Transportation Management 2.0: The road ahead
Guest post by
Nipun Lakhotia, Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Transportation Management Systems (TMS) have come a long way from home grown systems primarily aimed to reduce freight spend to highly advanced optimization systems. Let's have a look at some of the most sought after features offered by next generation TMS.
'onDemand' implementation platform is the buzzword in the transportation management systems. New enterprises can quickly embrace sophisticated TMS systems for their logistics operations by leveraging on demand platform. It also enables adoption of best in breed TMS functionalities under one roof - from management of inbound freight, private fleet management to highly advanced business intelligence capabilities.
Collaborative network routing explores opportunities for continuous move and utilization of transportation assets between shipper, suppliers & customers. This feature is effectively used by planners to identify recurring shipment patterns for optimal freight execution.
Demand forecasting is essential to integrate production scheduling with logistics capacity. TMS can bridge this gap by making transportation planning in concert with other operational execution systems.
Carrier procurement is an important area which was earlier overlooked by traditional TMS. Companies can achieve big savings by automating carrier bid evaluation by lane and re-negotiating carrier contracts based on historic usage of transportation services.
Carrier charge backs are commonly faced by shippers dealing with parcel & express carriers. This is a charge levied by carrier due to difference in dimensional weight between shipper's manifest and the actual as computed by the carrier. Shippers are expecting TMS to sync precise information about package dimensions and thereby manage freight costs accurately.
Transportation analytics transforms freight spend data into logistics information. Shippers can utilize this information to identify their best suppliers, decode transportation spend on various commodities, identify bottlenecks and leverage this information to reduce overall logistics costs.
Regulatory compliance is one of the key requirements for international shipping operations. TMS is expected to provide solutions in areas like restricted party screening, dangerous goods classification, custom documentation, audit etc.
TMS providers are proactively looking into new expectations of the transportation industry and coming forward with a suite of specialized solutions. Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) 6.0 series fulfils gaps in the standard TMS offering with the introduction of advanced fleet management, transportation sourcing, cooperative routing and fusion transportation intelligence (FTI) capabilities.
Comments
Very crisp details on why OTM is a Best of Breed tool within the field of ERP vendors. Would you be able to provide information on how OTM integrates with Global Trade and Landed Costs? Also, a key benefit is the feature of Event Management, Alerts with Visibility at the order and shipment level – all these three items are of high interest to the business and operations, and would you have any feedback on these from your engagements?
Posted by: Maria McCafferty | April 29, 2011 2:44 PM
I agree that supply chain event management is the key area for many organizations from transportation management perspective. Many OTM implementations are structured only around this core functionality, thereby providing clients real-time visibility to their in-transit inventory and improving efficiency of their logistics processes.
Posted by: Nipun | May 3, 2011 7:28 PM
Thanks for putting all the advanced featues of TMS together.
Is the Demand Forecasting integration & Carrier Charge Backs are part of OTM 6.0 series road map? If so it is really exciting & a real road ahead for TMS.
Posted by: Lakshman | May 4, 2011 7:38 PM