As your trucking business expands, its supply chain operations will automatically become more complex. Whether you are shipping a few loads a week or moving a significant number of loads through different modes from several different routes, you would definitely need a TMS system.
No matter how reliable and comfortable your legacy system may appear on the surface, sooner or later, your business will require automation of business processes or be left behind in the competition.
There’s no time to wait and hold on to your legacy system. Shift to a TMS today. Visit the LoadStop official website and start adopting an enterprise TMS for your trucking business.
A TMS can be an essential tool for your business, helping you completely plan, execute, and analyze your supply chain activities.
In response to ever-increasing competition and expectations, the supply chain industry’s demand for the transportation management system (TMS) is rapidly evolving. The main problem is that legacy systems fail to address modern-day supply chain issues such as late deliveries, lack of communication, and lack of transparency.
In this blog post, we will walk you through the comparison between the legacy system and TMS, highlighting the importance of TMS systems and explaining why you need to switch and leverage modern-day TMS.
Legacy vs. TMS Systems
While most trucking business owners and fleet managers have begun to recognize the true benefits of adopting and leveraging a modern TMS system, others might be wondering whether replacing their legacy system with TMS technology is worth their time and time money.
To understand the capabilities of a TMS system, we have listed down the key differences between legacy and TMS systems. Let’s take a look at them.
Legacy System
A few years ago, trucking business owners were investing in costly add-ons that brought their own set of challenges, including coding requirements. It was obligatory to integrate them with existing systems.
Because of these pain points, the budgets are often overaged, resulting in implementation shortcuts and incompetent and incomplete systems.
TMS System
Considering a cloud-based, enterprise TMS solution is a reality for all small, medium-sized, and large-scale companies working in the supply chain, logistics, and trucking industry.
By adopting a TMS, you can reduce your software costs even further. A modern TMS system can help you store important information from a user-friendly and affordable interface with a network of multiple integrations.
Legacy System
A legacy system is considered highly transactional. It is known for taking orders, handling carrier assignments, and effectively tendering loads to carriers. In fact, legacy systems were effective at taking orders from the ERP systems and manipulating some of the information to determine who the carrier should be. Some of the legacy systems may even support EDI, and that’s about it.
TMS System
The good thing about TMS systems is that they offer actionable intelligence beyond being transactional. TMS systems help determine the most suitable transportation modes, and routes, providing better workflows for carrier selections, consolidating orders with the orders, automating business operations, simplifying complex processes, automating freight rate shopping, and employing adaptive routing optimization.
For instance, with the help of a TMS, a fleet manager can know about the weather pattern on a particular trucking route that may prevent delivery on time or know whether there is an accident on the road and the freeway is temporarily closed due to the accident.
On the other hand, sig alerts can help fleet managers analyze what time of the day a carrier can go through a certain route at 50 miles per hour or 20 miles per hour.
Legacy System
Companies that have been using legacy systems were essentially relying on Microsoft Excel or Access to access, control, and manage data. Fleet managers had to manipulate the data to obtain helpful information manually.
TMS System
Another good thing about adopting the TMS system for your trucking business is that it offers business intelligence, KPIs, pie chart displays, and graphs containing information. A copious amount of data is used to create a single pie chart, and everything is automated and handled by the TMS system.
Reasons To Upgrade to TMS System
We wouldn’t suggest switching to a modern TMS had it not benefited your trucking business. Let us learn why we recommend you make the switch and leverage TMS for your business.
Analyze Big Data
We live in a technological age where we consume a lot of data. There is plenty of information for us, and let’s face it—legacy systems are not developed in a way to consume and analyze big data to offer recommendations.
Without visibility of information, you can’t forecast and manage your business. Therefore, it is recommended to switch to TMS so that it can capture the data for you.
Optimize Business Operations
Businesses using TMS technology are more agile. A TMS system should be adopted to gain speed and agility for your business. It helps optimize your business operations, enabling you to deliver loads on time. A legacy system may fail to provide delivery on time as the system is not adaptive as that of a TMS.
Improve Profitability
Every truck business owner would expect work to be done quicker and more inexpensively than they used to do in the past. With the help of a robust TMS system, you can develop a strategy, implement it, report against it, and manage it, obtaining real-time data for making better business decisions and gaining a competitive edge in the market.
Smarter business decisions often lead to a higher return on investment (ROI) and higher profitability.
The trucking business operates in a highly competitive landscape where it is expected to witness ever-changing regulations, strict deadlines, and anticipations from supply chain partners. Under such circumstances, it becomes critical for truck business owners to seek new ways to lower costs and improve business operations while increasing profit margins.
Implementing an enterprise TMS solution may require little effort initially, but the results are worth the effort. It may take some time to see the results, but they are guaranteed, and you will see your business becoming successful in the long run.
