The quarterly business review is on Thursday
Your largest importer holds a quarterly review with you. They want transit times by lane against what you quoted, the proportion of shipments delivered on the booked date, costs per container and per cubic metre by lane, and volumes by supplier. An account manager spends the week before exporting jobs, matching them to tracking events, pulling invoice totals and building charts.
Two other customers want a monthly version of the same thing, each with slightly different measures. Every month, the work starts again.
Why the reports take so long
The information is all in your systems, but not in a form that answers a customer's question directly. Transit time needs milestone events, on-time needs a booked date and an actual one, cost per unit needs invoices matched to volumes.
- Milestone events may not be stored against jobs consistently.
- Each customer defines measures differently, such as which dates count as departure and arrival.
- Invoice totals are in accounts and have to be matched to jobs and volumes.
- Supplier and purchase order data may only exist in the customer's own spreadsheets.
- Reports are rebuilt from exports every period.
What it costs
Account managers spend days a month on reporting instead of on the customer. Reports are late or inconsistent from one period to the next, which undermines them. Mistakes in a customer-facing report are embarrassing. And forwarders who cannot report well look weaker at tender time than they really are.
The customer reporting we build
- Job, milestone and invoice data are gathered daily from your forwarding system, tracking sources and accounts.
- Each customer's measures are defined once with you: which milestones mark departure and arrival, what counts as on time, which costs are included in cost per unit.
- Measures are calculated per shipment, and exceptions such as missing events are flagged for your team to check.
- Reports are produced on a schedule in the layout each customer prefers, with the shipment-level detail available behind every figure.
- Customers can have a live view of the same measures if they want it, with only their own data.
- Your account managers can add commentary before a report goes out.
| Measure | Built by hand from | Calculated from |
|---|---|---|
| Transit time | Exports and tracking sites | Stored milestone events |
| On-time delivery | Spreadsheet comparisons | Booked and actual dates per shipment |
| Cost per unit | Accounts export plus volumes | Invoices matched to job volumes |
| Volumes by supplier | Customer spreadsheets | Jobs linked to supplier and order |
After
Reports go out on time and consistent from month to month. Account managers spend the week before a review preparing the conversation, not the spreadsheet. Measures are defined clearly, so disagreements about figures are rarer. And when a tender asks how you report performance, you can show it.
The figures also help you internally. When on-time performance slips on one lane, the account manager sees it in the same data the customer will, before the review rather than during it, and has time to find out why: a carrier's schedule reliability, a slow transhipment port, or a haulage problem at the UK end. The review becomes a discussion of causes rather than a debate about numbers.
Checklist
- Customer KPI reports are built in spreadsheets every month.
- Different customers want different measures.
- Reports have gone out late or with errors.
- Milestone data is incomplete on jobs.
- Account managers dread review week.