A transportation management system (TMS) is a logistics platform that helps businesses in planning, executing, and optimizing the transport processes in external logistics. It is designed to streamline transportation and strengthen the overall logistic system.
Transportation management systems are often an integral part of the larger supply chain management system. It ensures the timely delivery of good by optimizing the delivery routes and loads of goods, helps you track freight across local and global frontiers, and automate documentation tasks like freight billing and trade compliance documentation. Altogether, the TMS system optimizes the cost for both end customers and businesses at large.
Who Uses a Transportation Management System?
Transportation management systems are importantly used by businesses that require the physical movement of goods on daily basis. It includes a set of business stakeholders and companies like –
- Manufacturers
- Distributors
- E-commerce companies
- Retail businesses
- Companies that deliver logistics services, like 3rd and 4th party logistics (3PL and 4PL) companies and (LSPs) logistics service providers
Today, looking towards the urge of going and growing online, businesses are strengthening their customer base and expanding their reach to a wider network. They are empowering their warehouse management and logistics system to supply their products all across the global frontiers.
the availability of cloud-based TMS solutions has made it cost-effective for small and growing businesses to uncover the benefits of incorporating a transportation management system into their supply chain processes.
10 Key Benefits of Transportation Management System
Before selecting a TMS, understand the value of this system and how it can be beneficial for your company. Some benefits of a TMS include:
1) Reduce freight expenses
Transportation Management system contributes crucially to optimizing the freight spend and saving your time through analytics and optimization. This system gives you suggestions as to how to optimize the expenses and leverage data for delivering valuable information.
2) Track deliveries in real time
A TMS gives you the ability to track the position of your drivers and shipments in real-time. It gives you information on the estimated amount of time a route takes to create that particular destination. This will help you in planning and preparing an efficient route schedule. Through this TMS, you can see which drivers and routes are the most efficient and can ensure you the fastest delivery.
3) Increase customer service
When it comes to the transportation and logistics industry, customer service is mostly anchored with the right delivery to the right person at the right time. So, by leveraging TMS, you can significantly improve customer satisfaction levels by monitoring the on-time performance of your shipments. You can easily identify where your shipments are and at what distance from the destination. It works as an online portal where customers can easily see and track their shipments and get an estimated time for delivery.
4) Improve warehouse efficiency and productivity
It often becomes cumbersome to manage the constant flow of incoming and outgoing inventory. This demands a well-organized and meticulous logistics process. If you paired up TMS with the warehouse management system, you can plan your inventory and plan your inventory levels accordingly. Besides that, you can track where your inventory is located, and its current position – transit or arrived. This system let users review the processes and ensure that they are efficient and productive.
5) Compliance and Safety
A transportation management system ensures compliance by integrating the right tools for monitoring and tracking compliance-related information like- emission data, records of vehicle maintenance, hours of service of drivers, and more. With this software, you can improve the safety protocols through various tools that monitor and manage the behavior of drivers like – driving speed. You can plan safer routes accordingly by considering the traffic and weather conditions.
6) Data Driven Decisions
Make data-driven decisions with TMS in real-time by leveraging the power of data analytics. It typically collects, stores, and retrieves the data like – delivery times, inventory levels, shipment costs, and more and accordingly prepares patterns and trends.
Such patterns will optimize your logistic systems, reduce costs, saves ample time, and significantly improve customer service at large. Based on such analytics, you can discover the most congested route and traffic-free timing of the day. That’s how you can avoid delays and plan your shipment schedule accordingly.
7) Enhanced Routing Capabilities
A TMS can optimize your routes with shorter order cycles and smaller cargo quantities. Businesses often look for pool distribution by leveraging an appropriate TMS technology. Through this strategy, you can save a big chunk of money and have more control over delivery channels since it’s faster and more cost-effective.
Moreover, for operators, picking and delivering cargo might be as simple as selecting the best pool location. In case of complicated orders, you can break down and route them individually to save your time and money.
8) Aligned Dock Scheduling
Dock scheduling becomes quite effective as transportation planning and execution have turned out to be more foreseeable. An efficient TMS can cut down your waiting times and ensure superior transportation from one point to the other by aligning distributions as per the schedules of a dock.
9) Accurate Order Fulfilment
Do you want to eliminate errors during your shipment process?
Human errors are bound to happen as the inventory level increases. However, any small mistake can adversely affect your impression in front of your customers and you may start to lose your brand loyalty. As a result, by using a transportation management system you can improve the accuracy of shipping to a greater extent.
As discussed earlier, it ensures you accurate supply chain insight with real-time tracking that makes your order fulfillment accurate. Call PL Solutions now to automate your business with a transportation management system.
10) Minimal Documentation
A Transportation Management system not only automates your shipment and logistics process but also minimizes paperwork. This will save you both time and money since it will automate all your documentation processes which are important for the company to keep running smoothly. That’s a win-win situation since it will reduce your admin costs during invoicing mistakes and improper billing.
The future of TMS
The future of TMS is quite bright and a breakthrough. Because customer expectations towards express delivery with smart real-time updates and tracking are growing significantly. Moreover, the ever-changing global trade regulations are forcing supply chains to stay abreast with the latest trends by investing in a transportation management system.
The Final Words
As discussed earlier, the transportation management system is fully capable of improving the logistics services and optimizing your cost and time, bringing shipment transparency to the helm. Due to the advent of SaaS, the functionality, configuration, and costs are in the buyer’s favor.
Given tough competition to manual processes, you can expect consistent results in savings if implemented correctly. PL Solutions software can be systematized to meet company-specific requirements. Feel free to call us for integrating the Transportation Management System with your logistics processes.
