TMS Trends

Transportation Management Systems (TMSs) are currently going through an economic boom. Management in transport intensive industries sees a high-performance TMS becoming increasingly important. The Gartner Group recently conducted a market analysis of the TMS systems prevalently used in North America. In doing so, they identified the criteria for the sustainability of the systems: In addition to the capability of being used in a global environment, the choice of systems depends on broad functionality and a modern technological basis.

02/23/2010 Among the important factors for use in global structures, the analysts included the consideration of country-specific features, in addition to the multilingualism of the systems. For example, different currency units should be supported in settlement processes. Consequently, leading software vendors design their TMSs with an increased emphasis on the management of multi-mode and multi-leg material flows.

The functional breadth of their solutions is what differentiates the leading players in the long term. The analysts from Gartner consider, for example, intelligent track & trace functions and a reliable event management to be among the features that offer particular utility to users. Other beneficial functionalities are advanced services for performance management, freight sourcing, as well as verification and settlement of freight costs.

As key technology trends in the future TMS market, the analysts include a centralized master data management, a business process platform capable of handling multiple clients and service-oriented architectures. Gartner imparts special importance to the latter, since it is precisely the increased need for agility and flexibility in the transportation sector that will fuel the demand for systems with a flexible architecture. Such systems allow companies to retain their adaptability at a reasonable cost.

The inet TMS was designed from the outset according to the principles of service-oriented architecture and provides all of the flexibility and agility that modern transportation management requires. The scalable software solution offers a high degree of transparency in real-time and provides all functions for professional planning, execution, controlling and analysis of transportation processes. It enables a frictionless, role-specific interaction between the participating supply chain partners free of redundancies. Multilingualism and multi-currency capability, as well as the support of other country-specific aspects make it predestined for global use. Its modular design allows the inet TMS to be used as an integrated solution for transportation management, freight cost management, and container management.

The TMS market still has huge growth potential, according to Gartner. The analysts assume a market saturation of only 20%. In addition, given the increasing cost pressures, the TMS-providers who offer cost-effective ways of mastering the complex tasks of transportation management are the benchmarks of the industry. Numerous practical experiences with the inet TMS show that its use can save up to 20% on transportation costs, and up to 30% on process and inventory costs.