Transport Management Software (TMS), as a logistics platform, facilitates your company’s order management system, distribution departments, and supply chain.
Today, with the integration of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms with TMS, customer interaction within the TMS has also been made possible.
The main focus of TMS is to plan shipping routes for products, find vehicles or carriers that are best suited for the shipment, and process the payment. Besides these functions, they provide you with multiple functions that will help you optimize your transportation operations.
TMS prioritizes the swift organization of shipping routes for products, identifying the most suitable vehicles or carriers, like fast auto transport services, to facilitate the shipment, and manage the payment process. Along with these core services, TMS also offers a multitude of other functions designed to enhance and streamline your transportation operations.
In this article, we cover some of the different ways through which transport management software streamlines operations.
1. Load Optimization
Essentially, the function of a load optimization function is to find creative ways to reduce the shipping cost of products or services and to facilitate carriers or vehicles that can deliver these goods quicker.
TMS analyses the shipment size, delivery requirements, location, etc. And using their complex algorithms come up with recommendations of carriers that are best for the shipment of goods. In simple terms, load optimization is designed to create the most efficient way of shipping.
2. Route Planning
Here, all your company’s shipping requirements, including volume of shipment, delivery time, and locations of deliveries are taken into consideration to plan pickups and facilitate vehicles to ship your products or services. There are other delivery route planning software tools like Route4Me for delivery that you can use to optimize your time and resources and draw best possible route plans for deliveries. This software can be used for one-time deliveries as well as frequent delivery routine planning.
A TMS has the potential to plan delivery routes, but that will depend on the input you give and the type of TMS you use. They aim to create delivery routes that will reduce shipping cost while improving overall shipping efficiency.
3. Reporting
While planning and optimization of shipments remain critical in streamlining your transport operations it is just as important to review data analytics.
The modern TMS has the ability to collect data relevant to each aspect of your supply chain operations and create reports that will break down all the important areas of your business. It makes sure that your business doesn’t drop the ball in areas other than optimizing and planning shipment.
4. Customer Communication Methods
Integrating a CRM system with a TMS system will benefit in improving communication between multiple supply chain partners to the ones involved in the delivery of goods.
The modern TMS can thus set up email or SMS text alerts that will help the customer, vendor or employees know the location of your shipment, the expected delivery time if there is any delay in delivery, etc. This will help in improving customer satisfaction.
Regardless of the type of customers or industry you serve, finding innovative ways of streamlining logistics is a top priority for every business today. You can manage these functions by using a well-equipped TMS system.
The best feature of today’s TMS systems is that most of them are in cloud-based form. Using a cloud-based system like Ramco Systems, you will be able to access information from any location, at any time, and from any mobile device. It is this type of flexibility and convenience that will help improve your business’s operational efficiency.
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