to make decisions, AI-enabled data mapping tools help business users map, filter, aggregate, transform, enrich, and analyze sensor data without the need for IT to perform weeks of coding.
Data integration techniques help business users capture real-time information from enterprise databases and integrate it with sensor and machine data for a comprehensive overview of daily operations. It evaluates data-in-motion and responds to highly sensitive events like changes in traffic conditions or equipment malfunctions. That allows users to make accurate and timely decisions, thereby improving operational productivity and reducing costs. The advanced features such as real-time dashboards enable users to easily monitor data streams and compare them to historical data for swift insights.
Perks of Leveraging a Modern Data Integration Platform
Modern data integration platforms enable business users to transform operations and improve the ease of doing business with partners and customers.
Here are some of the main benefits offered by a modern data integration platform.
Higher Visibility
It helps users gain visibility across applications, vendors and partners, throughout the supply chain. By automating processes such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash, users can reduce the visibility gaps and thus deliver value – securely and easily.
Faster Onboarding
Users can rely on modern data integration solutions to onboard diverse complex customer data feeds in minutes. By onboarding data faster, users can leverage the insights extracted after analysis to improve decision-making. Not to mention, this makes a powerful first impression on customers, thus allowing organizations to unlock new revenue channels.
Improved Value Generation
Relying on modern data integration platforms can help users connect all transportation and logistics, service, and customer data in minutes instead of months. This enables users to determine capacities, deliver products on time, and improve customer satisfaction. Businesses can, therefore, easily speed operations, delight customers, and grab larger market share.