I’ve spent a lot of time recently making PowerPoint slides for two panel presentations that were given by my colleagues today. They presented at the annual conference of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) in Orlando. Everything was wrapped up by Friday afternoon, and our folks flew diagonally across the continent over the weekend. By the time I got back into the office on Monday, the data was so different that I had to replace half of the PowerPoint slides.
I owe a debt of gratitude to all the nerds at Apple, Google, Microsoft and a host of other tech companies that made it possible for me to update those slides and send them across the country instantaneously. Really, it’s miraculous. I’m old enough to remember ordering 35-millimeter slides a few weeks in advance — not to mention renting a slide projector — whenever I had to make a presentation. I may be ancient, but I do keep up.
This experience also gave me a deeper appreciation for the data we provide at DAT. It really, truly does change every day. You may be looking at a highly aggregated view — 90-day average rates or national load-to-truck ratios — but those aren’t snapshots. They’re mosaics, composed of millions of interactions that, taken together, form a picture.
Here are a couple of those pictures:
