One of the interesting issues which I saw in a new research report from Aberdeen Group was that, most of the companies that want to implement International Transportation Management Systems (TMS) find it very difficult to have accurate data regarding the logistics activities in their supply chains. In fact, they ranked this as their biggest problem in TMS area.




Aberdeen found out that the companies which could overcome the problem had specific data quality improvement initiatives. I can summarize these programs in two main categories:

- The first strategy is to mention data quality service level agreements in the contracts with suppliers. Of course this can be done as a migration process where both parties are trying to improve the quality of the data.

- There are many software service providers which do the data scrubbing services. They usually have clients which are using similar logistics services providers so it makes sense for them to do such things on an aggregate level. The second strategy is to use such services.

Here I tried to highlight some new aspects and of course as I have written before, tracking technologies might help as well.