riers can do a better job of capacity planning and synchronizing driver availability with customer loads, Howland says.
Be automated. It may sound like an obvious statement
given their demonstrated benefits, but there is no substitute
for transportation management systems (TMS) when it
comes to monitoring transportation and logistics activities.
From carrier performance data to order-level reporting to
savings analyses, these systems provide unbiased information on virtually everything a shipper needs to know. A
TMS allows shippers to benchmark real costs with historical and planned costs. Without this insight, “it won’t be
clear why a plan succeeded or failed to meet the budget at
the end of the year,” the Robinson report said. It also gives
service providers the insight they need to make performance improvements, the study said.
TMS services are readily available through multiple channels—including the budget-friendly Web-hosted model—
and their value has hardly been kept under wraps in the
industry or in the media. Yet Grubbs of Stage Stores says the
software is not as widely used as you might expect. “I’m
amazed at how many shippers I’ve talked to who do not use
a TMS,” he said. “It’s the secret sauce.”
Be collaborative. Just because companies compete on the
store shelf doesn’t mean they can’t share supply chain
resources. Grubbs suggests shippers collaborate to create
round trips out of one-way hauls and combine freight to
build “continuous move” truckloads rather than settling for
more costly less-than-truckload (LTL) movements. Grubbs
says the two strategies lessen the need to find new capacity
since space already exists for one leg of the circuit.
Participants also stand to save a lot of money because round
trips are generally cheaper than one-way hauls, and truck-
load services typically run as much as 40 percent per hun-
dredweight below the price of LTL.
TRUCKLOAD FREIGHT transportationreport
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