Transportation Business: Measuring your Container Cube Optimization
Guest post by
Aniruddha Suresh Parwekar, Principal Consultant - Business Intelligence, Oracle practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Transportation is one of the key elements of your Supply Chain Strategy. The primary objective of the Supply chain is to deliver a right product in right packaging and right condition to right customer at right time and right Cost. Transportation part of the supply chain can help you with goods delivered in right condition to right customer at right time and right cost. In short, Transportation can make more impact on the cost rather than revenue and bottom-line rather than top line. Hence, while transporting goods; typical objective of any Transportation manager would be to minimize the cost for freight.
Note: Cube refers to "volume of a cargo inside a container". Optimum Cube as defined by Webster dictionary is "The highest level of cube utilization that can be achieved when loading cargo into a container".
For our discussion, let us consider the scenario of inland freight via containerization. Capacity of containers can be measured by number of Cases, cubes or weights it can handle. There are many algorithms for optimizing the weight, volume or the combination also called as density. For now, let us assume that playing with the "Cube" is our strategy. So maximizing the volume of the container to reduce the freight cost per cubic unit is a no brainer. But one needs to consider; is maximizing the cube permissible? Would the weight added by making the container fill to its last cube be more than the permissible weight for that container or trailer that would be hauling or handling it? Would maximizing the cube make the unloading and loading difficult and costly? Are there any cube restrictions on the type of Cargo that is being hauled etc? But still Cube is one of the key factors that any Transportation Manager would look at while planning for his container optimization. So let us quickly focus on what metrics Transportation Managers would typically look from Cube Optimization point of view:
- They should determine whether there are any cube exceptions based on the type of good hauled, type of container used. This will be required more from Safety and Industry compliances.
- They should analyze the cases, cubes and weights per trailer per type of cargo that is being hauled. They should monitor this over time for each of their shipment and see if they are utilizing the volume efficiently? Can they tweak one of the triple constraints: case, cube or weight to get the minimum or rather optimum freight cost? They could also do a simple trend chart between time periods like week, month or years to analyze their performance across each type of Cargo.
- If you have multiple facilities of Origin and Destination, then you could do several other types of analysis like:
a. Cubes from a particular origin to destination by Cargo Type (identify opportunities at origin)
b. Cubes across multiple origin points for same type of Cargo (identify opportunities by type of cargo)
c. Cubes being received to same destinations from multiple origins (identify opportunities by destination) - Another analysis could be a variance analysis, where they have defined goals per Cargo Type and type of trailer used and see if these goals are being met. They could keep doing this analysis over time and over other dimensions mentioned earlier and come up with averages which could be used to benchmark with others or best in the industry.
- One could also analyze on loading and unloading time by volume (cube) in the trailer
- Last but not the least are the typical Top 'n' or Bottom 'n' analysis which gives a quick snapshot of who is doing the best and who is doing the worst and provides opportunity to share ideas for overall improvement.
So, the key question here would be - How does Business Intelligence (specifically Oracle Business Intelligence) play a role in enabling this?
- One can deliver exceptions directly to the mail inbox of the Manager / Supervisor via Oracle BI Delivers technology. It also enables delivery of mails to PDA, Smart Phones and personal dashboards on the Oracle BI. We can also trigger actions based on the exceptions by harnessing the power of Oracle's Fusion Middleware.
- Oracle BI provides rich capabilities of charting with line, bar, pie and other advanced charting options like Dials and Gauges. Line and bar charts together make the optimal option for any trending analysis.
- Top "n" and Bottom "n" is an out of box feature in Oracle and can be easily employed by the business user creating the report.
In all, any Business Intelligence Solution is as successful as how we could get our business customers engaged with it. We need to ensure that they get all the data that they are looking for meeting their business objectives and in this case cutting the costs. Oracle BI has proven to be a great enabler in harnessing the power of the data and in my experience proven to be a reliable and easy to use BI technology.
I will try to cover other aspects of Transportation Business Intelligence Solution in my subsequent blogs.
