What is a Transportation Management System: Benefits, Features, and Main Providers

All involved parties, from planners to drivers and customers, have access to order information in a TMS. It's a centralized location where you can browse and manage your transportation requests, along with these features.

Order entry, whether manual or automatic, entails filling in all order details such as weight and setting up the current location and destination. A system will frequently assign a route from a list of predefined routes, including which mode of transportation, vehicle, and even driver should pick it up, as well as where and when it should be delivered. If you have an integrated WMS, this order will be sent to its scheduled conveyance automatically.

Order planners and drivers can examine their daily workload on a dashboard that displays created orders with their routes and assigned transports. All documents are instantly connected to their relevant orders, allowing the driver to store them on their smartphone or tablet instead of using paper. Planners have an overview of all scheduling changes and truck locations as drivers update the status of orders en route, allowing them to make modifications to the schedule and projected arrival time.

Most TMSs will automatically tender shipments for you. The list of carriers is sorted so that you can always find a provider that meets your requirements or let the system choose one for you. Tendering mechanisms such as broadcast, waterfall, and status tendering are available in most systems.

A rate engine is one of the most significant components of a TMS. Based on regulations such as base rates, discounts, and contract agreements, a rate engine calculates transportation prices for a parcel, LTL, truckload, and intermodal shipping. A TMS should be able to generate bespoke pricing rules to meet even the most complex tariffs and give a price to a client as soon as they submit a request.

You can plan the loading space of trucks, trailers, and containers and get a computation of the available loading space, taking maximum loads and weight into account. For example, master data allows you to enter information about your car measurements and retain it for future reference. The dimensions of the item are taken from the freight order. The 3D load plan function on some TMSs allows you to examine and alter the load distribution and space consumption.

TMS allows you to see and operate your assets on a single platform, whether you have a private fleet or use a shared carrier network. Although extensive fleet management functions are not available with all TMS providers, you can assign drivers and equipment, as well as handle dispatch and financial settlement for drivers. You can go as far as regulating fuel use and environmental impact, keeping track of vehicle checks, and remotely driving the truck if you use professional fleet management software.

Shippers waste the majority of their time scheduling dock appointments, while truck drivers lose time waiting for their turn at warehouse docks. A TMS can include dock scheduling and load sequencing in the transportation plan by integrating with a Warehouse Management System. You may have a better understanding of all warehouse and transportation restrictions, create more accurate schedules (automatically or manually), apply your business rules and location-specific rules, and always have a load status available to you or your customers.

A TMS typically allows partners and customers to communicate via email, but some vendors also provide self-service portals where customers can make and track orders, and partners may send tender offers and evaluate and submit bills.

A TMS's fundamental function is planning, although routing is not one of its strong suits. Many firms utilize route optimization software to schedule and handle routing difficulties, which, unlike TMS, uses a variety of algorithms to generate the optimal routes. As a result, you'll almost certainly need to employ a mix of the following tools: Routing tools will extract a large amount of data from the TMS, which can then be used to analyze route performance.

Track and trace technology allows you to track the movement of things in real-time during transit. This means you won't have to contact the driver to find out where the truck is, and you'll be able to see it at all times. This is frequently used to provide clients with information about the whereabouts of their packages, as well as for theft and scheduling purposes. Barcodes or RFID tags can also be used to track consignments, pallets, or crates: A TMS receives an update on its location every time it is scanned.

The process of leveraging data to improve business results is known as business intelligence. Some TMS provides a built-in BI architecture that allows users to extract, transform, and store data on their end-to-end platform. Real-time reporting and an assortment of custom reports that everyone on the transportation management team can develop for their requirements are the primary advantages of BI over traditional spreadsheets.

Because of the nature of the transportation sector and the rate at which it is digitizing, it will almost certainly be difficult to buy and run a TMS solution off the shelf. Most suppliers provide APIs and web service architecture so that you may link them to your existing systems with some programming work. However, if you choose numerous tools from different vendors, need to migrate from a legacy system, and need to build custom code, this process becomes even more complicated.

Also read: 10 Advantages of Transportation Management System

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