Express freight services provider adds value with Sisense

16-plus hours saved per week

Proudly Australian, VT Freight Express (VTFE) is the leading provider of express freight services, delivering throughout Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory, ACT, and Southern NSW.

Established in 2010 as VicTas Freight Express, the company rebranded in 2020 to reflect its evolving business model and expansion into other regions, states, and territories — a move driven by customers demanding the quintessential “VTFE experience”.

Privately owned and operated, and with a combined 100-plus years of experience, VTFE takes great pride in knowing that hundreds of its business partners rely on its services every day. It’s something the company doesn’t take lightly, which is why smart technology underpins everything it does.

Moving to a business intelligence (BI) solution was a natural next step for the organisation. Tim Thomas, Financial Controller at VTFE, is leading the company’s transformation to a smarter, more efficient future.

Eliminate lag and gain real-time insights 

VTFE installed a new transport management system in 2017, which created more data than the company was accustomed to. Moving to this new system also helped VTFE shift away from old-school paper and pens for deliveries, relying on handheld scanners instead.

While it was a boon for the company’s environmental impact — VTFE reduced its paper usage by more than 80% — it still wasn’t a complete solution that would allow VTFE to gain valuable insights from its mountain of data.

“We had a lot more information to work with, and a lot more data that we could plug in and get our customers to plug in as well. But we had no way to efficiently use it,” Tim shares.

“The vision for the BI Tool was to be able to represent the huge amount of data we collect into easy-to-understand visuals for all aspects of the business. The key was to be as hands-off once a dashboard is complete, as we were spending too long manipulating and reporting through spreadsheet data.”

Tim says there was a lag of up to a week, using PDF and Excel reports alone. Even more, as the company’s “go-to source” for all things data, creating these reports was a time suck for Tim. As the Financial Controller, his time was better spent focusing on more strategic tasks.

To scale, VTFE needed a more sustainable solution. The company had to empower everyone to make sense of the data. It was clear that it needed an intelligent BI solution.

Making the case for a cloud-based solution

VTFE is located in a region where fibre infrastructure must be augmented via rooftop-mounted satellites, which oftentimes leads to instability — a real liability for a 24/7 business that promises on-time delivery.

“Country-wide, internet speed is an issue,” Tim points out. “So hosting from an internal server would cause a significant lag. We simply don’t have the bandwidth to support it.”

To remedy this issue, VTFE needed a solution that would put everything on the cloud.

Democratise data and boost efficiencies with infused analytics

When VTFE landed on the realisation that it needed a BI solution, it did its due diligence and researched all available options. That narrowed its search down to two.

“Sisense stood out as an easy-to-use platform for someone like me, who doesn’t have a coding background. The others we demoed required the user to know a fair bit about coding,” Tim explains.

“Whereas with Sisense, it had that ease of use. Sisense could also connect with our TMS software, which is based in SQL. All we had to do was log in and download the data; it was just that simple.”

Tim loved the fact that putting a data model together was now hassle-free. They no longer had to pull from different columns or use complex formulas to drag out different data entry points.

A key differentiator was ElastiCube, Sisense’s unique high-performance analytics database with super-fast data stores that are specifically designed to withstand the extensive querying required by BI applications. This not only allowed VTFE to bring data from multiple sources, and then merge, manipulate and query the data as if it was one consolidated data set; it also meant that anyone could now build data models and dashboards — the main-selling point, declaring Sisense the clear winner.

Moving to Sisense Cloud

Roughly a year ago, VTFE made the decision to move to the cloud, which Tim says has made uploading and managing data exponentially easier. Previously, the company was using FileZilla to drop files in. With Sisense Cloud, it’s not only more efficient but more secure too.

Better yet, being hosted on Sisense Cloud provides ease of use while Linux improves speed and load time performance of huge files to new dashboards astronomically. It also eliminated timeouts.

“Not hosting on our site is a real benefit because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support it. Since moving to Sisense Cloud, we haven’t had any performance issues and the speed has been exceptional even when loading big data sets,” Tim says.

Sisense Cloud has also helped boost VTFE’s efficiencies, providing everything it needs for monitoring, performing updates, maintaining security, etc – freeing up staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

Sisense-powered dashboards in action

One of the first dashboards that VTFE implemented was geared at improving its metro delivery runs. Previously, it relied on spreadsheets to manage this. With a dashboard, it became easy to visualise how they could best restructure deliveries so drivers weren’t overburdened or underperforming.

Another dashboard was set up to help with staffing. VTFE relies on a casual labour force to break down carton freights. By looking at data in real-time, the company can determine how many workers it needs. This helps VTFE boost efficiencies while being careful not to overload staff.

Fast, easy, and affordable implementation 

A great benefit of selecting Sisense was the fact that it’s basically ready to go right out of the box, so to speak. With a little bit of training at the start and by following best-practice for setting up data cubes and dashboards, companies can be up and running with their new BI solution in as little as a month and a half.

“After a few training sessions, you’re ready to go. And if something comes up, and you need additional support, Sisense offers online training and a knowledge hub that you can access for free. You’re not paying support hours to build dashboards, which is excellent,” Tim says.

Implementing Sisense took two, one-hour training sessions a week for six weeks. In this training, VTFE’s live data was used to build its first ElastiCube. The dashboards that allow VTFE to gain real-time insights were also implemented during this time. From there, Tim conducted a small series of informal training sessions to introduce his team to the new system.

Impact 

Thanks to Sisense, VTFE is now able to quickly implement changes to improve service. By monitoring customers’ trade in real-time, rather than with a report that is a week old, VTFE’s CRM can get to the bottom of issues quickly.

In monitoring the delivery performance of its network, the company has been able to see when a particular agent or region’s service is slipping before it’s reported by the agent or a customer, allowing VTFE to proactively fix the issue.

One of the biggest impacts was seen at the onset of the pandemic, during lockdowns, Tim shares. With Sisense, VTFE was able to group its customer base by industry and then plan staffing and driver needs quickly and seamlessly around which industries would shut down. By being able to monitor customer service queries with real-time data and effectively diffuse situations before they go wrong, they have been able to significantly reduce queries.

Having the ability to present real-time data in a dashboard has been beneficial for customer reviews. Now if customers query the monthly total cost is too high, VTFE has the evidence backed by data, supporting the increase.

Even more, those in sales have also been more proactive with VTFE’s customer base since implementing Sisense. Now, they can monitor the trade of a customer by zones daily to ensure a customer is trading at the appropriate level. Plus, any drop-off is immediately noticed and actioned by its CRM.

“Implementing Sisense has been a great project that’s impacting our business positively,” he says. “It’s allowing us to get ahead of any problems that come our way.”

Future possibilities

Going forward, Tim sees a lot of potential and wants to leverage the power of Sisense to VTFE’s customer base by creating a portal with customer-specific dashboards. Embedding dashboards for customers will give them access to monitor VTFE’s performance throughout its zones and also the costs of the service.

“We see this as a value-add for our current customers and as a carrot for any prospective customers, attracting them to our company,” Tim says.

“VT Freight Express prides itself on being the best service. And our confidence in this, by displaying it publicly, would only increase the value of our claims, holding us to account.”