Today’s supply chain management landscape is rapidly evolving. Businesses face immense pressure to optimize operations, enhance customer service and reduce costs.

As a result, companies turn to logistics providers. Logistic companies — whether 3PL or 4PL — have the expertise to ensure that inbound and outbound delivery operations run smoothly. 

Challenges in the Current State

Despite these strengths, logistics providers face several challenges that impact both customers and internal teams, including:

• Manual effort: Significant time is spent manually generating customer reports using spreadsheets.
• Lack of transparency: Potential delays are often discovered too late. This leads to customer frustrations and missed opportunities for proactive and collaborative solutions.
• Scalability: If a logistics provider wants to expand business, the ability to guarantee meeting SLAs is crucial. Large accounts will not tolerate less than stellar performance.
• Cost pressures: Large accounts can negotiate low rates. Logistics providers need to ensure that these are still profitable.

As a result, 3PLs and 4PLs need efficient, scalable enterprise solutions. These should address both current inefficiencies and future growth ambitions.

Unprecedented Visibility through an Intelligent Control Tower

The concept of a Control Tower is not new to logistics. However, many do not offer the insights that logistics providers — or their customers — actually need for continuous improvement.

A true Control Tower requires granular process performance indicators and real time data. This is because your process reality is different to your process design. This difference is where you will unlock efficiency and cost savings.

Process intelligence is a transformative approach to the concept of a Control Tower that uses log-data and algorithms to provide insights into ongoing business processes. 

This technology can significantly enhance decision-making. It offers a clear picture of what is actually happening within key processes. This allows logistic providers to identify strengths and pinpoint areas for improvement by analyzing process fluidity and variations, allowing them to optimize operations more effectively.

You Don’t Know Your Processes As Well As You Think

This may sound like a provocative statement. Nonetheless, this is true for almost every business.

Consider a process like preparing a pallet for shipping. You understand what should happen, but not necessarily what will happen.

Illuminating the gap between the theory and practice is what process intelligence is about.

Every process has its own “happy path” — each step of the process happens perfectly. However, through discovery, you will find hundreds, possibly thousands, of variations. These non-compliant journeys impact efficiency, productivity and profitability.

The video clip above illustrates the time-lapse of a pallet moving through the shipment preparation process, with each dot representing an individual pallet. While the designed process appears linear, once it is executed in a live environment, it often evolves into a process with loops, rework and skipped steps.   

On occasion, these deviations are due to one-off orders that did not follow the correct process steps. More often than not, you will find patterns of bottlenecks that you were not aware of. These deviations, though not accounted for in the designed process, can inadvertently become the standard.

Every non-compliant journey within the process can lead to profit leaks, and when these deviations occur at scale, they can generate losses that are difficult to identify and address.

We call this visualization “process discovery.” It offers valuable insights into how your processes are working. But this is just the first step in process optimization.

Understanding Your Processes

Process intelligence leverages predictive and generative AI in three key steps to help you understand and improve your processes. These are:

1. Process discovery
2. Process monitoring
3. Process enhancement

QAD Process Intelligence offers a multi-level capability framework designed to provide real-time insights and predictive analytics. Identifying anomalies and addressing potential issues before they escalate enables logistics companies to transition from a reactive to a predictive mode of operation.

Put simply, you follow this journey:

• Reactive: Where did the issues occur that resulted in the problem?
• Proactive: How are my processes currently performing?
• Predictive: What is the predicted outcome for unit X?
• Preventative: I will take this action to avoid challenge Y, with unit X.

We start by analyzing your processes. Once this is complete, you are able to leverage data-driven process improvements.

The Benefits of Process Intelligence

• Proactive operations: Logistics providers can anticipate potential challenges and take preventive action. This shifts the mindset of customer operation teams to being proactive instead of reactive.
• Predictive capabilities: By predicting outcomes based on real-time data, logistics providers can make more informed decisions. This reduces costly errors and improves service levels.
• Efficiency gains: With process intelligence you can automate data analyzing and reporting. This frees up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual tasks.
• Customer dashboards: Personalized live dashboards give customers visibility into the status of their own orders and shipments. This allows them to understand the exact status of shipments, cutting down WISMO — “Where is my order?” — calls.

How Process Intelligence Delivers ROI for Logistics Providers

Process Intelligence delivers a clear return on investment by addressing current inefficiencies and unlocking new value. Some of the key benefits include:

• Human efficiency: Process intelligence automates manual processes. For example, your teams can generate customer reports in minutes, not days. 
• Penalty fee reduction: Logistics providers can reduce costly penalties by minimizing delays. 
• Root cause analysis: Customers are quick to blame logistics providers if something goes wrong. But at times, the customer is the cause of bottlenecks. Process intelligence enables you to identify the underlying cause. As a result, logistics providers can be more effective in defending against penalties with the power of actual data.
• Competitive advantage: Process intelligence control towers enhance a logistics provider’s ability to demonstrate value to prospective clients. Increased efficiency also improves customer retention.
• Savings on expedited orders: It is more cost-effective to prevent delays than rectify them. 4PLs, in particular, need to reduce the need for expensive last-minute expedited shipments. 

Logistics providers live in a world where: 

1. Customer expectations are rising
2. Operations are increasingly complex
3. Profits are being squeezed

Process intelligence gives visibility into what is happening now, and what will happen next. Logistics providers can leverage these real-time, granular insights to make data-driven decisions. This transforms business operations and boosts customer satisfaction. The result is increased operational efficiency, and a stronger, more competitive business.

To see how QAD Process Intelligence can revolutionize your logistics operations, please contact us here.