What is a Transportation Management System?

For many businesses and shipping organizations, the backbone of their operation is a transportation management system (TMS). But if you’ve never used one, you may not realize just how advantageous one of these systems can be. Here’s how a TMS works and how it can benefit your organization.

Who Needs a TMS?

There are a wide variety of organizations that use transportation management systems, including retail businesses, manufacturers, distributors, and logistics providers. While all of these companies are different, they all have many moving parts to keep track of. The right system will help keep track of loads and ensure they are being transported in the most efficient way possible.

Transportation management systems are not only crucial for mega operations. Even smaller businesses that spend $5 million or so on freight each year will begin operating much more efficiently when they rely on a TMS rather than old-school spreadsheets.

By using the right TMS, you’ll experience many benefits. You’ll save time and money because you’ll have fewer manual processes to work on and instead be able to dedicate more time to more important decisions. The right TMS is the ultimate tool to help you scale!

What Does a TMS Do?

Every TMS has three major functions: planning, executing, and optimizing to ensure that all goods arrive safely and efficiently arrive at their destination.

Before transportation can be released, TMS helps you determine the best way to get goods from point A to point Z. Your TMS will help determine the ideal type of transportation, the best carrier, the lowest rates, and the highest performing lanes with the goals for your load in mind. The right TMS can give you valuable insights that you might otherwise miss. Because your TMS helps minimize transportation delays and rates, this system will also help you keep customer satisfaction high.

After your TMS has helped you plan the best route for your load, it will also help you with load execution. The system goes through a large amount of data for you to expedite booking and tendering. It also allows you to track all of your loads to ensure they are running on time. The platform documents every shipment and allows you to communicate with your carriers.

Lastly, your TMS helps you optimize capacities by assisting you with tracking performance using a wide range of operational statistics. You’ll get pricing insights that help you cut costs and be able to identify lanes that are performing sub-optimally. All of this and more helps you improve your operations so things run smoothly and more profitably.

Work Smarter by Choosing FlexTMS as Your Transportation Management System

Overall, a TMS is an important supply chain management solution. If you want to incorporate a TMS into your operation but you’re not sure what platform to use, you should look into FlexTMS. Our cloud-based software is designed for small- and medium-sized trucking companies. Managing your fleet has never been this easy!

You can even start using FlexTMS for free! To learn more, get in touch with us today.

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