Transportation Intelligence

The deluge of daily transportation data from disparate systems such as route planning and onboard computers (OBCs ), hides actionable intelligence that can lead to gains in efficiency and cost savings. The challenge lies in uncovering those insights fast to support facts-based decision making. Syntelic integrates all available transportation data to drive a powerful analytics engine where raw data is transformed into transportation intelligence on a daily basis.

How easily can you leverage the wealth of data you already have from your various systems? Can you drill down on specifics? Can you find gaps in your equipment utilization? How quickly can you find the 20 percent of variances that represent 80 percent of your performance challenges in service time, driver productivity, delivery accuracy, and fuel efficiency? Are you leaving money on the table?

Visualize Plan vs. Actual Routes

When you use Syntelic to evaluate driver performance and route profitability, you get both a high level view and the ability to drill down into the details. You can easily compare and contrast planned route schedules with the actual timetables recorded by the OBCs. The Plan vs. Actual variances can be seen at a glance using charts and graphs. This lets you spend less time pouring over data and more time executing your plan —working with drivers on improving performance and driving down costs.

Improve Route Profitability

Syntelic unlocks opportunities for improving route profitability by addressing:

• Non-Productive Time when drivers diverge from the plan on pre-trip, post-trip, breaks, or layovers either intentionally or due to unforeseen delays. Visual analysis of delay categories, locations, and frequency can show patterns that can be resolved through driver coaching, training, or improved route planning.

• Excessive Service Time for drivers completing deliveries. By identifying the best and worst performing drivers and locations, you can manage by exception to develop best practices.

• On-Time Performance by comparing arrival times against appointment times and by focusing on time periods, drivers, customer types, and customer groups.

• Delivery Accuracy to reduce errors (also known as over, short & damaged, OS&D, or credits & claims) to detect loss patterns by driver or location.

• Fuel Efficiency to spot trends by drivers, times, or locations to focus improvements in idling practices and fuel consumption.

• Driver Safety using recorded OBC data on over-speed, over-rev, and rapid-deceleration events. Counseling drivers on safe operations helps prevent costly accidents.

Best-in-Class Dashboards and Scorecards

Syntelic’s flexible design enables multiple users in different business roles to take advantage of Syntelic’s highly configurable workspace. With Syntelic, a view can be quickly built and edited to show only what a user wants to see, from a single Key Performance Indicator visualization or alert, to in-depth scorecards, to executive dashboards. Syntelic offers a graphics rich environment to make data visual. Its data model breaks free of static templates to allow for deep data drill downs and ad hoc calculations.

Matches Your Business Language

Every company has a unique set of business requirements. Every industry has its own language. And the one constant of business is change. Syntelic understands the language of transportation and that language is used in the user interface, so that fields do not require translation. Moreover, users can customize views and reports without having to rely in IT support or pay a software provider.

Improve Customer Service

Syntelic gives you the big picture view you need to place a premium on customer service. The same gains in efficiencies that shave costs also improve customer satisfaction and retention: ensuring on-time deliveries, unloading faster, and having fewer delivery errors. System alerts such as late delivery notifications let you can proactively manage customer service issues when they happen. Optimized resource planning helps maintain consistency as drivers season themselves to familiar routes.

Gain a Competitive Edge

In short, Syntelic gives you a competitive edge by helping you get more from your investments in routing  systems, OBCs, fleet equipment, and human resources. It supports any migration to future  systems. With Syntelic integrating your data and enabling you to continually find opportunities to improve your transportation operations, you will benefit from the flexibility and control it seamlessly provides. Our implementation and support services will work with you to get you up and running fast, with assurance that your systems are set up to meet your business demands.

Executive Summary

Syntelic’s fast and accurate Transportation Resource Planning tool helps you make optimal driver assignments to stay ahead of the Department of Transportations new Hours of Service rules, increase your equipment utilization, and keep your drivers motivated. Syntelic’s sophisticated logic it lets you set daily dispatch plans with confidence even two and three days in advance.

Syntelic Transportation Resource Planning does not replace your current systems. It more fully utilizes these investments for additional operational improvement.

Balance Distribution Demand with Transportation Resources

Building a daily dispatch involves many factors. You have to consider the availability of drivers based on their current hours of service, vacation requests, unplanned absences, and possible overtime implications. What tractors and trailers are available depends on maintenance schedules. Your operations may also include master routes, bid packages, or other requirements that further complicate planning. One mistake can cost you precious time, money, and customers.

