Today, transportation management systems are specialized and largely geographically limited, mostly managing land-based transportation within North America or Western Europe.
Other geographies including Asia-Pacific and South America, as well as international transportation, have not been the focus of transportation managers or TMS applications.
There is general agreement on the need to address these gaps to enable agile and responsive supply chains.
Various large enterprises, logistics service providers, and industry analysts see the need for a single “ubiquitous” logistics network in which an organization can plug in once and have access to any and all of its partners and information.
Many TMS system providers advise first to “focus on domestic.” But what does “domestic” actually mean?
Transportation operations in North America, Western Europe, South America and Asia-Pacific have very different requirements.
Most of the applications focus on domestic US geography while a smaller number is able to address Western European operations with some limitations.
They operate in silos. Even when they address the functional requirements of other geographies, they stay too expensive to justify an implementation in a silo.
These gaps highlight the need for a single view, connecting all domestic and international transportation through a common foundation.