Recipe Includes a Flocculating Agent
We are in an age of information overload. Whether it is someone wittering away on Facebook, or facing the inevitable chatter on Twitter, we have too much of it. Sometimes I hark for the bygone era of one’s daily rag, one’s meerschaum, and one’s faithful hound at your feet. For all its myriad advantages, like looking up how to make the optimum Gin and Tonic, this deluge of information is potentially unsustainable.
Luckily we live in an era of big data, of systems that can be an ark in this biblical flood of information. We just need to make sure that in business we are hanging on to systems and solutions that can extract and manage the bits we need to focus on from the rest of the data. In the logistics and supply chain area, this is particularly important. Whether you are trying to distill the rating information from thousands of shipping lanes into an optimum price, or you are trying to understand which of your shipments needs intervention, you need help.
We call it exception management, but I like to think of it in terms of chemistry. I like to think of the key data as a colloid, dispersed in the flow of data. We are the flocculating agent, that causes the important information to be visible, to clump together and to be used for something more important. It is more than filtering, which extracts one substance from a bigger portion, but leaves it in its original state. What we do is more transformational. Our flocculation adds logic, information and importantly usability to the data.
Your supply chains are complex and driven by information that is coming from a vast multitude of sources. As you execute a shipment, you need to make sure you are not throwing precious resources and people power at the parts that are not valuable. Talk to Elemica about freight rating, tracking shipments, capturing exceptions or managing your locations. We will have ways of improving information in these areas. Let us be the flocculation agent in the soup of information overload.