The first week of every month goes on one spreadsheet
Your largest customer, a distributor who ships a steady flow of pallets every night, has a quarterly review with you and wants monthly figures in between. How many pallets, how many delivered on time, which ones failed and why, any damage, and a breakdown by their own sales region.
So somebody exports consignments from the network system, pastes them into a spreadsheet, looks up failures one by one, adds the damage claims from the email folder and builds charts. It takes days. Two more customers have asked for something similar, each in their own format.
The data exists but not in the customer's shape
The network system holds most of what customers ask about, and your own records hold the rest. The trouble is that nothing turns it into a report without a person in the middle.
- Exports come in the network's layout, not the customer's.
- Failure reasons and claims are recorded in different places.
- Customers want figures by their own references, regions or product lines.
- Each customer asks for a slightly different report.
What hand-built reports cost
Office days, first, at a time of month when invoicing also needs doing. Then errors: a spreadsheet built by hand each month drifts in how it counts, and a customer who notices a figure changing from one month to the next starts to doubt all of them.
The strategic cost is that you cannot offer good reporting to customers you are trying to win, because producing it for three accounts is already too much.
And reports built late are used late. By the time the customer reads about a bad week, it is five weeks old.
There is a dependency risk too. The report is usually built by one person who knows which export to run, which columns to delete and which customer references need fixing by hand. When they are off at month end, the report is late, and the customer notices.
How we produce the reports
- Consignment, tracking and POD data is collected from the network system through member exports or API, along with your claims and failed delivery records.
- Each customer's own references, regions or product codes are carried through from their bookings.
- Measures are calculated with definitions agreed with you and written on the report, so they are counted the same way every month.
- Each customer has a report layout, built once, which refreshes automatically at month end.
- Reports are sent as PDF or spreadsheet, and optionally shown on a customer portal where they can see the month so far.
- Your office reviews each report before it goes out, with a note field for anything that needs explaining.
| Customer asks for | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Consignments by service | Network bookings |
| On-time delivery | Tracking and POD times |
| Failures and reasons | Your failed delivery records |
| Damage | Your claims records |
We do not change how the network measures performance. Customer reports use your agreed definitions and say so.
Reporting becomes something you can offer
The monthly report appears for review on the first working day. The office checks, adds a comment and sends it. When sales pitches to a new account, a sample report is part of the offer.
Customers with a portal can look at the month so far, which often answers their questions before they ask.
Is this your month end?
- Customer reports are built by hand every month.
- Different customers want different layouts.
- Figures shift from one month to the next because of how they are counted.
- You cannot offer reporting to new accounts.