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Transportation Analytics

Move goods faster, more intelligently and at an optimised cost, by gaining visibility and insights into your transportation operations

Transportation Analytics at a glance:

  • Complete visibility of operations across carrier/freight partners, countries and technology platforms, with an integrated view of data from diverse sources.
  • Unique blend of internal and external data enabling you to make better informed carrier choices, plan smarter routes, increase tender throughput and cut costs.
  • Customised insights and self-serve dashboards empowering you to ask the right questions of your transportation data in a convenient, accessible way.
  • Streamlined information flow through all relevant parties and stakeholders – enabling you to focus on building stronger business relationships.
  • Deep logistics category knowledge plus advanced analytics and data science expertise through The Smart Cube’s Transportation Centre of Excellence.
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Better understand and optimise the biggest cost area in your supply chain

Transportation typically accounts for around half of all supply chain costs. If an organisation lacks the insight needed to optimise transport operations, costs can spiral, other processes can suffer, and customer experiences can fall far short of modern expectations.

To manage and maintain effective transportation operations today, organisations need to:

  • Understand and navigate an increasingly complex logistics landscape, filled with greater carrier choice than ever before.

  • Maintain a strong customer focus and ensure that goods arrive with customers on time – wherever they are.

  • Master new data types and harness data from third-party carriers to optimise routes and build smarter transportation strategies.

  • Cut costs and improve efficiency in any way possible to protect profit margins – without sacrificing delivery speed.

We do more than just analyse your transportation data…

The Smart Cube applies advanced analytics and data science to internal and external data to provide custom reports and dashboards that help you make informed carrier decisions and optimise transportation performance on an ongoing basis. We build and implement our solution around your organisation’s needs. By putting self-serve analytics tools into the right hands at the right time, we deliver insights that can be turned into actions quickly, across four areas that impact transportation costs and efficiency:

  • Carrier identification and selection
    Carrier identification and selection

    Make better informed carrier sourcing decisions and optimise your carrier base with bid and tender analytics, rate benchmarking and scenario modelling.

  • Ongoing performance analysis
    Ongoing performance analysis

    Get the full story about carrier performance, and gain the insight needed to resolve performance challenges proactively.

  • Route optimisation and network analytics
    Route optimisation and network analytics

    Visualise your transportation operations and make smarter routing decisions with full visibility of where goods are moving, when, and at what costs.

  • Joint innovation support
    Joint innovation support

    Uncover powerful opportunities for logistics innovation and carrier collaboration with input from The Smart Cube’s transportation experts and data scientists.

How your business benefits

If you are responsible for procuring logistics services and need to evolve your sourcing strategy, are managing transportation operations and need a reliable and consistent view on performance, or are just looking to leverage automation and best practices across your supply chain CoE team, with Transportation Analytics from The Smart Cube you can:

  • Improve transportation visibility by bringing diverse carrier and logistical data sources together in one place.
  • Make the most of your resources and deliver more with what you already have through intelligent route optimisation.
  • Explore alternative delivery models and see the impact they could have on your operations and bottom line.
  • Cut costs across your transport operations by optimising carrier and service level choices, and leveraging fuel price forecasts, for improved budget planning.
  • Automate data integration and establish an intuitive single source of truth for all relevant data points.
  • Improve customer experiences by sharing deeper delivery insights and cutting delivery times.
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How we work with you

Based on your business context, strategic goals and priorities, we adopt a custom approach to help you move up the analytics maturity curve towards rapidly delivered predictive and prescriptive transportation insight. Here’s how our process works:

Step 1

We work with you to understand your business challenges and priorities, and map the diverse transportation data sources you want to bring together.

Step 2

We bring in complementary, external data to deepen your data sets, enabling greater visibility and more complete analytical insights.

Step 3

We scope and build customised dashboards that are designed around the needs of your organisation, enabling convenient analytics delivery.

Step 4

Our specialists provide tailored recommendations to help you move up the analytics maturity curve and deliver proactive predictive insights.

Step 5

We review and refine the solution to ensure it supports your objectives and enables you to ask the right questions of your data.

Why choose The Smart Cube?

When you choose Transportation Analytics from The Smart Cube, you always get:

An algorithmic approach: We automate the cleaning and aggregation of transportation data, ensuring a reliable, consistent flow of analytical insights and significantly reducing data management workloads.


A solution built around you: We design our Transportation Analytics solution around your organisation, goals and technology infrastructure – taking a flexible and agile approach to meet your needs.


Rapid, measurable ROI: We use a combination of custom and pre-built assets to build tailored solutions fast, ensuring that the insights we generate translate into meaningful business results and help you see value almost immediately.


Deep transportation expertise: When you work with The Smart Cube, you benefit from years of deep market knowledge and expertise developed and held within our own Transportation Centre of Excellence.


A unique blend of data and human intelligence: We bring internal and external data together, combining them with advanced analytics capabilities and category knowledge to deliver 360-degree transportation insights.


Transportation Analytics in action

Custom carrier sourcing framework delivered €3.5 million savings for global healthcare firm

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client wanted to run a pan-European tender to streamline and identify cost-saving opportunities within road freight across the region, but did not have the capacity, tools or framework needed to assess more than 1,500 transport lanes spread throughout 40 countries.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube created a tender baseline and aggregated data from shipment level to lane level, and created custom quotation templates for each of the 50 carriers. We automated the carrier bid integration process and created a framework for running different carrier scenarios, enabling an efficient carrier selection process and allowing flexibility to assess change impact.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The automated, custom carrier sourcing framework provided clear visibility to the client and helped understand cost saving opportunities worth €3.5 million through the pan-European tender.

$43 million in visualised savings helped this automotive manufacturer improve EBITDA

  • THE CHALLENGE

    EBITDA margins were shrinking while order lead times were high for this leading US automotive manufacturer. It turned to The Smart Cube to explore how it could optimise its distribution network and reduce operating expenses.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube created a Solver model using a non-linear programming algorithm to find optimised distribution centres in each cluster, which were made using the Lead Cluster algorithm in R. The model helped the client identify the distribution centres that could yield maximum EBITDA margins and reduce the order lead time by up to 24 hours.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The client visualised savings of $43 million by reducing its storage and transportation costs, leveraging the cluster strategy, and as a result was able to make more informed decisions about future strategy.

Custom data modelling of more than 10,000 SKUs helped eliminate 5% in logistics costs

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client wanted to optimise distribution, warehousing, transportation and labour costs and evaluate best route to market for more than 10,000 SKUs across 4 assembling units, 15 distribution centres and 4 temperature regimes, with each distribution centre able to serve >500 retail stores.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube ran data models across all key data, from personnel/transportation costs and labour hours, to volume of inbound and outbound traffic, supplier orders, routes from each distribution centre, pallet spaces and cases – to provide visibility into the best routes. The data then fed into a dynamic cost simulation and scenario analysis tool (delivered via Tableau) to provide visibility and assess the optimised routes to market.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    Our simulation tool helped the client identify process efficiency opportunities in terms of managing warehousing activities and optimal routes, leading to a 5% savings in the logistics cost.