Big Data is transforming numerous fields of business. It is helping industries recognize the needs of their target audience. Logistics is one of the revolutionizing areas that is benefitting through advanced data-driven technology. Read on to find out the use of Big Data analytics in freight transportation and how your eCommerce business can benefit from it.
What is Big Data Analytics?
It is an intricate way of interpreting vast and varied sets of data for extracting meaningful information. It can be hidden patterns, undiscovered correlations, market trends, or buyer’s preferences that enable you to make well-informed business decisions.
Bulk information is accumulated through devices such as mobiles, tablets, software, logs, RFID readers, remote sensing, etc. and analyzed for obtaining valuable information necessary for devising effective strategies for your business growth. Click here to read more about Big Data Analytics.
Use of Big Data Analytics in Reducing Transportation Costs
The movement of goods from one place to another is complex and requires safe and efficient delivery. Big Data is impacting the overall operations of the logistics industry and helping businesses reduce their cost of transportation in the following ways:
Route Optimization
Every logistics service provider needs to ensure they are neither using excess resources nor underutilizing them. Be it putting too many vehicles on a single delivery route or fewer resources than needed; it impacts the supply chain and adds to the expenses. Big data allows you to mitigate costs and save your money through efficient route optimization.
By equipping sensors on your delivery trucks, accumulating the weather and the road maintenance data, and managing the fleet maintenance and personnel schedules, you can examine the data for identifying the existing trends and optimize your routes accordingly for maximum efficiency.
Besides, route optimization benefits you significantly in the following ways:
Save Cost of Fuel
Selecting an optimal route for delivering the shipments saves the cost of fuel. Moreover, the regular analysis of historical data allows you to distinguish the likely changes that may occur in the fuel costs, allowing you to determine your freight budget accordingly..
Reduce Vehicle Usage
Optimal routes lessen the requirement for multiple resources, easing you with one of the primary obstacles of unavailability of sufficient vehicles for pick-ups and delivery of shipments.
Predictive Maintenance
An unanticipated asset downtime can impact the supply chain in more than one way. Predictive maintenance allows you to identify failure patterns and anomalies through predictive algorithms for you to learn from those patterns for predicting future failures of machine components, so they can be replaced before they even fail. It helps keep unwarranted costs at bay and amend the efficiency of the supply chain.
Forecasting Future Disruptions
Through data analytics, you can foresee the likely future disruptions in the form of bad weather, or geopolitical stability before they happen and proactively manage your transportation operations. It enables you to steer clear of the possible delays, particularly, during the last-mile delivery for maintaining fulfillment of the end-customers.
Conclusion
It’s apparent that for freight logistics, Big Data analytics is the solution to opening new doors of cost-savings and efficiency. If you want to reduce transportation costs and maximize your delivery efficiency, you need to start relying on data-backed solutions to transform your business from human-driven to a data-driven organisation.
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