Logistics is the backbone of your e-commerce business. And it’s been telling you a story. Understanding that story could significantly impact customer satisfaction and your bottom line. However, like all other e-commerce businesses, your logistics operation–and the resulting data–is incredibly complex. 

Simply looking at charts and graphs is insufficient to get an overview of what is happening in your logistics setup. To get actionable insights, or the actual “story,” your reports should arrange logistics data from carriers with other metrics. 

For instance, a chart that shows carrier delivery issues lets you see which carrier is not performing well. However, if you layer it with geographic data, you might discover that the root cause of performance issues could be warehousing problems in a particular country that the carrier serves. 

To help you discover the logistics “stories” that matter, we recently upgraded our standard reports to help logistics teams and decision-makers get the best possible insights from your logistics data and keep your logistics operations running smoothly and efficiently. 

These reports can be found in the Analyze tab in your Parcel Perform dashboard and are designed according to logistics reporting best practices. With just a glance, you can evaluate shipments, resolve problems, find the best carrier partners, and optimize your transit time. Here are some details of each report and how they can be used to optimize your logistics operations. 

Overview of Shipments - Understand key trends in shipment volume

The Overview of Shipments report can be used to analyze key trends in your shipment volume

The Overview of Shipments report is best used for shipment volume analysis and enables the decision-makers to get an accurate overview of business and shipment health. It comprises 3 key charts, Shipment Count (Country), Shipments Over Time, and Shipment Status. With just a glance, you immediately see key trends in your shipment volume that can help you make business decisions faster.

For instance, if shipment volume is rising, you can initiate countermeasures like increasing inventory levels to meet increasing demand. Besides the standard view, filters and tags can also be applied to single out insights that matter. For example, you can use the “Destination Country” filter to see the business health of a specific country or “Delivery Mode” tags to understand how a specific delivery mode is performing. 

Overview of Issues - Identify and resolve shipment bottlenecks

The Overview of Issues report lets you quickly identify shipment bottlenecks that require your attention

When your customers don’t get their orders on time, their satisfaction takes a nosedive. The impact on your bottom line could be difficult to recover from. That is why e-commerce businesses take delivery issues very seriously. However, most carriers label each issue differently. If you work with multiple carriers, you end up with multiple descriptions of the same problem. 

With Parcel Perform, information from all sources is normalized into one cohesive standard, making our reports much more accurate. For example, if three carriers encountered a hold-up at customs. Instead of counting them as three separate issues, our reports count them as one issue happening three times. 

As of today, the number of standard issues we consolidate from 1,015+ carriers stands at 67, one of the highest in the industry. It gives your logistics leaders an accurate overview of delivery issues and helps pinpoint exactly what needs their attention. Having such granularity also lets you decipher if underperformance is due to a specific carrier, seasonal behavior, or regional problems (e.g., strict customs or poor local infrastructure). 

Carrier Performance - Benchmark shipment volume and transit times

The Carrier Performance report lets you benchmark shipment volume and transit times and find the carrier that suits your business

Your carrier partners are an extension of your business. Their service quality directly impacts your reputation, customer satisfaction, and bottom line. If customers are unhappy with the delivery, your reputation is hit, and they stop buying from you. If they’re inefficient or overloaded, your costs rise due to more WISMO queries and higher shipping overheads. 

That is why our Analyze standard reports focus on creating a report that gives you instant insights into carrier performance. By comparing shipment volume and transit times, your business (and logistics team) can quickly see which carriers deliver orders according to customer expectations and which ones do not meet delivery service quality standards. 

These insights help you make better load distribution decisions. For example, if Carrier A has more issues in a particular country than Carrier B, your logistics team can allocate more deliveries to Carrier B to maintain fulfillment quality. At the same time, they can also negotiate for better rates due to an increased load to lower overall costs. 

Transit Time (First Attempt) - In-depth analysis of carrier performance

The Transit Times (First attempt) report gives you a closer look at how individual carriers are performing in specific geographic locations

Transit time is the only performance metric your customers care about. That makes it a priority for your logistics team. To help them stay informed on this critical metric, we made the Transit Time (First Attempt) report standalone to facilitate an in-depth analysis of carrier performance. The transit time charts in the Carrier Performance report are for carrier comparisons. 

However, the transit time charts are for logistics teams to look closely at performance according to individual carriers and destinations. For instance, the primary “Transit Time Overview” chart helps you understand transit times at different periods over the year, while the “Transit Time Distribution Over Time” chart helps you understand carrier consistency regarding performance. 

Finally, you have the “Transit Time Overview Per Destination Country and Carrier” table. This table allows you to quickly compare individual carriers' overall transit time performance side-by-side to find out which is performing better and more consistently. We’ve also included filters so you can take a deep dive into performance by delivery mode, warehouse, domestic, or international shipments. 

Smoother operations, lower costs, happier customers

Success in logistics operations can be elusive. Many factors can cause even the most well-oiled logistics machine to fail. The only way to mitigate these factors is to have as much data and information as possible. Parcel Perform’s Analyze module is designed to provide unprecedented transparency into your operations. 

Instead of throwing numbers and charts at your logistics team, we created four definitive reports that give you all the information you need to keep logistics operations running smoothly. These standard reports use your logistics data and tell the operations “story” your team needs to hear. 

To find out how you can have these “stories” at your fingertips, book a demo with our e-commerce logistics experts. Learn how to start with Parcel Perform’s industry-leading data and delivery experience platform.