Blog · Industry
Which customers give you Asia to Europe and route transpacific elsewhere. Which trade lane you win on rate and lose on space. Which sales office covers forty accounts and quotes twelve. From the booking system, reconciled to invoiced TEU and tonnage.
How a forwarder measures the time from shipment delivery to invoice issued, per customer and per branch, from the shipment milestones and the billing ledger: the median days, the shipments delivered and still unbilled past a stated age, the value waiting, the branches and customers where the cycle is longest and why, disputed accessorials, missing carrier costs, customer billing rules, and the working capital the delay ties up.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a forwarder or customs broker measures customs exceptions from its entry data: entries held per customer and per lane, hold rate against the broker's own norm, days held, the reason codes, the share caused by the customer's own data, missing commodity codes, wrong values, incomplete descriptions, against the share caused by the broker or the authority, the cost in storage and delay, and the customer conversation about the fields that stop their freight.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a forwarder or carrier measures detention and demurrage from the container event data and the billing ledger: free time against actual dwell per container, charges incurred from carriers and terminals, charges billed on to customers, the gap between the two per customer, the customers whose containers routinely exceed free time, and the identity that ties charges incurred to charges recovered plus absorbed.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe ten questions the managing director of a freight forwarder puts to the branch and trade lane managers, what is lane share per customer and per mode, are TEU and kilograms ever added, which customer lanes lost reliability before the tender, what detention and demurrage did we absorb and for whom, how long does delivered freight wait for an invoice, which customs holds are the customer's own data, which customers are concentrated on one carrier, what is margin per file by branch, which customers went quiet by lane, and what changed, each with the table from the bookings, milestones and billing exports, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a forwarder builds one customer view across ocean and air without ever adding a container to a kilogram: mode as a dimension, units per mode, reconciliation per mode to invoiced volume, revenue as the only figure that sums across modes, and the reporting mistakes that follow when the two are blended.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a forwarder or carrier measures share per customer and trade lane from the booking system: TEU or chargeable weight won against the customer's total on the lane, office coverage against quotes logged, and the reconciliation to invoiced volume.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a forwarder or carrier measures the reliability of its transit times per customer per lane from milestone data: quoted transit against actual door-to-door, the share of shipments within tolerance, the variability that matters more to a shipper than the mean, and the customer lanes whose reliability fell before the tender did.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow forwarders should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a freight forwarder or shipping line should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: trade lane share per customer, volume by mode kept apart, transit time reliability per customer lane, customs hold rate and cause, detention and demurrage per customer, booking to invoice cycle, gross profit per shipment, customer concentration by gross profit, quote conversion by lane, and dormant customer lanes. Also the three measures most forwarders miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete customs hold calculation on ten entries from two customers on one lane, small enough to check by hand: each entry's filed and cleared dates, held flag, reason code and correction source, hold rate per customer against the lane norm, days held, the cause split into customer data, broker entry and authority selection, the two fields on one customer's invoices behind most of its holds, the cost in storage and delay, and the assertion that entries equal cleared plus held, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own entry data.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe complete transit time reliability calculation on ten ocean shipments for one customer on one lane, small enough to check by hand: quoted transit at booking, departure, arrival and delivery milestones, actual door-to-door days, the tolerance, on time per shipment, reliability, the interquartile variability, the delay split into origin dwell, on-water and destination dwell, the shipment with milestones out of sequence, and the assertion that every delivered shipment has a delivery milestone after departure, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own milestone data.
17 Sept 20263 min readCustomer share analytics for forwarders and shipping lines, by trade lane.
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