Quiz: Is Your Transportation Management System Holding You Back?
If you’re trying to determine if 2021 is the year that you rip out your current transportation management system and start fresh, ask yourself these seven questions:
- Has our company grown significantly since we first implemented TMS, and is that system still in place?
- Are we constantly trying to bolt-on new solutions to our existing platform in an effort to eke more useful life and functionality out of it?
- Are we getting hit hard by transportation cost hikes because we don’t have the resources to be able to “shop around” for every load?
- Do we need instant access to the data, analytics, and reporting necessary for making good, fast transportation decisions?
- Do we want 100% visibility across our end-to-end supply chain?
- Is our current system so old that our software vendor stopped updating and/or supporting it years ago?
- And finally, are we missing out on the modern functionalities that today’s cloud TMS platforms offer?
If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, there’s a good chance that your TMS is holding you back, hurting your company’s productivity, and forcing you to pay more than you should be—both in money and time—for transportation. It’s also making you handle processes manually and virtual ensuring that you never extract the full value from your data, insights, and reporting.
It’s Time for an Upgrade
In the U.S., many existing TMSs are anywhere from 10-20 years old (or in some cases, even older). With technology coming a long way since the early-2000s, any on-premises transportation management software that’s still in place is probably nothing more than deadweight at this point. Even the earliest cloud-based TMS systems are starting to show their age, and mainly because their makers either went out of business or stopped supporting these older platforms.
Left with obsolete technology, industrial manufacturers are missing out on the modern functionalities that a full-fledged, cloud-based TMS built for the B2B industry provides. Other companies settle for generic TMS systems meant for everyone from the wholesale distributor to the e-commerce company to the large retailer. Whether they own a small fleet of trucks, use intermodal and rail, or ship their goods overseas—or, a combination of all three—industrial manufacturers need a TMS that’s built with them in mind.
Without the right TMS in place, companies will waste too much time on manual processes; rely heavily on paper, email, and phone calls; have poor visibility into their supply chains; and basically operate in “firefighting” mode around the clock.
Rising Rates & Other Challenges
With the pandemic disrupting global trade, the cost of shipping goods has been steadily increasing over the last year. “The virus has thrown off the choreography of moving cargo from one continent to another,” the New York Times reports.
“Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers — the metal boxes that move goods in towering stacks atop enormous vessels,” the publication points out. “As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.”
When it’s based in the cloud, TMS offers benefits like speedy deployments and the ability to use the system from any location—a huge plus in today’s suddenly-remote workplace. Offered on a subscription basis, cloud-based TMS requires no additional hardware or IT support and boasts a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than on-premises solutions.
In part II of this 3-part article series, we’ll show you how to pick the right TMS for your business.
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IntelliTransTMS is the only SaaS-based TMS that provides shipment execution and visibility across rail, truck, intermodal, barge, and ocean shipments. Whether you ship hundreds or thousands of loads a month, lowering distribution costs helps improve your bottom line. IntelliTransTMS reduces labor-intensive, time-consuming and error-prone business processes. From shipment visibility to invoice auditing and analytics, you have everything you need whenever and wherever you need it.
IntelliTrans’ Global Control Tower provides high levels of supply chain transparency; aggregates, completes, and enhances data from a variety of sources; offers visibility into and execution of different aspects of the supply chain; and generates data-driven alerts and analytics that ask deeper questions and deliver meaningful insights.
By leveraging tracking information, the Global Control Tower provides analytics that measures key performance indicators (KPIs) like fleet cycle time, origin/destination dwell time, lane and hauler performance, back orders, freight spend, load optimization, and more. With their rate, equipment, lease, tracking, and invoice data in a central repository that’s accessible 24/7, companies can position themselves for success in any market conditions.