What is a Transportation Management System (TMS)?
A Transportation Management System (TMS) is a software or technology that allows companies to track and manage their shipments efficiently. It helps companies keep track of their logistics functions and optimizes for shorter and more effective transport.
Companies rely on a TMS to provide real-time visibility into all inbound and outbound loads. The software also allows companies to view insights to better optimize shipping efforts and make better decisions.
Our XTMS software provides our partners a holistic approach to transportation management with a complete suite of services available at your fingertips.
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What Types of Companies Use a TMS?
Shippers, carriers, and freight brokers primarily use transportation management systems (TMS). Basically, anyone who is involved in transporting goods – including shippers in the food, manufacturing, construction and building, equipment/machinery, and chemicals industries – use a TMS to track and optimize their shipments.
The Role of a TMS in Supply Chain Management
Critical to supply chain management, a TMS aids in the planning, executing, and optimizing of the movement of goods from one location to another. Efficient transportation management ensures that products reach their destinations on time and in good condition, minimizing delays, reducing costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction. It coordinates logistics across various transport modes—such as air, sea, road, and rail—by selecting the optimal routes, consolidating shipments, and managing carrier relationships. A TMS also digitizes the processes for tracking shipments, monitoring real-time data, and analyzing performance metrics. Effective transportation management supports cost savings and operational efficiency and provides a competitive advantage that leads to an agile and responsive supply chain.
What Are the Advantages of Using a TMS?
Utilizing a TMS is beneficial for short-term shipping success as well as long-term efficiency. Users can expect significant hard and soft cost-savings by streamlining historically manual processes such as load building, tendering, optimization, consolidation, and tracking into one system. What previously took hours and weeks to gather and distribute data can now be done in minutes. Find out how implementing a TMS can streamline your operations and save you time and money.
Cost Savings
Hard Costs: Finding and capitalizing on load efficiencies is one of the ways that TMS users can save money and positively impact their bottom line. Using real-time data, you’ll have access to competitive intelligence that reduces spend on time and fuel.
Soft Costs: In addition to cost savings, investing in a TMS allows your employees to save valuable time through data automation, saving up to 30 hours of manual data entry and tracking orders per week. If you’re interested in time and cost savings, find out if a TMS is the right solution for your company.
Real-Time Load Tracking
Knowing exactly where your shipments are at any given time gives peace of mind to you AND your customers. With status notifications delivered every 15 minutes through a centralized platform, you can pinpoint a truck’s exact location throughout its entire journey, maximizing planning and route efficiency and making smarter decisions faster. Start tracking your loads in real-time with XTMS.
Shipping Performance Data
Hard Costs: Finding and capitalizing on load efficiencies is one of the ways that TMS users can save money and positively impact their bottom line. Using real-time data, you’ll have access to competitive intelligence that reduces spend on time and fuel.
Soft Costs: In addition to cost savings, investing in a TMS allows your employees to save valuable time through data automation, saving up to 30 hours of manual data entry and tracking orders per week. If you’re interested in time and cost savings, find out if a TMS is the right solution for your company.
A Dedicated Team and Stellar Customer Service
Working with a new system can be intimidating, especially if this is the first time using a TMS. With Dynamic Logistix, you’ll have access to a team of experts who will work to understand the specific shipping and logistics needs of your business. This same team provides the industry insights and updates you need so that you’re able to work on your core business and lean on our experts to help you understand and implement logistics solutions.
How Does a TMS Work?
A Transportation Management System (TMS) streamlines logistics by managing the entire shipping lifecycle, from quoting to tracking and analyzing. It begins with configuration, where companies set parameters and preferences for their logistics needs, ensuring that the system aligns with their specific business goals and regulatory requirements. Through integration, the TMS connects with other enterprise systems to share data seamlessly, enabling real-time decision-making and improved accuracy across departments. The TMS also handles quoting, booking, tracking, and analyzing shipments, giving users a comprehensive view of logistics operations and helping them make data-driven adjustments to optimize routes, reduce costs, and improve delivery times.
Difference Between a TMS and ERP
A Transportation Management System (TMS) and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system serve different functions within a company’s operations, although they often complement each other. A TMS focuses specifically on managing the logistics and transportation aspects of the supply chain, handling tasks like route optimization, shipment tracking, and freight cost management. An ERP is a broader system that integrates various business processes across departments, including finance, human resources, inventory, and customer relations, to provide a holistic view of the organization.
While a TMS provides deep, specialized functionality for transportation management, an ERP is designed to centralize data and workflows across the entire enterprise. Many businesses use a TMS as a standalone system or integrate it with their ERP to enhance logistics capabilities within their overall enterprise structure.
The Future of TMS Systems
The future of TMS systems is poised to utilize advanced AI to drive greater efficiencies and automate complex logistics processes. As TMS solutions become more intelligent, human involvement will shift primarily to exception management and intervention, allowing the system to handle routine tasks and decision-making through automation and AI. Enhanced data analytics will lead to smarter reporting, enabling companies to make better-informed decisions and gain deeper insights into their operations. Fraud prevention will continue to be an attractive benefit for companies, placing value in data science and performance metrics rather than subjective human biases or longstanding relationships.
A Transportation Management System Streamlines Your Operations
The advantages of using a TMS system are significant across the entire supply chain. Load efficiency and optimization saves you time and money; a dedicated account team identifies and manages the shipping strategy that is right for your business’ needs; and access to a carrier network locks in competitive, fair rates. Find out if XTMS is the right solution for you. Get in touch with one of our experts today!
