Transportation management system

by John Silver Transportation management system developer

Choosing a transportation management system (TMS) is a crucial step that will determine the success and development of your company in the future. Therefore, the choice of TMS must be taken seriously. How to make the right choice when there are a huge number of different transportation management software available on the market? To do this, we have prepared a complete guide to choose a transportation management system for your company.

What should I look for in a transportation management system?

You should ask yourself this question even before you start searching for and choosing a transportation management system. The answer to this question will help you form the technical requirements for the future TMS and a complete list of features that the transportation management system should implement.

What are some of the core features of a TMS you need?

There are many transportation management systems and all these software products have their own feature sets. Sometimes it can be a daunting task to make a choice between them. Therefore, you need to make a list of the core features that your company needs. This list will help you quickly choose the transportation management system that best suits your company's needs and weed out those TMSs that charge extra money for features your company doesn't need.

The list of the core features of a transportation management system may include, for example:

Customer management

Drivers & payroll management

Trucks & trailers management

Loads & trips management

Income & expense management

Reports

etc

Which type of transportation management system platform is right for your company?

There are 2 common types of TMS platforms with their own pros and cons:

Custom local software solution designed for your company's needs and hosted on your company's servers or computers.

Pros:

Implementation of all the features that your company requires

Ability to make changes or develop new functionality at any time

No monthly payment is required

Cons:

Expensive initial product development (may be in the millions of dollars)

The need to maintain your own development and support team or to involve a third-party team of professionals (depending on the system, it can be from several thousand dollars to several hundred thousand dollars per month)

Time to develop and implement (may take up to a year)

Software as a service hosted on cloud servers or high-speed servers of hosting providers

Pros:

Does not require investment in development

Does not require a development and support teams

Contains the most commonly used features of the transportation management system used by most transportation companies

You can start using it immediately after a simple registration procedure

Cons:

The need for monthly payment (from $99 per month, depending on the system)

To make changes or add new functionality, it is necessary to convince the service management of the appropriateness of such changes.