The gap between data and insight isn't technical — it's structural. When information lives in separate systems, you're making decisions based on incomplete pictures.
Disruption has turned visibility into the predominant currency for modern supply chain leaders, especially at mid-to-large organizations. Most of us know that visibility depends on data, but what fewer see is that visibility isn’t strictly a ‘data problem.’ Every organization swimming in shipment records, carrier performance metrics, and cost breakdowns already has plenty of data. The real challenge of visibility is turning data into decisions that you can act on.
For many supply chain organizations, the barrier is fragmentation. When company data lives in separate systems that don’t talk to each other, you are forced to steer off partial views and after the fact reports. Without a unified picture, visibility becomes mere guesswork.
At Odyssey Logistics, we’ve spent the last several years working on this problem — not just for ourselves, but for the customers who depend on us to move their most critical freight. In solving it, we’ve learned that closing the gap between data and insight comes down to unity and consolidation.
You can only connect the dots when the dots live in the same system.
How data becomes insight
The journey from raw data to actionable insight happens in stages. Most companies, however, get stuck somewhere in the middle.
Imagine the story of a late shipment in stages.
Data is just the raw numbers of the shipment: it left the warehouse at 14:32. It arrived at the destination at 09:15 the next day. The carrier charged $847.
With context, data becomes information. Now you know the shipment was four hours late and cost 12% more than the quoted rate. With this context, data becomes information. This is where most supply chain systems stop.
Insight is when your systems can tell you what to do about it. It shows you this carrier has been late on this lane six times in the past month, always on Thursdays, likely due to a scheduling conflict at their consolidation center, and recommends switching to an alternate carrier for Thursday pickups. This is where value lives — but it requires unified data.
Why do so many companies stop at the information stage? The fundamental problem is fragmentation. For many shippers, their ERP holds order data, the TMS has carrier performance, and the WMS knows inventory levels. You can pull reports from each system, but connecting them requires manual work. By the time you’ve stitched together a coherent picture, you’re making decisions based on yesterday’s reality.
Odyssey has taken a different approach. Our data architecture consolidates information across modes, geographies, and service lines into one unified system. What makes this particularly powerful is that, with our newest systems, our customers can combine their own data with ours.
Upload your demand forecasts, production schedules, and inventory targets — and suddenly you’re not just seeing what’s happening with your freight, you’re seeing how it connects to the rest of your business.
Rethinking network optimization
Turning insight into action
Another customer used this self-service capability to reveal a cost-per-weight anomaly adding 2.8% to their monthly spend. Within days, they’d traced it to a specific product line and adjusted their packaging strategy.
