Analytics: How to Use the Logistics Pro Interchange Dashboard

Overview

The Interchange Dashboard gives you a clear view of how much your fleet relies on outside tug capacity — and how much capacity you're supplying to others. It tracks every job where a tug was bought (hired from a competitor to complete your own order) or sold (loaned to a competitor to complete their order), and rolls that activity up by month, area, company, and trip type.

This guide walks through the key metrics, filters, and visuals available on the dashboard, and shows how to use them to spot capacity gaps, benchmark competitor reliance, and understand who you're exchanging work with.

How Bought / Sold Is Determined

Every job has two fields that decide whether it counts as Bought, Sold, or neither:

• Awarded To — the company the order was awarded to

• Resource Owner — who owns the tug assigned to the job

The dashboard compares these two fields on each job:

• If Awarded To is your company and Resource Owner is a competitor → the job is Bought (you hired a competitor's tug to complete your own order).

• If Awarded To is a competitor and Resource Owner is your company → the job is Sold (your tug was hired out to complete a competitor's order).

• Anything else is Not Applicable and is excluded from both totals.

Filters

Use Reset Filters (top right) to clear all filters back to their defaults.

Key Features

A summary tile showing your net position as a buyer or seller of tug capacity:

• Net buyer/seller figure: The difference between jobs bought and jobs sold. A negative number (net buyer) means you're hiring more outside capacity than you're lending out.

• Buy : Sell ratio: How many jobs you bought for every job you sold.

Example Use Case: A large negative net buyer figure with a heavily lopsided Buy:Sell ratio tells you your fleet is structurally short on capacity in certain areas — worth investigating before it becomes a recurring cost.

Two tiles sitting alongside Exchange Overview:

• Bought: Total jobs where tugs were hired from competitors to complete your orders, plus average jobs per month and number of unique suppliers used.

• Sold: Total jobs where your tugs were loaned to competitors for their orders, plus average jobs per month and number of unique buyers.

A line chart plotting monthly job counts — orange = Bought, blue = Sold — over the selected date range. Hovering over any point shows the exact count for that month.

Why this matters: A rising orange line signals growing reliance on competitor tugs over time. Comparing the shape of the orange and blue lines quickly shows whether the exchange relationship is balanced or one-sided.

Example Use Case: You notice Bought volumes climbed steadily over the last several months while Sold stayed flat. This is an early signal to review fleet capacity planning before the gap widens further.

Two side-by-side bar charts ranking areas/ports:

• By Area - Bought: Ports ranked by competitor tugs hired in to complete your orders — the longer the bar, the more outside capacity that port needs.

• By Area - Sold: Ports ranked by your tugs hired out to competitors — the longer the bar, the more spare capacity you're supplying there.

Example Use Case: Port A shows the longest bar on the Bought side by a wide margin. This flags Port A as your most capacity-constrained location — a candidate for adding your own tug capacity rather than continuing to hire it in.

• By Company - Bought: Competitors ranked by jobs you hired them for — your top suppliers of outside tug capacity.

• By Buyer/Customer - Sold: Companies ranked by jobs they hired your tugs for. A Buyer / Customer toggle lets you switch how this chart is grouped — by the competitor buyer, or by the end customer.

Example Use Case: Company A stands far above every other competitor on the Bought side. This concentration means a lot of your outside-capacity spend sits with a single supplier — worth reviewing that relationship or rate agreement, since you have limited leverage if they raise prices.

Two donut charts breaking down job volume by trip type:

• Jobs Bought by Trip Type: What kind of work competitor tugs did for you — a bigger slice means that trip type relies more on outside capacity.

• Jobs Sold by Trip Type: What kind of work your tugs did for competitors — a bigger slice means you're covering more of that trip type for others.

Example Use Case: If "Undocking" makes up the majority of your Bought slice, that's the specific service type driving your reliance on outside tugs — useful when deciding where added capacity would have the biggest impact.

A row-level table listing every Bought job, with columns for Job Number, Hired From (the competitor), Date, Trip Type, Customer, and Ship. Use this to drill into the specific jobs behind any of the summary charts above.

1. Start at Exchange Overview to see your overall net buyer/seller position and Buy:Sell ratio for the selected period.

2. Check the Monthly Exchange Trend to see whether reliance on competitor tugs is growing, shrinking, or stable over time.

3. Use By Area - Bought to identify which ports rely most heavily on outside capacity.

4. Use By Company - Bought to see which competitors you depend on most, and check for concentration risk.

5. Toggle By Buyer/Customer - Sold between Buyer and Customer views to understand who's using your spare capacity and for which end customer.

6. Review the Trip Type donut charts to see which services drive Bought vs. Sold activity.

7. Drill into the detail table for the specific jobs behind any trend or concentration you want to investigate further.

8. Use the Area, Trip Type, Bought From, Customer, and Ship Name filters on the right to narrow any of the above to a specific slice of your fleet.

9. If you need to change how jobs with blank Awarded To or Resource Owner values are classified, open Interchange Config and update the treatment for each condition, then click Save. Allow 2–3 hours for the change to reflect.

• Bought and Sold classifications are derived entirely from the Awarded To and Resource Owner fields on each job. If those fields are populated incorrectly on a job, the job will appear on the wrong side of the exchange (or be excluded as Not Applicable).

• Jobs with blank Awarded To or Resource Owner values are governed by the Interchange Config settings. Changing this configuration is retroactive to all jobs meeting that blank condition, and can take 2–3 hours to fully reflect on the dashboard.

• All chart bars across this dashboard are clickable filters — clicking a value filters the rest of the dashboard to match.

• The Buyer/Customer toggle on the Sold-side company chart changes the grouping level, not the underlying data — the same Sold jobs are simply re-aggregated by a different field.

• Company, port, ship, and customer names shown in this guide are placeholders. Your dashboard will display your fleet's actual data.