Transportation Management Systems for the Small to Mid-Sized Shipper

Transportation is Expensive

Consuming anywhere from 10% to 12% of the typical company’s revenues, it’s a big line item that’s still often managed and orchestrated through a combination of Excel spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls.

Modern Material Handling’s “2019 Materials Handling Technology Study” supports this assumption, noting that even though 50% of companies saw an ROI from their transportation management systems (TMS) within 18 months or less, just 26% of firms have implemented TMS.

Blame at least some of that low adoption on the fact that many small- to mid-sized companies (SMBs) think a TMS is only for large shippers that have multimillion-dollar transportation expenditures.

This couldn’t be further from Using TMS to extract more productivity out of transportation the truth.

Where the on-premise software may have been expensive to install and maintain just 5 years ago, today’s cloud-based and managed service options have put the power of TMS into the hands of a broader swath of users.

“These new solutions are so easy to implement and use that companies are very attracted to them, and particularly those shippers that are dealing with challenges around capacity and freight rates,” Bart De Muynck, Gartner’s research director, transportation technology, recently told Logistics Management.

“They see TMS as a way to get more productivity out of transportation.”

Companies are also extracting real ROI out of their TMS investments. According to an ARC Advisory Group survey, 43.5% of the respondents indicated freight savings of approximately 5% - 10% with the use of a TMS application.

Of these savings, nearly 60% of users indicated that less than 25% of the net savings were absorbed by the software.

These are pretty significant “wins” in a transportation environment that continues to become more expensive, complex, and confusing every year.

Contents

• Putting the Power of TMS into the SMB’s Hands
• Measuring the Benefits: TMS in action
• Making The Case For TMS for SMBs
• Do You Need a Transportation Management System?
• Don’t Get Left Behind