Continuous Improvement

Written by John Wills (VP of Product)

As part of my role at Shipnet, I am fortunate enough to meet regularly with customers, stakeholders and generally respected figures in the industry to talk about the trends, emerging tech and possible opportunities for innovation. This is (for me at least) fascinating stuff, and I often come away from these discussions with my head full of possibilities and ideas. 

One of the recurring themes in these discussions is analytics. Prior to me joining shipping (coincidentally, almost six years to the day now), I worked as a CIO and strategic advisor to businesses in the UK, and the very strong trend then was all around enabling money saving/generating insight from vast amounts of unstructured and semi structured data that they held in all kinds of disjointed systems. In short - Analytics drove continuous improvement to realise more revenues or greater savings, but the challenge was to get the data in a single place so that you can then analyse it for the improvements. Not a trivial job!

At Shipnet, I’m significantly luckier. Here all of the necessary data is conveniently located within a single integrated database, meaning that the analytics and reporting capability we have is significantly simple to use. 

Those tools (which we provide as part of every Shipnet deployment) include an attractive visual report writing (i.e. what you see is what you get) application, and a very easy to use dashboard creator. If you can use a pivot table in Excel, you can start creating your own dashboards straight away, or you can work with us to select from our extensive library of pre-existing ones. You can then tweak those to your heart’s content, or if you want something novel, we can create it for you to order. You don’t need SQL skills to do this, but if you do have them, you’ll be able to combine any data from any part of your service and display it using maps, charts, graphs, tables, dials, gauges and many other widgets.

Finally, you can also publish those dashboards to non-Shipnet users (or even your customers- using your reports as a revenue generator for your business!), using our web Analytics tool. 

Neat stuff, eh? And all part of any Shipnet solution.

John Wills

VP Product

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