Syntelic’s Transportation Resource Planning tool brings together all of the many factors that go into making smarter route assignments. Today’s dispatch plan should not complicate the next day’s plan. When building a daily dispatch plan with Syntelic you can look into the past, the present, and the future to assign drivers and equipment to routes quickly and efficiently.

Use a Timeline for Planning

Syntelic pulls together route histories from actual onboard computer data. It then compares that history with information about future routes from master route schedules, schedule requests, planned leave, bid packages, and tractor and trailer maintenance schedules. The planning dashboard shows all routes to be planned, any pre-assigned routes, a list of drivers and their available hours of service (HOS), and available equipment. As you make route assignments, Syntelic’s Horizon Timeline View lines up the route schedule with driver history to prevent HOS violations and reduce overtime hours. Adjustments are as easy as dragging and dropping drivers onto routes, until all routes are planned.

Configured for your Operations

Because every company is different, Syntelic’s Transportation Resource Planning solution can be configured to your business rules and your workflow. You decide what you need to see in every table column and row. Filtering data is as easy as a mouse click. Hide columns or drag-and-drop to move them. Syntelic’s easy dashboard builder allows you to set up custom dashboards by combining views of routes, drivers, available equipment or any relevant transportation data.

These days, the system sources for transportation data typically come with software to view that data in the form of dashboards, scorecards, and reports. Depending on the vendor, systems for routing, scheduling, dispatch, order management, transportation management, equipment maintenance, onboard data collection, load planning, business intelligence—you name it—they may tout benefits such as:

• Reduce out-of-route miles
• Lower fuel costs
• Increase resource utilization
• Reduce overtime pay
• Eliminate tractors
• Improve delivery times
• Prevent speeding violations
• Reduce safety violations
• Reduce damaged goods

What's more, these software solutions are often described as easy to use. They include charts and graphs. They feature "optimization algorithms," analytic tools, and "drill downs."

So how does Syntelic add value?

Some companies only need the software that comes with the different pieces of their transportation IT infrastructure. Other companies can live with the inevitable gaps, or they find workarounds. And some companies have a budget to cover the added costs of custom data views, custom reports, and database integrations.

Companies relying on Syntelic may still use other system software to get at efficiency gains. With Syntelic, they have the enormous advantage of having all of their critical transportation data in one place. Syntelic is also fundamentally designed to be a flexible platform for creating dashboards, scorecards, and reports. By combining flexibility with fully blended data, Syntelic acts as a true "transportation intelligence" solution, pushing back the barriers to that inhibit visibility into operational performance. As a result, Syntelic adds additional efficiency gains and further cost savings.

User-Defined Dashboards

Syntelic Dashboards let you drag and drop elements into place. It's easy to take away things you don't want to see, and bring into view things you do want to see. You can drill down on anything that exists in the unified data repository. You can quickly and easily filter in place to glean find patterns and glean actionable insights.

• No Static Templates − With Syntelic, you can display any combination of metrics from various data sources in a single view.
• Create Calculations with Ease - You aren't limited to a narrow set of predefined calcs. You don't have to export your data into a spreadsheet or report generation software to figure out ratios, percentages, variances, or other challenging problems. Syntelic's calc builder is both easy to use and powerful. In other words, you can take columns of data from different data sources and perform calculations that display the results the way you want to see them.
• Deep Drill Downs − Syntelic can roll up to the summary level and drill down to the underlying data. Drill down, then drill again. You can drill down from route summary, to individual route, to individual driver, to customer record, trailer record, order record, all in one place. Drill down and down again to the smallest detail, or sideways to make comparisons.
• Interactive Graphics for Analytics − Manipulate charts and graphs on the fly with in-place filtering, linked child views, and editing, to empower managing by exception, trend analysis, and scenario testing.

Reliable Data Integration

Syntelic software integrates with a wide variety of distribution systems software such as Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Order Management Systems (OMS), Transportation Management Systems (TMS), Route Planning solutions, and Onboard Computers. Syntelic’s experienced software integration staff develops and maintains interfaces and maps all relevant data fields by working directly with systems providers. Transfer methods include web services APIs , direct ODBC connections, and flat file server-to-server import-export transfers.

Syntelic also includes tools to import data in a flat file (e.g., comma delimited), annotate data fields, and customize data labels depending on user level permissions and your own business rules.