Supply Chain Network Optimization
Supply Chain Network Optimization
The right supply chain optimization techniques can help improve your transportation pricing, routing, and bidding strategies.
Once you’ve established an operational supply chain network, it’s important to always be looking for ways to improve your efficiency. However, rethinking your approach requires accurate data and proper network optimization techniques for the supply chain. DAT’s accurate benchmarks and forecasts identify key performance indicators and help you optimize supply chain networks.
- Take an evidence-based approach to refining your network optimization supply chain.
- Generate reports and analyses with DAT’s supply chain network optimization tools.
- Optimize your supply chain and lay the groundwork for success.
Take an evidence-based approach to refining your strategies.
DAT iQ processes more than annual freight transactions, providing real-time analysis and rates for lanes.
To maximize the efficiency of your trucking supply chain, you need a deep well of accurate data that allows you to pinpoint the areas of improvement. This data also needs to be relevant to the problem being solved. That’s why, rather than creating a proxy for trucking volumes using a metric like tender rejection, DAT iQ measures actual shipments that are moved, both under contract and on the spot market.
Generate reports and analyses tailored to your supply chain.
Get a clearer view of market conditions and the factors impacting your logistics and transportation strategies — all in easy-to-read graphs.
Optimize supply chain networks and lay the groundwork for your success.
Armed with actionable insights, accurate market rates, and context for your pricing strategies, you can identify inefficiencies and streamline your business.
Powered by advanced supply chain network optimization software, DAT iQ offers multiple ways to access the freight market data we gather and organize for our clients. The Freight Market Intelligence Consortium (FMIC) is a subscription platform that offers shippers unparalleled insight into market rates and cost volatility — which can help drive measurable results during your supply chain network architecture optimization processes.
Free resources like DAT Trendlines give you a glimpse of updates on market rates and spot budget risk for different transportation modes.
Supply chain network design and optimization is especially critical in the transportation and logistics network optimization businesses because of what’s known as a “diseconomy of scale.” Generally speaking, when you purchase a product in increasingly higher quantities, the per-unit cost goes down.
However, this isn’t true for the trucking industry — more loads on a given lane can actually lead to a higher cost per load. This isn’t good for carriers, who distribute their assets and services across balanced networks, and for whom the matter of taking on additional loads isn’t always as simple as a verbal agreement. Increased demand and pressure from other market factors can disrupt these networks without a proper procurement strategy in place to account for tight market conditions.
Supply chain optimization software provides a method of analyzing your operations and comparing your rates and performance against real market data so that you can determine the areas where you’re excelling and the places that could use more attention in your network modeling. By ensuring that your network is operating as efficiently as possible, you can minimize your overhead and increase profits at the same time.
Most supply chain management professionals use the practice of rate benchmarking to understand how they are performing as compared to similar organizations across the market — and the same is true for both logistics network optimization and transportation network optimization.
Knowing how your truckload supply chain costs stack up against the competition on your preferred lanes is a key part of supply chain network optimization. Most of all, it allows you to determine whether your service level agreement, cost, or efficiency metrics might be creating challenges for your business.
We vet DAT iQ’s rate forecasting against confirmed third-party information, allowing us to provide rate forecasting with two times the accuracy of our competitors’ prediction models. However, we understand that rates can change rapidly on certain lanes, especially those with higher degrees of volatility (e.g. those in Georgia and Florida), which can increase the margin of error for rate forecasting. Our rate forecasts always include a margin of error — that way, you can decide for yourself what’s best for your network optimization supply chain strategy.
Shippers who join the FMIC provide DAT with anonymous transaction-level data on a regular basis (which can vary from weekly to annually). We also conduct in-depth surveys and reports, allowing us to determine the variables and factors on the minds of other supply chain logistics professionals like yourself. Our cutting-edge data analytics engine breaks down this trove of user-contributed data, enabling us to provide you with actionable insights and reports on the state of the market that can help refine your approach to logistics network optimization and distribution network optimization.
Currently, more than 130 shipping companies operating across the entirety of North America contribute transaction information to the FMIC. A typical year’s total looks like more than 30 million market transactions totalling nearly $30 billion value. Joining the FMIC gives you access to the same supply chain network optimization reports, dashboards, and analysis tools used by leading shipping operations in the U.S.
We do! Our supply chain network optimization software doesn’t stop at crunching the numbers on raw market data — they can be used to improve your operational efficiency, too. DAT iQ generates custom business reports that track your logistics network optimization. You can also look at underlying market data, historical rates, and forecasts through DAT iQ. If you’re not sure what you should be trying to streamline and optimize your supply chain network, our expert team is here to help you determine which supply chain network optimization issues you may want to tackle first.