Do you know how to manage your fleet and get the most out of it with a TMS?

Fleet management is an arduous and tedious task in which it is easier than we would like to admit to make mistakes and pay for it with poor performance and loss of time and money. For this, there is the option of managing your fleet with a TMS to assist, optimize and automate operations.

However, TMSs are thought to be a product exclusively for large companies with huge fleets because of their sophistication and complexity. But, nothing could be further from the truth, any company that manages its supply chain and operates with a transportation fleet has the need to install a digital control tower for cargo operations.

If you want to know the advantages of managing your fleet with a TMS, take note!

Allows you to organize the company and grow with it

Thanks to the ability of a TMS to collect all the necessary information about your fleet, your customers and your orders, it is now possible to unify all the data in one place. This eliminates the need to go through calls, messages, e-mails and paper documents to check the accuracy of accounts, which wastes too much time and resources.

Therefore, apart from the ease of successful operations, it is also much easier to collect the KPIs applied to your monthly, quarterly and even annual targets and act on them. In addition, thanks to better communication and customer satisfaction, it allows the company to grow and adapt to the volume of demand, because it takes just a few steps to add new vehicles and new hires to the TMS database.

Avoid unnecessary calls

Usually, to carry out the transportation of an order, either to get it to the distribution center or to the end customer, a team member is needed to make the calls to the shipper and the broker to check the availability of the freight and agree on a rate. With this action, too many time and financial resources have already been invested that may result in the freight not being available or not being dealt with by the people involved.

However, the TMS automates this entire process, as the system collects information about the available fleet and sends this data to customers in very few steps and time invested. In this way, time is spent on other tasks and relationships with shippers and intermediaries are improved, and they are eager to return to your services because of their effectiveness.

It is worth noting that shippers are looking for their automated processes to adapt to the automated processes of third parties, as they want to leverage their investment in a TMS and would be burdened by doing business with a logistics operator that does not have one.

Perfect complement to fleet management software

Usually, people interested in digitizing their transport logistics operations often wonder what is the difference between a TMS and a fleet management software, as both terms may seem confusing at first. For this reason, we will outline the main differences between managing your fleet with a TMS and controlling it with fleet management software.

On the one hand, a fleet management software focuses on digitizing the administration of vehicles and their safety control, communication between staff and customer, and order visibility through geolocation.  On the other hand, a TMS provides the ability to manage, plan, execute and post-process all logistics operations, whether it is assigning orders, preparing invoices and documentation, etc.

As you have seen, both functions complement each other and provide greater control over various aspects of transportation and operations. Of course, these tools can be more useful, according to the needs of your fleet and your processes, so you should consider whether a fleet management software or a TMS is your best option.

Can be adapted to the constraints and sector of the company

As mentioned above, there is a belief that managing your fleet with a TMS is only within the reach of large, industry-leading companies. While it is true that a TMS can provide more complex and large-scale functionalities for international companies, it is also possible to adapt to a smaller fleet and a smaller order flow.

For example, there are TMS that support multimodal and intermodal transport, i.e. transport that requires other modes of transport such as sea, air and rail and/or shipments that require more than one carrier and one contract. For this reason, the complexity of these modes together with the internationalization of these as invoices with different currencies makes a TMS an essential tool to be able to manage and have control over all operations. However, an SME or medium-sized company will not need such a complex system and can study which options it wants and which others can be discarded.

Conclusion

The advantages we have all heard about managing your fleet with a TMS consist of time and cost savings, performance control and improved customer satisfaction, among others. However, the TMS goes a step further and assists in the digitization of a sector that is more than necessary as the logistics and distribution industry is becoming increasingly complex and competitive with its current challenges.

Not to mention that improved transportation management is not exclusive to logistics giants, but is also applicable to any size fleet and order volume. Especially considering that it is estimated that only 20-35% of companies have a TMS in place.

At Hedyla we are attentive to the latest developments in the sector, so we provide the most demanded logistics solutions in the industry and adapted to any restriction and size of the company or fleet.