Driving supply-chain resilience with advanced transportation management systems
A transportation management system (TMS) is a big, but worthwhile, investment. The events that have shaken our ground in the past few years have highlighted the importance of resilience – the ability to absorb a disturbance and bounce back to a functioning state – for supply chains overall and for transportation in particular.
Given the complexity of modern supply chains and the speed at which we are expected to deliver, resilience is in danger without a solid TMS in place. Transportation infrastructure, smooth logistics and reliable TMSs supporting coordination and responses is what keeps the world truly connected in the new normal.
Building visibility, understanding the risks and taking action (in that exact order)establishes resilience within supply chains. What makes a TMS a great investment is that it builds your capability to see, understand and act on the challenges and bottlenecks of the transportation process before it gets too late to do so, which makes it a key digital enabler of resilience.
Establishing visibility and building a connected ecosystem for supply-chain success
Today, building a connected ecosystem is a must for organisations that want their supply chain to excel. Multiple data or ERP systems need to be connected with external data sources in order to create a single source of truth for all the stakeholders involved in the shipment process, including the customers. Additionally, the organisation needs to avoid using multiple types of software and, instead, aim at having one TMS in place.
While establishing visibility is crucial for success, defining what KPIs would measure and contribute to your operational resiliency and risk is the next step. Introducing these KPIs to your TMS’s daily dashboards gives you a tool with which you can both monitor your real-time performance and build projections.
Real-time data collection and processing should be at the core of a TMS today in order to allow you to proactively manage and navigate changes (even last-minute changes) in the shipping process. In addition to shipment tracking happening in real time, it is important to maintain streamlined communication, scheduling and clocking in or out, and efficient load management in a single TMS ecosystem.
The TMS dashboards should give you not only a real-time summary of how your daily operations are performing but also match your current performance with further scheduling along the shipment route, generate projections and trigger alerts for potential disruptions.
Introducing these KPIs to your TMS’s daily dashboards gives you a tool with which you can both monitor your real-time performance and build projections.
Real-time data collection and processing should be at the core of a TMS today in order to allow you to proactively manage and navigate changes (even last-minute changes) in the shipping process. In addition to shipment tracking happening in real time, it is important to maintain streamlined communication, scheduling and clocking in or out, and efficient load management in a single TMS ecosystem.
The TMS dashboards should give you not only a real-time summary of how your daily operations are performing but also match your current performance with further scheduling along the shipment route, generate projections and trigger alerts for potential disruptions.
Introducing these KPIs to your TMS’s daily dashboards gives you a tool with which you can both monitor your real-time performance and build projections.
Real-time data collection and processing should be at the core of a TMS today in order to allow you to proactively manage and navigate changes (even last-minute changes) in the shipping process. In addition to shipment tracking happening in real time, it is important to maintain streamlined communication, scheduling and clocking in or out, and efficient load management in a single TMS ecosystem.
The TMS dashboards should give you not only a real-time summary of how your daily operations are performing but also match your current performance with further scheduling along the shipment route, generate projections and trigger alerts for potential disruptions.
Sensing and understanding the risks
Once the critical operational aspects and exceptions that need to be addressed for dynamic management of the shipment process have been identified, the performance projections generated by a TMS with real-time data empower your critical capability: the ability to sense the risks.
With advanced analytical capabilities, a TMS can generate predictive insights and optimal business scenarios or be integrated with a tool offering such a capability. Sensing risks through algorithms that scan digital-twin components, model constraints and identify impact is the basis for well-informed and timely decision-making, and it is worth aiming to sense these risks.
This allows a decision maker to prioritise troubleshooting by the impact of potential disruptions and informs you about where to focus.
Taking action with an advanced TMS
An advanced TMS that establishes visibility and helps you understand the risks levels up your logistics resilience. It enables you to perform cost optimisation, dynamic re-routing, load management or to change the transportation mode to avoid sacrificing the lead time or sustainability impact promised to a customer.
Having an advanced TMS in place allows you to orchestrate a collaborative response among supply-chain ecosystem partners based on automated prescriptive recommendations, and this gives you flexibility and makes you resilient.
TMS success stories
We have extensive experience in leading multiple successful TMS transformations. Among such transformations, we helped a leading technology and service provider for mineral processing and metal refining to replace their existing transportation management system with a more innovative, digitalised and global solution which was cost-efficient and eliminated the complexity of the previous solution.
Our team facilitated the implementation of a state-of-the-art, standardised global TMS, which led to significant savings, the full visibility of client-managed transportation and streamlined transparent booking processes for all delivery flows with clean data.
Our experience in TMS transformation extends to many industries, including (but not limited to) the renewables, petrochemicals, industrial products, biopharmaceuticals and healthcare industries.
In addition to being a critical enabler of supply chain resilience, an advanced TMS helps when it comes to sustainable transportation. To learn more on the topic, please browse this webpage: Sustainable Transportation | Deloitte US.
