Sharing insight from route planning software can boost performance across your business

How do you share transport office KPIs across your organisation? Are reports produced manually and distributed by email each week? Or do you compile ad hoc reports when an issue arises?

More and more of the transport operations we talk to are looking to use delivery services to differentiate their brand against the competition. If this is the case in your business, then the performance of your delivery service is going to be of interest to your colleagues outside of the transport office. With that added visibility comes the need to share KPIs more widely. But how do you do this quickly and efficiently?

You’ll know that route planning software creates transport plans based on vehicle type and availability, customer locations, customer orders and service requirements. Automating your transport planning process will reduce the amount of time spent planning but it can also reduce time spent creating management reports. With the information stored in your route planning software, you can produce a wide range of different reports, at a detailed level, that showcase the performance of your transport operations. These might include reduced cost per drop or better truck usage.

But your route planning software also contains a wealth of other information that could be used across your business to improve customer service, or profitability. For example, you can report on

• successful first-time deliveries
• on-time deliveries within the promised time window
• installations completed successfully on first attempt

If you’re a 3PL trying to win new contracts, this will be gold dust for the sales team trying to prove how reliable your delivery service is. Equally, marketing teams looking for stats to prove how good your service is will find this data invaluable. Finance directors or heads of customer service trying to work out the cost to serve individual customers, or customer types will be able to analyse delivery costs on a per customer basis.

Streamline the reporting process

Sharing this business critical information can be time consuming if it’s carried out manually. Using Paragon software, you can set up reports that are then automatically emailed out at a time and frequency of your choice – e.g. every Monday at 5am, or the last Friday of the month – to all relevant managers that want visibility without logging in to your routing and scheduling software.

Paragon’s automatic reporting feature – functionality that comes as standard with our Live Management module – eliminates time-consuming data extraction and report creation. Using these reports, managers can quickly and easily view daily, weekly or monthly performance to identify ways of improving customer service and reducing costs.

Easy to share in multiple formats

Your route planning software offers reports that you want to share, but you don’t want to pay a software licence for everybody to access the data, or ask your colleagues to login to an unfamiliar interface to access the information.

Paragon holds all data in a SQL database. This means that it can be easily output into formats such as Crystal reports, Excel spreadsheets or PDFs. These documents can then be shared via email with your colleagues.

When customers integrate Paragon routing and scheduling software with vehicle tracking systems then performance against actual data is also available. This data can be displayed in an HTML format in real-time. For example, managers can view per cent of deliveries on-schedule against target via a simple web-based browser on a monitor or a tablet.

Typically our support team sets up a number of reports as part of the software implementation process. But if customers need a little help to produce more detailed reports for specific areas of the business, our Paragon hotline team is always on hand to help with advice. If you want to find out more about Paragon’s powerful reporting functionality, why not get in touch to discuss your requirements in more detail.