Innovations in Transport Management Systems

Filed in archive Point of view on May 29, 2008

Recent trends in the logistics market such as rising price of fuel, tougher regulations on transport (e.g. in Europe) and different service level requirements by clients have caused some new enhancements in TMS solutions.

This motivated me to write a piece on new TMS features: One of the new features some TMS providers are including in their solutions in the ability to re-run the planning and more integration. In the past many solutions were batch-based and it was not possible to re-run the planning with newer conditions. It was not possible to link the data in TMS with other systems such as warehousing either. This is changing at the moment and the new solutions are including such elements in their software.

Another feature which is becoming mainstream in many industries (and not only retail) is route and load optimization. The TMS software solutions now permit to plan on LTL and consider strategies like cross-docking.

And at last, comes the issue of contract management; the ability to manage the all the contracts in a single centralized DB and easily change the prices where and when desirable.

In my future posts I'll try to write more on the criteria we should consider for selecting a TMS.