Transportation management system (TMS) software streamlines your entire inventory management for the transport industry and delivery systems. It keeps track of your incoming inventory while also real-time tracking where your outgoing stocks are located. Understandably, these innovative software solutions are becoming the norm in maintaining transport operations for larger companies.
Unfamiliar with transportation management system software or looking to get started with new cloud-based software? This brief overview is designed to give you a starting point, showing you what it is and how it can benefit the logistical operations of your business.
You Can Subscribe to Exactly What You Need
Value-wise, cloud-based TMS provides you with exactly what you need – nothing more and nothing less. Without this system, you could be employing an accountant only to audit your business once a year – something that transport management software can perform with a click of a button!
By employing the latest TMS technologies, you can customize TMS to your needs. For example, if you only need the basic functions, go for the basic package. Otherwise, customize your TMS to include add-on services that you need for your business to operate smoothly. Services, such as premium online accounting integrations, communication platforms and many other features are easily integrated into modern TMS solutions. Why not explore the available free trials and choose what fits your business best?
You Can Optimize Your Sales Quality & Quantity
As stated above, a TMS software can help you to keep track of each logistic routes. It can also tell you how long it would take for your inventories to reach your clients. This helps by giving you enough data to get a glimpse into what’s working and what’s not
As an example, you can analyze TMS data on delivery timeliness and product damage rates. From there, you can optimize your sales funnel via suitable means such as delivering only several stocks at a time or hiring more staff to help with product packaging. Using a TMS, customer satisfaction rate increases simply because you are taking steps to avoid oversupplying or under-supplying your retailers!
TMS Provides Improved Real-Time Visibility
Compared to all other models of inventory tracking in a supply chain, TMS takes the cake. This is due to the real-time tracking of your inventories and other important assets. This means you can keep track of where your drivers are, how long they require to dispatch deliveries once they are parked, how many deliveries they are able to complete in a day and much more. Most importantly, this real-time visibility provides your clients a sense of security. This is because they can track their stocks’ whereabouts and know when they can expect their incoming stocks to arrive.
You Can Save Up to 25% in Transportation Costs
Did you know that you can integrate various transportation partners and carriers’ data into your TMS? When you do so, you can optimize the delivery routes for each carrier service because a TMS would map out the most efficient logistic routes for your business!
With that task being handled by your TMS, you can focus on mapping out shipping criteria with your carrier services. You’re able to let them know when you need your inventories delivered and come up with a plan that would serve your business best.
When you map out these criteria and adjust your plans based on each carrier’s ability to fulfil your criteria, you can save up to 25% on transportation costs
Enjoy Lower Administrative Costs!
When you have a well-designed TMS, you will be able to find out where you can cut your expenses further. This can be anything from choosing a new route to replacing a poor-performing delivery partner or many more!
This works best if you integrate your shippers’ costs, contracts, billing and other information into the TMS system. By doing this, more data can be reviewed at the same time to provide you the most relevant suggestions.
Gain Insights into What Truly Matters for Your Business
As a basic prerequisite, most TMS comes with analytical tools to help you gain further insight into your business. These tools keep track of data such as the amount of time needed for your freights to reach their destination to storing multiple shipping profiles from various vendors and partners. Also, you can send custom invoices, bills and shipping reports with ease. You can even select the format that you want the reports to be in,
The more integrations you have with your TMS, the more helpful the accompanying insights would be for your business. These helpful insights could include both positive and negative aspects of your business, such as highlighting certain problem areas that you will need to take care of or showing you which product or delivery route is bringing you the highest profit.
Avoid Costly (Mostly Human) Errors with TMS Software
A missing number in your invoices, missing driver records and paper filing maintenance can be costly to start with. Some of these mistakes can easily cost your business a hefty sum if you’re not careful!
By having TMS integrated with other functions, such as warehouse management and client relationship management, you are less likely to make such errors. This is because any mismatches in your data can be cross-checked and validated with ease. Data backups are also readily available to prevent data loss or corruption. This way, you can always access your data and check it for error whenever it is required for you to do so.
With all these benefits, you would be doing yourself a disservice not to look at all the TMS solutions out there.
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