At Fruition Logistics, we take pride in being Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) experts. This is the core strength of our business and a specialty that we think most, if not every business can benefit from using. We are going to continue our series of explaining some of the key benefits of using LTL. In this blog, we will focus on the benefits of using Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to manage LTL shipping and how it will optimize efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
There are an array of benefits to using a TMS that shippers will realize if they took the time to implement one. Many smaller shippers believe that an implementation of a TMS is not cost effective. We believe quite the opposite. Smaller companies, with lower freight spends, would in fact benefit from implementing a transportation management system. Due to the advancement in technology, most TMS’s are web-based, have user-friendly online services, and are easily integrated into other current systems.
The use of a TMS in LTL freight management helps ensure that your loads are most closely matched to the best LTL carrier, equipment, and lanes so that you can get the best available rates without forfeiting the service you anticipate. Some of the best advantages of a TMS applied to LTL freight include:
- Improved visibility to shipments: When you have an accurate location of where the freight is, you can communicate with confidence to your clients, which allows your company to build better relationships and rapport with those customers.
- Invoice retrieval, consolidation, and audits: Accounting and bookkeeping in the transportation and logistics industry can be a difficult and daunting task. Patirurally for companies that have multiple locations and freight shipments each week. An efficient TMS will contain all shipment information for easy access, automatically provide reporting on variances between quote and actual freight invoice, as well as provide further auditing features for piece of mind.
- Data and analytics availability: Because the TMS generates reports, your company can gain insight for the LTL freight shipping activity and outcomes. These types of data and analytics helps ensure that you can make future business decisions that are based on fact and not intuition or opinion.
- Process Automation: Having a TMS can help you understand the benefits as live/real-time LTL freight rates and control by restricting user choices to those desired by speed, scalability, and management. This will help avoid future growing pains as the TMS will grow in conjunction as you ship more freight. This automation will also ensure that the TMS is supported by a tech team, in turn, will give you access to the latest and greatest technology to keep up with the fast paced changing world of logistics technology.
- Manuel steps elimination and simplifying data entry: Logistics automation features will ease your worry about entering in the wrong information. These manual data entry errors can result in an increased shipping cost. It is important to understand that many factors go into creating LTL freight rates. This makes it imperative to not let something as minute as a manual data entry error to increase your rate and spend unnecessary company funds.
- Optimized communication between all parties: Due to a majority of TMS softwares being web based, most of them also have documentation storage capabilities. This is helpful if these archived documents are needed in the future i.e. discussions between the shipper, the consignee, and the carrier. This allows for full transparency, which is extremely important in our industry. In addition, they have automatic notifications via technological applications with carriers. This allows all parties to know where the freight is at any time. When communication fails, money will be lost.
