How to get a free Transportation Management System (TMS)
If you've investigated a transportation management system, you know they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when you take into account hardware and software, training and implementation costs. There is a simple way to get one for free with almost no start up costs or long implementation time.
What a TMS can do for you
- Visibility of shipments – this allows you to coordinate and consolidate shipments to save money. It also allows you to allocate resources effectively in your shipping/receiving departments.
Cost Visibility – Wouldn't you like to know if one customer has changed their ordering patterns and instead of ordering ¾ truckloads is now ordering only ¼ truckloads and by doing so has just increased your costs significantly? If you know about this, you can take corrective action like increasing your customers price or collaborating with them to order in larger quantities.
Expedited Freight Visibility – The customer is king. These days many companies are paying huge expedited freight charges and don't even know about it. It's just lumped into their general freight charges. Wouldn't you like to know which customers are expedited the most? Wouldn't you like to investigate why?
Inbound visibility -If most of your raw materials are being shipped in “prepaid” you really are paying for the freight. It's not free. It's included in your purchase price. The cost of the freight and the suppliers margin on that freight is also included. For most companies this can be a huge source of cost savings if they take control of their inbound freight. But who has time? With a TMS system you can get visibility and take control. If you track it, you can manage it.
On-time Visibility- How do you know if your logistics function is servicing your customer effectively? It might have got off your dock on time, but how do you know your customer got it when they needed it? If you don't have a TMS system, you probably don't. A good TMS system will track pick up performance as well as, delivery performance.
Vendor Management – So you know that sometimes you don't get your raw materials on time and it causes havoc in your organization. Was it that the carrier was late? Or, was it that the vendor didn't ship on time? With a TMS you have visibility and can take appropriate action.
As the size of your business grows at TMS system is essential to remain competitive, “but the cost is just too much to justify”; is what I hear from many clients. Well, what if I told you, you could have one for free.
Hire a 3PL
Many 3PL's have TMS systems that can provide you with all the data you need to better manage your transportation costs. 3PL's include this as part of their service. At DSN, not only do we have a TMS system for our customers, but it's also web based, so there's no installation required by our customers. We also employ a team of staff programmers to customize our system to collect and display data in any way our customers want to see it.
An additional benefit of a TMS with DSN
DSN will also find and book the trucks for you while routing the shipments through their TMS. You might be thinking... then what would I do! You can focus your time where the real savings are in transportation: Reducing expedite shipments, consolidations, vendor management, inventory management, working with customers to reduce costs, etc. When you're not spending your time looking for trucks and fighting fires, it's amazing what you can accomplish.
I would strongly recommend if you're a growing business to contact DSN today to help stream line your logistics systems.
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