The parcel world is only getting more complex. Monitoring and optimizing your spend and performance across multiple services and carriers has never been harder.
Shipping reporting is a strategy every shipper should be implementing to help track and report on the metrics that matter most to you and your business.
What is Shipping Reporting?
Shipping reporting involves tracking and analyzing parcel shipping data through reports. Most commonly, the goal of shipping reporting is to derive insights to understand your shipping performance and make more informed operational decisions.
From a high level, there are two different types of shipping reporting:
- Reporting on Transit: How are your carriers performing? Are they delivering your shipments on time? How long does it take them to get from one place to the other?
- Reporting on Costs: How much are you paying your parcel carriers? Are your rates competitive? What is the best rate for the types of packages you ship?
When it comes to reporting on parcel costs, it’s crucial to look at the granular level – not just your total cost. Additional charges to your profile add up quickly, and could eat away at your bottom line if left unchecked.
Why is Shipping Reporting Important?
Shipping reporting can have significant benefits for your business. For instance:
- Cost Control and Optimization: Shipping reporting helps businesses understand shipping costs, accessorial charges, and inefficiencies
- Improved Decision-Making: With accurate and real-time data, businesses can make forward-thinking decisions with confidence
- Customer Satisfaction and Retention: Your shipping performance directly impacts customer satisfaction; reporting can help monitor delivery times, delays, and more
- Performance Benchmarking: Shipping reports allow businesses to benchmark for performance against competitors and industry standards, highlighting areas for improvement
SiftedAI’s Reporting Studio
SiftedAI’s Reporting Studio is a BI (Business Intelligence) tool designed for parcel shippers who want the power and flexibility to build out reports and visualizations without having to manage data exports or work with clunky files.
The Reporting Studio includes full report-building and customization features, putting the power in your hands to tailor visualizations to your unique business needs.
Will Green, Senior Solutions Engineer at Sifted, talks about what makes the SiftedAI Reporting Studio a powerful tool.
“Without Sifted, companies are doing a lot of work on time consuming reporting,” Green said. “Before Reporting Studio, we had a lot of customers who were working in Excel or outside tools, now you don’t have to go through that step. We’re consolidating the process even further so you can just operate directly inside of our platform. The data you need is all there–it’s really empowering you to use your data however you want to.”
Benefits of Using SiftedAI’s Reporting Studio for Your Shipping Reports
Dynamic Functionality
With SiftedAI’s Reporting Studio, reports are not a one time, static resource. Using this tool, you’ll have the ability to continuously build out reports on your own that update automatically and showcase how your operations are performing overtime.
There’s no need to import new data into the studio, unless you’re working with a custom dataset, your carrier data is already normalized and synced to the Sifted platform.
Time Savings
Because the Reporting Studio puts the power in shippers’ hands, you don’t have to wait for an outside source to derive insights, instead you get to self service and immediately share insights with your organization and internal teams.
Personalization
With SiftedAI’s Reporting Studio, you have the opportunity to customize reports to see exactly what you need, without all the extra details.
Although you don’t have to import carrier data since it’s already synced to the platform, you do have the option to import custom datasets into the Reporting Studio – such as SKU level data or customer insights. This feature gives you even more flexibility to measure KPIs specific to your business.
User-Friendly
If you are familiar with tools like Excel or Power BI, working in the Reporting Studio will be an easy transition for your team. SiftedAI’s user-friendly interface makes building your own reports quick and easy—no coding required.
Get a Demo of SiftedAI
Sifted’s latest innovation in Logistics Intelligence, SiftedAI, was built to simplify parcel complexity, lower costs and do the heavy lifting for shippers. It continuously monitors your shipping spend and performance, providing the analytics and tools needed to achieve 100% optimization.
The Reporting Studio is a premium solution for shippers that want to take customization a step further within the platform.
If you are interested in learning more about how SiftedAI and the Reporting Studio can help you monitor and optimize your shipping profile, schedule a demo.
Existing SiftedAI users: The Reporting Studio is a feature that you can add on to your package anytime. If you are interested in upgrading or learning more about building a personalized plan, reach out to your SiftedAI team member or [email protected].
