A global less-than-container-load consolidator does thousands of small things a day: quotes, bookings, consolidations, container moves, invoices. Each of them lives in a system built for one region or one product line. The consolidator in our case study ran three product lines across six data centres, with forty non-standardised sources and more than two hundred operational reports — and still had no single view of how each trade lane was performing.
Why reports multiply and answers don't
Every region and every function builds the report it needs from the system it has. The definitions drift: a TEU in one report is not a TEU in another, revenue is booked on a different date, a customer has three names. Leaders end up comparing numbers that were never meant to be compared, and the conversation turns to whose number is right.
- Siloed data and inconsistent performance across regions
- Manual tracking and delayed reporting
- Low digital adoption by sales teams and customers
- No management-level view across the network
Unify first, then build
The engagement started with the data, not the dashboards: more than thirty systems unified into one central data lake, cleansed and quality-checked across global operations, with one KPI layer on top. Only then were the hundred-plus live dashboards built — for container freight stations, trade-lane yield, live containers, and sales and operations — and an AI-powered sales app and a customer platform for shipment visibility fed from the same data.
What changed
Delivered results at a global LCL consolidator
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Sales growth | 20–40% across 20+ countries |
| Processing time | 30% reduction through centralised data and automated reporting |
| Workforce productivity | 150% boost with an AI-powered sales app |
| Digital adoption | 25% rise in customer adoption of the shipper platform |
| Dashboards | 100+ interactive Power BI dashboards |
Note: Client results from the delivered engagement.
Why the payoff was commercial
Unified data is usually justified as an IT efficiency. Here the largest gains were commercial: salespeople walked into meetings with lane, customer and quote history on their phones, and shippers could see their own bookings without calling. Both depended on the same governed numbers the leadership team used.
What three consulting firms couldn't solve in two years, SCIKIQ delivered in three months. Complete game-changer. — CIO, global LCL consolidator
The engagement was delivered on the SCIKIQ platform, working alongside the client's strategy adviser as the execution partner.