Date of Award

6-2019

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems and Technology

Department

Information and Decision Sciences

First Reader/Committee Chair

Shayo, Conrad

Abstract

The business of logistics and transportation is increasing in demand and complexity and will do so into the future. As with many businesses in the digital age, large amounts of data is being generated at increasing speeds leading us all into the era of big data. A common result is that organizations are left data rich and information poor. At ABC Logistics, and many other third party logistics and transportation companies, the question is how to harness the data and create centers of excellence through business intelligence methodologies. This research project goes through the steps taken to identify an area where business intelligence and data transformation could be an advantageous prospect and how to present it in a way that would be of great benefit to the organization as a whole.

Third party logistics companies, such as ABC Logistics, operate under a business model where they do not produce or own any of the product they manage through the supply chain process. What they sell is their expertise in logistics services from the inbound of product, processing of orders, and outbound shipping to and from the customer. This makes the third party logistics business very competitive. Competitive advantages are key to success in this type of business and one area that is underutilized is measuring and managing labor productivity. Currently, ABC Logistics utilizes an AS400 system for warehouse management and Kronos for timekeeping. The problem lies in how to get all the information together in one location where transactional master data is shared across the organization. Once we do that, then the second problem would be analysis and decision management i.e., how we analyze the data and present the information in a human readable format for frontline supervisors and middle management to be able to interpret the data and take action.

The solution will be to create a data warehouse to normalize all the various data sources for timekeeping and warehouse production transactions. In order to build the data warehouse, we will utilize an SQL Database with SQL Server Integration Services to transform the data into our data warehouse. With the data transformed into a structured and consistent format, the data is analyzed and the results presented in a human readable format. This will be done through business intelligence tools such as Power BI that allows us to create custom dashboards. This solution will lead to a better understanding of our operation, increase profit, and give ABC Logistics a competitive advantage over their competitors.

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