Today’s fluid, omni-channel logistics and global economic environment present companies with a more complex transportation puzzle to solve. Best-in-class companies, suppliers, and customers find advanced transportation management systems (TMS) essential for planning, automating, optimizing, and collaborating to meet challenges such as:
- Controlling transportation cost
- Embracing omni-channel
- Meeting multi-enterprise requirements
- Utilizing data to improve operations

The ability to think strategically while exploiting tactical opportunities is crucial for any company with products to deliver. As the transportation component of supply chain operations becomes more dynamic, research shows that best-in-class organizations distinguish themselves in their ability to exploit transportation management systems (TMS) to create game-changing improvements and differentiate their service capabilities. In addition to reducing freight costs, companies invest in powerful transportation management solutions to secure capacity and improve overall transportation operating efficiency. These systems handle the “big data” created by shipments, customers, items, and products that flow day-in and day-out, and measure performance over time.

Bolstered by a research survey from the Aberdeen Group, this paper illustrates why the biggest key to achieving transportation excellence may be adopting the right TMS to automate and optimize five key areas:
- Contract and rates management
- Routing and SLA compliance
- Mode shift, rate/lane aggregation and consolidation
- Route and stop optimization
- Settlements and Financial Payments

Advanced transportation management systems can provide powerful optimizations across multiple modes of transportation, as well as paperless execution, freight accounting with auditing or self-pay functionality, tactical modeling, strategic planning and sourcing, and procurement.