Wouldn’t it be great to have a metrics dashboard for everything you do in life? Imagine how nice it would be to have clear historical data on where you’ve been, real-time data on where you are right now, and forecast data on where you’re going. While that may take some of the spontaneity out of life, it would certainly help to have all of this information at your fingertips—ready to use when planning your future and allowing you to tweak strategies in real time to handle the day-to-day stresses of life.

Well, there’s good news for logistics managers: If you have a TMS, WMS, or both, you likely already have the raw materials to put a system like this in place to better manage your supply chain. Using metrics that measure performance, freight costs, billing accuracy, service consistency, delivery reliability, and myriad other aspects of a company’s operations, many savvy shippers are already translating the raw numbers into information that’s helping them work smarter and leaner to save time and cut freight costs.

“One of the big areas for shippers continues to be measuring and monitoring partners’ performance,” says Greg Johnsen, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing for GT Nexus in Alameda, Calif. “Where companies put forth a lot of effort to create and negotiate service contracts, that’s really the easy part. The challenge lies in monitoring how those partners [such as consolidators, freight forwarders, and carriers] are performing week over week, month over month, and quarter over quarter.”

On the TMS side, Adrian Gonzalez, director of ARC’s Logistics Executive Council, says shippers are using performance dashboards to get those questions answered. Whether they want a quick snapshot of their own key metrics (like how they’re doing on service consistency, or how their suppliers are doing in terms of business support), or a comprehensive scorecard showing whether carriers are performing up to expectations, shippers are gaining visibility that they’ve never had before, thanks to better use of existing technology.

“Shippers can see where the problems are and tackle them,” says Gonzalez, who sees the need for visibility, event management, and performance management as key reasons shippers would want to use the metrics that are integrated into their WMS and TMS systems. The fact that metrics have grown beyond just raw numbers, and can now be easily dropped into pie charts and bar graphs for easy reading and usage, is also driving more shippers to use them.

“Today, we’re seeing the sexy side of metrics in terms of providing neat user interfaces that are more graphics-oriented as opposed to tabular-oriented,” says Gonzalez. “It’s becoming more visually appealing instead of just scanning down a big table of numbers.”

Sexy pie charts and user-friendly bar graphs aside, the real reason shippers are turning to metrics in higher numbers is the promise of lower costs and better supplier performance that comes from having an accurate dashboard. Fuel costs, for example, have become particularly onerous over the last year or two, says Greg Aimi, director of supply chain research at AMR Research in Boston. And this has created a heightened sense of urgency to track transportation costs.

Using metrics, Aimi says, companies are examining fuel costs, rates of acceptance, rates of decline, and on-time performance from the time of pick up at the warehouse to delivery at the customers’ facilities. “They’re using the carriers to help them get information about the actual arrival at a facility and the actual departure,” says Aimi.

Take the consumer-packaged goods manufacturer, says Aimi, who used metrics provided by its TMS to monitor its retailer’s DC, the grocer’s DC, and the multi-stop carrier that was delivering the goods to those locations. By monitoring the return time, or just how long it was taking to unload a stop, the shipper learned that several other stops on those runs were delayed because the early stops were holding onto their trucks for too long.

“Through this exercise the company was able to work with the retailer, giving it incentive to turn the trucks within a two-hour timeframe,” says Aimi, who sees vendors like Red Prairie, Manhattan Associates, 3M HighJump, and SSA taking the lead in providing metrics-capable supply chain software. “The shipper knew that if that could happen, then it would save money on multi-stop planning.”

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) developer Oracle, with its recent acquisition of Seibold, has also thrown its hat into the ring, according to Gonzalez, who sees much of the ERP activity being driven by shippers who need improved visibility of orders and shipments and who need to know what their own operations are doing on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

It’s one thing to have a bunch of numbers thrown at you on a screen or a spreadsheet, but taking those numbers and transforming them into useable information is something else entirely.

“The world still exists in reams of paper and the five-month-later updates on Excel spreadsheets,” says Johnsen. He sees electronic, real-time information as being the most valuable for shippers who can make the most of their software by capturing from their partners’ systems data like shipping delivery times, turn times, cycle times, transit times and other metrics, and then standardizing it in a single location for further use. “It’s an exercise in integration,” Johnsen says.

It’s also an exercise in getting the right information from the right trading partners, says Razat Gaurav, vice president and general manager for I2’s Global Transportation and Distribution Group in Dallas. According to Gaurav, metrics are only useful when they are both appropriate and timely. For example, a shipper that’s trying to measure on-time delivery performance for its inbound operations and at the supplier’s dock must rely on those suppliers to provide that information.

“If there is a long lag time from the time the event happens and when you get those updates, then your performance metrics could be way off base in terms of what’s really going on,” says Gaurav. “It’s less of a system issue, and more of a process and compliance challenge, and part of a continuous process for a lot of shippers.”

Some of the challenges can be overcome through clear communication with suppliers. Kelly Killingsworth, senior director of product management of transportation products for Manhattan Associates, says many of the firm’s customers are “onboarding” suppliers and carriers, and clearly articulating to those parties what their expectations are and what they’re being measured against—making sure suppliers are “onboard” with the idea of using metrics.

Using Nike as a hypothetical example, Killingsworth says the manager in charge of shipping shoelaces for the firm would talk to suppliers about how the manufacturer was going to measure the shoelace suppliers’ performance against their fill rates. If a purchase order is set to ship on the 10th of the month and delivered on the 15th, for example, then a 24-hour pickup notice would be initiated and the expectation would be that the deadline be met.

“The onboarding process is all about educating your suppliers of everything you’re doing to track those metrics,” says Killingsworth. “If you don’t clearly articulate what you’re going to measure and keep track of those metrics, it becomes a flaw in your deployment process. You could have the best system in place and not be able to track good metrics if you don’t have the onboarding process in place.”

Ian Hobkirk, senior analyst for warehousing and transportation for Aberdeen Group in Boston, expects more vendors to integrate metrics into their software, and more shippers to start using the data to streamline their operations, save money, and make the best possible supplier choices. Getting there isn’t always easy, says Hobkirk, who sees too many managers getting caught up in the day-to-day activities and neglecting to compile and analyze the results. (To see Aberdeen’s June report on TMS, visit aberdeen.com.)

“You really have to stay on top of it and not wait until it’s too late to make a mid-point correction as to whether you signed a good contract with a carrier or not,” says Hobkirk. “The biggest challenge is doing it on a regular basis, but those shippers that do are the ones who are benefitting the most from these metrics.”