Three transportation management system (TMS) essentials your logistics teams may be missing out on

By Steve Barber, Vice President of Product Management at Uber Freight

Originally featured in Talking Logistics

Supply chain leaders of enterprise organizations and rapidly growing businesses know: The best thing they can do to streamline and supercharge their operations is hire best-in-class logistics expertise. The second-best thing they can do is to equip those experts with a best-in-class Transportation Management System (TMS).

The modern transportation management system (TMS) is the cornerstone of proactive and strategic logistics operations. They enable logistics teams to accelerate, if not automate, many manual steps in the end-to-end logistics lifecycle. From simplifying procurement and streamlining execution to enabling boundless visibility and elevating freight audit and payment, the TMS is every transportation operator’s “swiss army knife” to connect all nodes of the supply chain to streamline communication, manage costs, and improve service delivery.

There’s a reason why teams that leverage a TMS gain, on average, an 8-10% reduction in operational costs.¹ Teams that adopt a TMS for the first time can realize a tangible return on investment within six months.

But not every TMS was created equal. Transportation management technology began proliferating in the 1990s and while the logistics landscape has been reshaped by technological disruption, traditional TMSs haven’t kept up. Transportation teams today must be more informed and responsive than ever, yet their tools are challenging to set up and navigate. They need new capabilities to solve new challenges, but new capabilities are rarely released because their TMS is maintained on brittle architectures.

A modern TMS that’s built to flex and grow with your teams and your business, on the other hand, can be a game-changer.  Leading shippers such as KRONOS, a global producer of titanium dioxide pigments, understand top-tier operations require a team of experts who are armed with a best-in-class TMS to address supply chain challenges and deploy alternative strategies with efficiency and efficacy.

When evaluating TMS software for your transportation teams, three elements are essential to ensuring you’re investing in the right tool for the job:

• TMSs must enable real-time visibility to your supply chain and logistics operations, across modes and regions.

• TMS applications should leverage the latest emerging technologies and unlock the latest best practices in logistics management.

• TMS providers should be consistently upgrading and innovating with new capabilities in the tool.

End-to-end visibility and traceability are table stakes

A hurricane impacting shipment journeys. A port disaster such as the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. Skyrocketing freight fraud incidents. Supply chain disruptions are constant in the life of a logistics team.

Leading transportation teams know to expect the unexpected. They also know that to do so, they must have eyes on every shipment with real-time shipment visibility and tracking across modes and regions from a single pane of glass. A best-in-class TMS helps them get there. By leveraging real-time tracking data from multiple sources like carrier ELDs, driver apps, and carrier dispatch systems, TMS users gain an end-to-end and real-time picture of their shipments globally.

With a best-in-class TMS, shippers can visualize shipment progress on a map and receive real time notifications of shipment delays. Risks are proactively identified and flagged by proprietary AI algorithms, with smart ETAs and risk probabilities that help shippers mitigate potential issues.

Access to pertinent, precise, and actionable shipment exceptions enable teams to tackle complex challenges and seamlessly manage customer expectations from order creation to final delivery. Traceability from one source of truth helps teams quickly analyze shipment data, identify the root cause of incidents, and mitigate future risks with speed and precision.

McBride, a top European manufacturer of household goods, leverages our TMS solutions to enhance data visibility and control. Since adopting the solutions, McBride has improved routing guide compliance to 97% and saves over €1 million annually by improving transport data visibility.

The time to use emerging technologies such as AI is now

Think artificial intelligence (AI) is for fun and games? Think again. AI is impacting nearly every business sector, including supply chain and logistics. Logistics can reap major benefits of this next-generation technology and 50% of supply chain leaders have already signaled intent to invest in AI applications.²

This is just the beginning of the era of logistics AI. Our industry has an opportunity to double down on AI innovation and it starts with infusing AI-powered capabilities across transportation management tools and processes. From automating manual processes to recommending opportunities to optimize shipments, surfacing intuitive insights curated specifically for transportation teams and their unique supply chains, AI-powered applications can help supercharge decisions and accelerate desired business outcomes, directly from a TMS.

Across the end-to-end load lifecycle, transportation teams can harness AI-powered capabilities today to:

• Streamline procurement with more accurate load estimates using Uber Freight’s proprietary pricing algorithms
• Optimize orders across modes and automate execution, from appointment scheduling to final delivery
• Get proactive service alerts powered by Uber Freight’s service prediction algorithm
• Leverage AI and OCR to improve freight audit and payment processes
• Analyze their networks, contextualize market trends, uncover hidden opportunities, and empower better decisions for their supply chains with generative AI tools.

These capabilities can help logistics experts get more out of their TMS. It’s also on TMS providers to continuously explore ways to infuse emerging technologies such as AI across their offerings. TMS providers need to keep their finger on the pulse of the latest technology trends and prioritize building robust, modular, and intelligent applications that help — not hinder — logistics teams’ ability to manage their operations.

Choose a TMS provider that thinks and stays ahead with you

Annual RFPs, routing guides, and a robust logistics partner network were once sufficient to manage transportation operations. But in our fast-paced and ever-changing environment, networks can shift on a dime. Staying proactive and prepared is key to building and sustaining more agile and resilient supply chains.

Time-tested and forward-thinking logistics partners, transportation management solutions, and transportation management technology are key to success. That’s why we continue to build on our suite of end-to-end logistics applications, managed services, and an expansive carrier network so we can continue to advance supply chains and move the world’s goods.