5 Key Challenges in Transportation Management System

The transportation management system of any business is responsible for the safe and timely transfer of goods from warehouse to the customers’ place using the least resources and at minimum cost. To achieve this goal, businesses have to hire separate teams for accomplishing a variety of jobs involved in the transportation process. But performing the tasks like order segregation, mapping of orders with a suitable vehicle, route planning and others manually cannot guarantee precision and speed in the process. But these are not the only two challenges a business has to face. Here are five more of them:

5 Major Challenges in Transportation Management System

Inability to utilize vehicles’ capacity

It is one of the major problems that occur when you use a traditional transport system. In that type of system, you have a team to look into vehicles’ details and decide which type of products and number of products a vehicle can accommodate. Their estimations might be wrong; in other words, a vehicle may accommodate more number of orders.

Inefficient route management

Not able to manage routes efficiently can directly impact the time of delivering an order. Moreover, it can also cause idling of engines (when a vehicle gets stuck in traffic congestion), more driving time, and high vehicle maintenance cost.

Inability to track consignments

With a traditional transport system, you have to have a dedicated team that might need to make hundreds of calls in a day to get an update on the status of the consignment.

Increased transportation cost

Manual allocating orders need more manpower, manual route planning and optimization can lead to frequent vehicle maintenance, high driving time, and delay in delivery (which may cause RTO), and not using a vehicle’s capacity completely may lead to the requirement of more vehicles from the market. All these problems together cause an increase in the overall transportation cost.

Inability to deliver orders on time

Not being able to deliver orders on the given time is also one of the key transportation woes. This directly impacts the customer experience.

How to overcome transport management challenges?

The trend of same-day and next-day deliveries has made it necessary for businesses to have an efficient transportation management system that can ensure the completion of every process at the specified time. Even a minor delay in the process like route planning or consignment pick up can cause delayed delivery. We know you have read enough about these transportation-related challenges and now is the time to provide you with ways to fix it.

So the best way to get rid of all such transportation problems is to integrate a TMS software into your business. The software can not only automate your processes but also ensure that every process is being accomplished with the utmost precision. Let’s check out some other benefits of the transport management software:

Automatic order allocation

To understand the significance of automatic order allocation, consider a scenario- your business is receiving fifty orders in a day, in that case, it would be easy for your team to segregate the orders based on their type, delivery location, weight, and other constraints. What if you receive five hundred orders a day? Would your team be able to segregate them at the same time? Obviously, it would need more manpower and time.

By automating order allocation, this task can be done in no time. Yes, it’s true. Transport management software is designed in a way to easily integrate into your existing ERP to check new orders and categorize them based on the given parameters. After categorizing, the software automatically looks for the right vehicle and driver for further order processing.

Vehicle capacity utilization

The TMS software can check every minute detail of vehicles to ensure effortless mapping of the orders to the vehicle. It looks into the type of vehicle, the capacity of the vehicle, weight and volume constraints, and other details to ensure more deliveries can be done using a single vehicle. In short, a TMS helps in utilizing every vehicle’s capacity to the fullest.

Automated Route planning and optimization + dynamic route planning

The software automatically finds efficient routes for every vehicle and also provides the feature of dynamic route planning. The latter comes into action when the end-customer makes changes to their delivery address or time while the order is out for delivery. The driver gets the notification about the customer rescheduling the delivery and the software shows a new route which excludes visiting that customer.

Real-time trip tracking

Having complete visibility on the entire trip helps a business to monitor and track the entire transport process and maintain complete transparency with their customers. Using transport software, both these goals can be achieved. Besides, businesses can also make it easy for drivers to create trips, manage trips, upload digitized proof of delivery, and more.

Transparency with the end-customer

The transport management software sends a tracking link to the customer; using that link they can track their order in real-time. Apart from this, they can also reschedule the delivery, select time slots for the delivery, and share their feedback.

To get transport management software with all these features, reach out to Shipsy, a renowned SaaS-based transportation management system suite provider.