Improving Your Transportation Analytics with Excel Add-On

by Michael Watson

Transportation is an area ripe for analytics:

• It is a big expense
• It is made up of many different shipments
• You have difference choices to make

And, many companies do their transportation analytics in Excel. This is not a bad thing. They load up thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of shipment records to analyze. This usually works up to a point. But, at some point, having the following capabilities inside your Excel spreadsheet would allow you to do much more:

• Quickly determine the distance between points (as in, determine 1 million distances within a few seconds rather than waiting overnight)
• Rate small parcel shipments with different weights and different origins and destinations
• Rate LTL shipments with different weights and different origins and destinations
• Manage your truck load carrier’s rate tables so you can easily look them up and apply them to different lanes

We have partnered with a software company that provides these capabilities with an Excel add-on. This add-on gives you simple formulas you can embed in your spreadsheet to create a powerful transportation analysis.

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