Data analyst for Mobile, Alabama businesses

Mobile is a different business city than the Eastern Shore. Companies here are frequently second or third generation, with twenty or thirty years of records and a line-of-business system somebody chose in 2006. The problem is rarely a shortage of data. It is that the data is locked in a system that produces printouts instead of answers.

The industry mix leans toward the port: logistics, freight, marine services, industrial supply and the contractors who serve them, alongside healthcare around the medical centers and a professional services core downtown.

What comes up in Mobile

Legacy systems come up first. An ERP or dispatch system from fifteen years ago holds everything the business has done and exports it grudgingly. The useful move is not replacing it — that is a six-figure project — but pulling a scheduled export into a reporting layer beside it, so leadership gets a current view without touching operations.

Contract and customer concentration comes up second. Logistics and industrial supply firms often discover that three customers carry the margin and a long tail of small accounts consumes the service capacity. That is a straightforward analysis and it frequently changes how a sales team spends its week.

Multi-entity reporting comes up third. A lot of Mobile firms operate two or three related companies sharing equipment, staff or premises. Each entity reports cleanly on its own; the group view is rebuilt by hand in a spreadsheet every month. That spreadsheet is usually automatable in under two weeks.

A Mobile example

A freight and warehousing company tracks loads in a dispatch system and bills from an accounting package, with a fuel card feeding a third report. Individually each looks healthy. Joined together, margin per load by customer and lane becomes visible, and it is common to find one regular lane that has not been repriced since fuel moved. One conversation with that customer pays for the whole engagement.

Mobile's nonprofit sector

Mobile has larger, older nonprofits than Baldwin County — organisations with real budgets, multiple funders and a board that expects proper reporting. They usually have a donor database and a program system that do not speak to each other, and a development director producing the board deck by hand. Connecting those two is typically the highest-value thing we can do for them.

How I work here

In person. Daphne to downtown Mobile is a half-hour drive, so meeting at your office is normal rather than an event. For multi-site operations I can visit more than one location if that is where the differences in process live.