The old days of business intelligence weren’t that long ago. The field is moving forward at breakneck speed, and data practices that were unheard of just a few years ago are now commonplace. The way that businesses, and terminals specifically, should be approaching their data collection is changing, and those that ignore the shift will find themselves at a disadvantage.
The industry is moving away from the old days of business intelligence, but many terminal operations are still living there. For some, it’s still regular practice to manually collect data into an Excel spreadsheet and then clean and verify it by hand. Every report requires hours of work, and the opportunity for error is ever-present. It is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that undermines time-sensitive insights.
There’s a better way. BI automation replaces manual data collection with an automated process that can pull information from every segment of a terminal’s operation in real-time, providing a rich data pool that can yield critical insights on a continual basis. Automation unlocks the true power of business intelligence, creating a positive feedback loop of constant, incremental improvements.
How Automated BI Can Revolutionize Operations
Tools like Tideworks Insight allow terminals to collect and finely curate large volumes of data without the need for human input. Information is collected automatically, whether you’re tracking equipment moves, yard utilization, or any number of other data points.
This information is gathered and stored in the data platform, where it’s maintained and instantly available for automated report generation. These reports are simply generated, automatically, from the collected data. Depending on how frequently terminal operators need updates, the system can be set to refresh a given report at set intervals. It could be every week, every day, or even every hour.
Previously, reports were always some period of time out of date. The insights you might glean from them didn’t reflect the current situation. They came from the past. As you read the report, it was always possible that things had already changed. Reports become more meaningful when they reflect real-time data, and update on a regular basis.
There’s a second benefit to automating your BI curation. Data collected manually is frequently limited in scope. The time involved in achieving a fully holistic picture is too high to be practical. Automated BI, on the other hand, can collect nearly limitless data points from multiple sources.
Download our Manzanillo International Terminal (MIT) Case Study to explore how Tideworks Insight processes provided access to cleansed, organized operational data without comprising the production database.
With Tideworks Insight, not only can you integrate with your TOS to collect relevant transactional data, but you can also integrate with your accounting system, your maintenance system, and more. All of this information can be cross-referenced and analyzed together to reveal complex interactions that weren’t visible before. Automated business intelligence is simply more intelligent than manual BI.
Automated BI Is the Future. So Why Aren’t People Using It?
People tend to resist change. They may like their current system. They may feel it tells them all they need to know. And even if they recognize that an automated system is superior, they might assume that it’s unnecessary for them. These are just a few of the many reasons why terminal operators might choose to ignore automated BI in favor of their known manual process.
They May Be Nervous About System Failure
It’s possible that they’re afraid of putting their data at risk. They might see the value in automated BI but are leery of technology they don’t understand. Their Excel spreadsheets aren’t perfect, but at least they know the data will be there when they need it.
These fears aren’t entirely baseless. Systems do go down from time to time. If you’re performing data analytics or creating reports and the systems go down, you might reasonably worry that needed reports will be inaccessible. But properly-designed data platforms like Tideworks Insight plan for these sorts of eventualities. Tideworks Insight is built to be resilient without compromise to the production database.
They Might Think it’s Too Costly
There are initial costs to the system, but in the long run, it’s far more costly to do nothing.
Manual data collection and analysis requires significant man-hours to complete. With Tideworks Insight, a complex report that may have taken two weeks to prepare can be finished in as little as two days. And run-of-the-mill reports are created and updated automatically. The cost savings far exceed the required investment.
And that’s only part of the story. The business improvements that are possible when holistic data is collected in real-time will save your operation even more.
They May Be Worried About a High Learning Curve
Everything valuable has a learning curve, and Tideworks Insight is no exception. However, we’re with you every step of the way. We provide training to our customers to make certain they know how to get the most out of their automated BI curation. You don’t need to worry about a learning curve because we make it easy.
If You’re Not Automating Your BI Curation, You’re Leaving Money on the Table
Your technical team has a limited amount of time available to them each day. Instead of spending this time collecting data, manually cleaning it and checking it against sources for accuracy, they could be analyzing automated BI looking for the next great insight that will save your terminal money.
If manual BI processes are like reading through a medical chart that’s week’s out of date, automated BI is like looking at the monitors hooked to the patient in real-time.
Automation allows terminal operators to monitor trends as they happen. You’ll have awareness of issues as they develop so that you can take preventative actions before real problems appear. You’ll see relationships between elements of your operation that you were blind to before, allowing innovation that was previously impossible.
In the old days of manual BI, you could only look at what happened. With the deep, real-time analysis that automated BI provides, not only can you see what’s currently happening, you can get a real sense of what may happen in the future and create predictions. Once you try Tideworks Insight, you’ll never want to go back.
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