Supply Chain Analyst job description

Ocean carriers, air freight forwarders, customs brokers, global consolidators, and trucking companies are the people a supply chain analyst deals with on an ordinary day. The occupation behind the title is Logistics Analysts, 13-1081.02: study delivery and supply chain processes, recommend changes to them, and often run route activity including invoicing, electronic bills, and shipment tracing. The pay figures are the logisticians line, 13-1081, which this board's logistics coordinator page draws on too, so they describe a family rather than one title. The May 2025 survey put half of those 251,040 workers above $82,320, with $50,890 and $133,160 marking the bottom and top tenths.

Core Duties and Responsibilities

Maintaining the databases of logistics information is the anchor task, with vehicles and containers watched through web-based tracking systems next. They follow product from origin to final delivery, call carriers for rates and schedules, and check warehouse inventory transactions for receiving, storage, and shipping integrity. The analysis side interprets data on availability, reliability, strategic sourcing, supplier management, and transportation, applies data mining, modeling, and cost or benefit analysis to it, then reports performance measures and proposes better processes. Recommending is where the authority stops; approving a change and directing it is a supply chain manager's work.

Common Skills and Technologies

Judgment leads the skill list here: critical thinking, reading comprehension, complex problem solving, active listening, systems evaluation, systems analysis, and monitoring. The tooling is unusually specific for a logistics job. SAP, SQL, Tableau, and Power BI are the four that show up by name in employer postings; the fuller O*NET list adds Amazon Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, Access, Visio, Project, Visual Basic for Applications, IBM SPSS Statistics, Oracle PeopleSoft, and Oracle Primavera. Someone who can write a query and turn it into a readable report covers most of that.

Education, Training, and Career Path

Most people arrive with a degree and several years in freight or warehousing, O*NET Job Zone Four. Bachelor's degrees cover just under two thirds of the field, associate's degrees close to a quarter, and the rest split between some college and graduate credentials, so a two-year qualification plus real warehouse time is a genuine way in. Logisticians, logistics engineers, and supply chain managers are the roles next door.

Sources: O*NET 30.0, 13-1081.02 Logistics Analysts, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/13-1081.02. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 13-1081, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes131081.htm.