How Smetric Insights helped a transport operator, Transcon, improve business performance and productivity using business intelligence to provide better reporting.
Background
Transcon is a transport business focusing on the Whangaparoa, Rodney and Otamatea regions through to Auckland. With a fleet of over 17 trucks they operate daily freight and container services from depots in Warkworth and Wellsford, to Auckland and beyond.
Transcon’s Reporting Challenges
Transcon was looking to implement business intelligence to provide a better reporting solution to help improve performance and productivity in their business. Blake Noble, Managing Director, had seen what Smetric Insights did for Walker Brothers Transport and knew that they had a good result.
It also showed Blake what was possible and that Smetric could tailor the reporting to extract what they needed.
Transcon uses a number of different systems to manage the business. They use Xero for the financials, EROAD to record vehicle mileage and movements, and iCosLive for transport management. They had used a number of other off the shelf reporting systems e.g. Spotlight and another product introduced to them by their former accountant.
“Our previous reporting was rigid with no tailoring to see things how we wanted to see them. We didn’t just want financial reporting; we wanted operational metrics, daily.”
But they were rigid with no tailoring to be able to see things how they wanted to see them. Those reporting systems also lacked the ease of extracting data from their financial as well as their operating systems.
They didn’t want just financial reporting. They needed operational metrics to track daily, weekly and monthly performance.
One of the key metrics they used was a month-on-month sales comparison to have visibility on individual customer usage. They used to do it manually every day, but not easily, and it was a static report in pdf format. It couldn’t be done remotely.
What Did We Do
Smetric tailored some connectors to extract the data they required from Xero, EROAD and iCosLive. The data is refreshed daily each morning at 5am.
Now, every morning, Blake can review what is going on in the business. Replacing the daily sheet of paper in the office with a set of interactive dashboards means that they not only have clear visibility on what is happening now, but they also have visibility on historical activity and see any changes.
What’s more, Blake can review the reports remotely. He can see everything he needs to see even when he is away from the office.
Result
- Saving time reporting
Having the dashboards refreshed daily, automatically, saves time every day. - Saving time looking at reports
They can new see at a glance what is going on from financial and operational reports. Blake finds it is way better than pouring over data in a spreadsheet to interpret what’s happening.