A transportation management system (TMS) helps companies move freight from origin to destination efficiently, reliably, and cost effectively. In a TMS survey, ARC found that respondents indicated freight savings of approximately 6 percent with the use of a TMS application. TMS achieve these savings based on process enforcement, visibility, analytics, and optimization. Whereas process enforcement and optimization are based on visibility and analytics – any visibility benefits or any analytics functionality is only as good as the data quality and the currentness of data processed. Capgemini also indicates, that the demand for global visibility is increasing and that shippers want to know where everything is located across the entire supply chain at any given point. Shippers today are still challenged by disparate systems, an obstacle no serious global shipper can afford. The conclusion is: real-time data is key in order to achieve visibility, analytics, optimization and process
In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies. The supply chain task is not an enterprise problem; it is an end-to-end network problem involving multiple enterprises. Therefore, the solution does not lie in fixing one link in the chain but in devising a community.