Transportation Management Systems (TMS) have been around for over 20 years and have come a long way since their inception. A TMS is a software program designed to help companies manage their logistics and transportation needs within the same platform. It centralises and organises transportation data, empowering companies to:
- Forecast needs
- Optimise routes
- Manage transporters
- Plan and procure transportation
- Execute and track shipments
- Automate booking and tendering
- Automate billing
- Access simplified reports
With the right TMS, shippers can plan for segments of their business within specific constraints, to optimise assets and costs. The pros of implementing a TMS include:
- Load planning
- Freight tracking
- Payment
- Reporting
However, with the ever-evolving needs of the supply chain, and the staggering growth of e-commerce, TMS solutions have a few shortcomings that cannot be overlooked when it comes to optimising transportation:
- A TMS offers a fragmented handoff from planning to execution. As opposed to factoring in details from an entire multi-enterprise transportation network, it can only account for the information you put into the system yourself or what it gathers from a siloed ERP.
- Data and workflows are not tied together, which means users are forced to use manual processes like spreadsheets, which only adds room for human error.
- A TMS is built to address a specific geography, market, customer set, or division; it plans, sees, and optimises within silos.
- A TMS is automated to a certain point, but is still highly manual, like when a user is searching for spot rates, managing capacity needs, and dealing with exceptions and unforeseen surges.
- Supply chains need flexibility, and today’s TMS is, simply put, architected for a linear process that leads to constraints. It struggles to keep up with the complex requirements of today’s ever-fluctuating logistical needs.
- Because a TMS is primarily used internally, the lack of collaboration within the broader network leads to inefficiency and lost revenue.
- A TMS is built to plan the movement of goods without the agility to make adjustments to any changes in demand, capacity, or market fluctuations. Because of this, it also lacks the capacity to actively manage exceptions between tenders, appointments, or deliveries. Essentially, a TMS lacks operational acuity or rate intelligence.
- A TMS takes orders from an ERP, but it isn’t an analytics engine, which means any data collected is unstructured.
- Since a TMS is an internal software, it isn’t interconnected or set up to optimise lanes/trips within a network. It also isn’t designed to optimise assets or fleets across multiple networks and shippers, which means there is no predictive optimisation to find the best routes possible with the least amount of empty miles or deadhead.
In essence, a TMS lacks certain real-time executional data shippers need to ensure customer delivery. But this doesn’t mean you need to throw your TMS out with the bath water! Instead, it must be supplemented. SemiCab’s solution (and optional services) turbocharge your current TMS investment on the execution side, bringing you the efficiencies your business needs to thrive.
How is a Multi-Enterprise Model Different?
SemiCab offers a multi-enterprise transportation platform that works in conjunction with your TMS. The platform provides a single lens across all the various flavors of truckload transportation (private fleet, brokers, asset-based providers, etc), eliminating any execution friction while enhancing and extending your Enterprise TMS. Our unique multi-enterprise transportation platform aggregates truckload transportation demand across customers (other shippers), optimises it with supply from our transporter community, considers the specifications (equipment, weight, volume, location, HOS constraints, etc.), and creates highly efficient and reliable transportation. That is how with SemiCab, operations can:
- Ensure customer delivery with confidence
- Ensure inventory availability where it’s needed
- Ensure speed expectations of customers
- Achieve sustainability goals
- Avoid surge costs
We are the only neutral, collaborative transportation platform solution in the market today – creating new efficiencies by realising complementary opportunities across customers in a multi-enterprise transportation network, and we want everybody to benefit! Reach out today, and learn how we can help ensure customer delivery with always-on transportation.
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