Moving in the Right Direction With WebFOCUS

E. van Wijk Transport Company Uses BI to Link Data From Three Separate Systems

The transport sector has been through many changes in past few decades. Twenty years ago, the average transport company was geared primarily towards the movement of cargo but, these days, most logistics service providers support the entire supply chain from end to end. As a result, more and more companies are striving to optimize their business operations. Computerization and information technology play an important part in this process.

These developments have not gone unnoticed by E. van Wijk Logistics B.V., an international transport company with branches in western and eastern Europe, a fleet of more than 150 vehicles in the Netherlands, and a complete line of services, including road transport, storage, and value-added logistics.

Running E. van Wijk as efficiently as possible requires real-time insight into business operations and performance results, metrics which the company had been gathering with three separate software systems – transport management (TMS), warehouse management (WMS), and computers in their vehicles used by drivers.

"All systems work perfectly by themselves," says Jan-Willem Schreuders, system manager at van Wijk. "Additionally, each of them delivered reports that were acceptable. However, combining data from those systems to gain insight into both the input – our investments – and the output – our results – was an exceptionally time-consuming task.

"We would literally spend days on end gathering all the information in Excel, displaying it side by side for comparison, and turning it into a usable report. We would only do this once every quarter – not frequently enough to enable effective management. This is why we asked the software company GreenCat, who has been our supplier for twenty years now, to find a solution that would solve our problem, yet allow us to continue to use our existing software."

GreenCat subsequently consulted with their partner, Information Builders. "Consulting Information Builders was only logical," says Ruth Woudenberg, managing director of GreenCat. "They specialize in business intelligence with their WebFOCUS platform, and in integration solutions with their iWay Software adapters.

"With this combination of products, they are able to access data from more than 300 different information sources, process it, and transform it into reports that can be outputted in practically every desirable format. Generating and analyzing information from the three systems used by van Wijk was not problematic at all with WebFOCUS."

WebFOCUS is a comprehensive, fully integrated, enterprise-scale solution that delivers powerful and feature-rich, yet intuitive business intelligence across an entire organization, enabling timely, accurate reporting at the executive, analytical, and operational levels. With WebFOCUS, any data, in any enterprise source (including documents and other unstructured formats), is made readily available, accessible, and meaningful to any user in any location.

Information Builders' extensive integration expertise also ensures the flexibility of WebFOCUS as an application. WebFOCUS has the ability to seamlessly access and integrate information in more than 300 data sources, including packaged applications, legacy systems, data warehouses and data marts, and files and documents, and transform it into vital, relevant, and actionable information in real-time. The business intelligence suite can easily be connected directly to any new software package at van Wijk.

"Logistics is a rapidly changing line of business," explains Schreuders. "If we want to expand or change something, we are not bound to a particular package. WebFOCUS allows us enough space to choose the best option for every branch of our operations."

The Results

The impact WebFOCUS had on van Wijk's operations became clear soon after its implementation. "A lot of our transport is joint cargo, which means we transport different consignments to the same destination in the same vehicle at the same time," explains Schreuders. "This is a logical form of transport, but also one that makes it virtually impossible to determine whether a vehicle is operating in a profitable fashion.

"Nowadays, we measure profitability per vehicle, per department, or even per day, and print out these reports with the touch of a single button in Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF. This has given our efficiency an enormous boost. If a certain route is not profitable, we can examine the cause immediately and take action to remedy the situation."

A good example of this involves issues related to long wait times. Previously, van Wijk vehicles would often experience lengthy waiting periods at certain delivery addresses, but the reasons for the delays were not clear. Now, drivers communicate waiting times to account managers via the vehicle's on-board computer. Account managers then contact customers to inform them of the long delay, and offer them a choice of solutions – unload faster or pay additional costs. Bottlenecks on the road are also signaled more easily. Planners at van Wijk use this information to modify routes that frequently cause problems in order to avoid delays.

In addition to its own fleet of vehicles, van Wijk makes use of chartered trucks for about 30 percent of its cargo. By gaining direct insight into the costs and liabilities of these chartered rides, planners are better able to decide which charter should be deployed on which ride. Through in-depth analysis of all this data, van Wijk can quickly recognize patterns in customer requests, and respond quickly to any new or modified requirements.

What the Future Holds

"WebFOCUS makes our life, and the lives of our customers, a lot easier," says Schreuders. "It is difficult to express this value in money, especially since we don't have any concrete figures about the long waiting times we experienced, and the utilization of expensive charters. But the fact that we were able to work and operate our business more efficiently, immediately after the implementation of the WebFOCUS business intelligence solution, naturally results in direct profit."

Currently, van Wijk uses WebFOCUS to gather data and report on transport activities. The company also expects to apply these same capabilities to their warehouse activities in the future. Because most customers make use of transport as well as storage services, van Wijk can analyze all its activities by each customer. "This allows us to offer our services in a more tailor-made, customized package for each customer," Schreuders concludes. "This means that WebFOCUS not only helps us make better decisions, but it can be used by our customers as well."

In addition to van Wijk, dozens of other transportation and travel companies worldwide have turned to WebFOCUS to provide them with the timely, complete information they need to operate more efficiently and more profitably than ever before. Industry leaders such as Air Canada, Holland America Cruise Lines, ProRail, and VIA Rail Canada are leveraging this robust business intelligence platform to achieve a variety of mission-critical business goals, including increased sales and marketing effectiveness, enhanced customer and employee management, improved cost and budget management, streamlined logistics and shipping processes, and much more.