In the logistics world, shippers are constantly being told why they need to implement a Transportation Management System (TMS). With a million different ways to pay for a TMS (SaaS, Multitenant, Enterprise), things can get awfully complex.
Lost in the discussion about what type of TMS provider you should engage with are many of the underlying, less obvious reasons a TMS can benefit your business. Routing, carrier selection, tendering shipments, mode optimization and document generation are great, but we can’t forget about data.
TMS in today’s environment have become expert at capturing, interpreting and reporting on data and key metrics. If you’re still living in a world of spreadsheets and pieced together reports, take a look below at three ways TMS data can benefit your logistics:
Automated Reporting
A few months ago we were doing a discovery session for an industry leading manufacturer with several million dollars of annual LTL spend. With no TMS implemented, all key data was being manually inputted and tracked in a shared Excel spreadsheet which took several hours a day to maintain. After invoices were approved, they were send to the relevant stakeholders to painstakingly input fields like origin zip, destination zip, weight, pallet count, NMFC, net charge, fuel surcharge, accessorial charges…. You get the picture. A TMS can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes you to get to your data because it captures all the needed points on every shipment with reports ready in a few clicks.
Better Manage Carriers
Implementing a TMS can offer serious insight into your carrier network, its performance, and the volume percentage being shared by each service provider. With the right technology partner, a TMS can now only help you route better with your existing carriers, but provide the data an information to see where new carries should be brought into your network- or existing ones should be eliminated.
More Competitive Carrier Negotiations
Another great use of your data is in issuing and managing for effective bid events for LTL rates. Without the proper data to support a robust RFP development, people often make decisions around what they assume is happening. It’s not uncommon for a customer to tell us “I ship a lot in this lane from A to B” when in fact they’re shipping a significant more from A to C.
Consider another example, pricing mechanisms. Oftentimes shippers are negotiating general, vague and inappropriate FAK’s for their business simply because they think the broad the FAK the better! In several of these instances it made more sense for us to break down and tier or bracket the FAK’s to represent the larger volume of their freight. If 90% of your volume is pushed in class 125 or below, an FAK cover 50-500 probably isn’t the best for you.
Motus Logistics empowers customers through use of our TMS which can offer in-depth reporting on-demand 24/7. Much like our customers, we use this data to leverage competitive negotiations and keep our clients ahead of the curve through proactive monitoring of their data and ongoing consulting. Want to learn more? Get in touch!