The function exists to make decisions faster, not to produce reports. Most brokerage analytics fails that test.
Charter, the data prerequisite, the metric hierarchy by role, the KPI dictionary, reporting architecture, standing up your first analyst, and the analyses that pay for themselves.
Three departments computing margin three ways is not a disagreement about performance. It is a disagreement about arithmetic, and it consumes an extraordinary amount of leadership attention in businesses that have never written the definitions down.
Most dashboard failures are a level mismatch rather than a data problem. Behavioural metrics go to individuals daily, operational to managers weekly, business to leadership monthly.
No industry benchmarks. Where a figure appears it is either sourced to a public filing and cited, or labelled as the author’s own judgment. Written by an operator with fifteen years building and scaling freight brokerages.