Data driven decisions rely on facts and experience rather than guessing and intuition. When you make decisions for your transportation business based on data and facts rather than guesswork, you’re giving way to less risk.
Reducing the risk also allows for greater room for growth and improvement. By taking the data, you are seeing the evidence of what has worked and also quite possibly, what hasn’t. Don’t waste time testing the same strategies over and over. Pull your data so you can see where inefficiencies may lie and where improvements can be made.
What Are Data Driven Decisions?
A data-driven approach means you are utilizing the data you have to help make the right decisions for your business. Instead of simply attempting a new strategy based on your impulse, you can use the data you have to see what has worked in the past.
Data can be retrieved from nearly everything these days and that means you’re able to use facts instead of opinions. Using data driven decisions helps you utilize what worked and avoid what didn’t without the waste. Using data to back your business decisions can help to minimize the risks.
How Do Data Driven Decisions Work?
Data driven decisions work by taking the data you have and making wise business decisions according to that data. Simply looking at the data you have won’t do though. There’s too much and you need to have a plan.
If you aren’t sure what data resources you have or how to utilize them, a transport management system may be a good option. Create objectives that will more easily allow you to detect the data you need. Up-to-date, accurate, and quality data is a must to ensure you are able to make the best data driven decisions for your business.
By analyzing relevant data, the evidence of what works and what doesn’t will be much more clear allowing you to make easier, quicker, more effective decisions for your business.
Advantages of Transportation Business Analytics
Utilizing data to drive your transportation business decisions can be incredibly beneficial for your operations. Read on to learn more about a few of the main advantages you may see when you start letting your data work for you.
Informed Strategies
Data driven decisions help you to create more informed strategies. While mistakes are unavoidable, when they do happen, you’ll be able to understand what occurred to ensure you can prevent the same issue from happening again in the future.
Testing new business plans is generally less threatening when you derive your plans from data collected. This is because there is typically less room for a major fallout. If you create a business plan simply on intuition, you have zero ideas if it will succeed or fail.
When you create your strategies on data and evidence, the chance for failure declines greatly and if it does fail, it’s less likely to be as detrimental because you’ve seen the potential outcomes. Thankfully, with the right data, making these business decisions can typically be done much more quickly as you have the facts you need right in front of you.
Continuous Growth
One great advantage of technology is that it doesn’t get distracted by every detail. With data, this means that it can make it easier to see new growth opportunities.
When you’re able to measure performance, you can more easily eliminate what doesn’t work and move on to try the new potential opportunities that will. Spending less time on strategies that don’t work means you’re wasting less money.
This, in turn, allows you to focus and spend more where your business needs. With constant demands and challenges, growing a transportation operation can be tough. Knowing the common issues and how to avoid and resolve them is vital.
Greater Transparency
When you are making your business decisions based on the data you have, the transparency of your business is generally greatly improved. It helps to encourage and motivate your employees to work together for the company.
With a dependable team working together, stronger relationships are built allowing for easier communication in all areas. When your data is out there and your employees see that you are working to make the best, informed decisions, they will be working towards the same goal right alongside you.
Improved Accountability
With greater transparency of your company comes improved accountability. Your employees are aiming towards the same goal and they’re working together to get there. Properly managing your company’s data becomes a necessary and communal touch point for everyone involved.
Transportation Business Decisions You Can Make Using Data
Data affects all areas of business, you may just not think about it if it isn’t a negative impact. Your supply chain, financials, every aspect of your business has some form of data related to it.
Using a data-driven approach in the following areas is especially recommended:
Growth
Are your current customers happy? What are additional features you can promote to reach new customers? How can you avoid customer churn?
Hiring Practices
Do your new hire practices make sense? Is training cost-effective? What’s the turnaround for training a new hire?
Marketing
Is advertising worth it? What type of advertising channel are you using? Is it working? What is your ROI?
Customer Support
Is your customer support team efficient? Are your customers happy? How do you handle customer support needs? Is it the right way? What are your response times?
6 Steps To Making Data Driven Decisions To Improve Your Transportation Business
You likely already have the data, so why not let it work for you? Properly analyzing the data you have is imperative to ensuring it can help improve your business as it requires. Read about the six main steps that can help you make better data driven decisions to help grow your transportation business.
Step 1: Set Meaningful Goals
Knowing your business objectives is a necessary aspect when looking to grow. Without goals, where will you go? What you are looking to improve must be clear and well-defined.
Once you’ve decided what your goals are, you can move on to finding the relevant data to support your goals and objectives. Establishing varying KPIs, or key performance indicators will help you determine which data you will need to find and analyze.
Step 2: Find Relevant Data
Once again, it is imperative that you have and know your goals. Without this main point, you will absolutely be wasting time pulling a load of data that will have little to no effect on your company’s growth. Once you’ve determined your goals, you will be able to pull all of the relevant data around each aspect.
Step 3: Analyze the Data
Analyzing the data you’ve pulled is the next step to ensuring you can help yourself make the right data driven decisions for your business. Finding patterns, good or bad, will help you see what is successful and what is not.
There are different reports and ways you can view your data that will allow you to get a better visualization of your data. Varying graphs, charts, and maps may give you greater insight into the trends. When you have an understanding of the trends, it will be easier for you to draw conclusions, which will aid you in the creation of better business strategies.
Step 4: Create and Implement a Strategy
When you’ve seen the data and the evidence or facts, you’re left to use that information and plan your strategy. You’ve made your decision, and now you have to make a plan to implement it.
Your plan here must be thorough. Who is doing what and when? What is the expected outcome? Don’t leave room for failure. Instead, designate responsibility for each aspect to ensure there are no gaps. Then, you can move forward with your strategy and your business plan.
Step 5: Measure Success
Now that you’ve created and implemented your new business plan and your strategy, you’ll need to measure its success or lack thereof. The likelihood of a drastic failure will be less when you’ve been utilizing a data driven approach to make your business decisions.
Now’s the time to pull new data, analyze it, and compare it to the first set of data you pulled before you made the changes. Did your data driven business strategy make an impact on your goal? Was it positive? Or was it negative?
A negative outcome doesn’t always have to be viewed as a failure. Knowing which strategies don’t work can be equally as important as knowing which ones do.
Step 6: Repeat Regularly
The last step in making these decisions is to simply repeat this process regularly. The practice of pulling data relevant to your company’s objectives will need to be constant if you are continually looking to grow and improve your business’ success.
Even if you’ve seen success with a recent strategy, checking in and analyzing the data regularly will help you stay on top of its success. Not all strategies will work forever, so paying attention to the performance of your strategies is key. Even a slight adaptation may be all that’s needed to make sure it continues to help your company improve.
Use Your Data For Transportation Business Growth
The data is there. In fact, there is more data than you likely need out there. Having a data-driven approach towards your transportation business will help you make more effective decisions that will help improve your operations.
Data driven decisions are becoming the norm, which is excellent as it ensures that you won’t just be left to guess and hope anymore. When you are looking to grow, improve, or streamline your operations, utilizing data is one of the greatest decisions you can make!
FAQ
Making data driven decisions helps you drive business growth by focusing on the areas you want to improve. You can utilize the data, or facts, you already have to make improvements or cuts where necessary.
Promoting data-driven decision making can be as simple as providing the evidence. Show people the proof of what has worked and what hasn’t to help alleviate failing at the same thing twice.
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