Choosing the right TMS is a critical part of every chemical shipper’s transportation network. Modern TMS provides advanced visibility into your day-to-day transportation operations and documentation that ensures your chemical freight gets to your customers on time. The right TMS makes it easier, more efficient, and cost-effective to track, manage, and optimize logistics operations across all modes and provide the right level of visibility to all parties.

Our Infographic: 5 Signs You’re Ready for a Global TMS focuses on the TMS needs of small and medium-sized chemical shippers, but in this blog, we’re taking a slightly broader look. To start, we’ll lay the foundation for what a TMS should include and how it should be helping you. Then, we’ll look at some key questions that will help you decide if it’s time for an upgrade.

What is a Transportation Management System (TMS)?

A TMS is a digital platform that streamlines the shipping process and allows shippers to automate processes, receive valuable insights, and reduce transportation costs. Anyone who moves freight around regularly knows that every transportation network holds a vast number of moving parts. A TMS helps shippers analyze and monitor these complex networks and make smart decisions that optimize spending and improve processes throughout these complex networks.

Your TMS Needs to Provide Greater Visibility, Transparency, and Accurate Data

Without the right TMS in place, you’re missing out on organization, structure, and, most importantly, visibility into the entire transportation cycle. From bidding to rate management to real-time tracking, analytics, auditing, and more, a modern TMS places you on the same playing field as every other shipper in the market. The complexities of moving freight to and from hundreds of locations with as many or more providers across multiple modes become effortless, driving value across every aspect of your supply chain.

To ensure you’re getting the most from your TMS, ask yourself these questions:

• Am I Getting the Full Picture? If you don’t have all the data you need, your analytics will be insufficient, inaccurate, late, or non-existent. If your internal systems and sources from your TMS aren’t correctly aligned and up to date, you get uncleansed, unstructured, and unstandardized reporting. If your TMS can’t properly process and report the entire volume of your data, you’ll always be late to the game, drowning in a lake of rapidly aging data, starved for intelligence.
• Is my TMS limiting my efficiency? If you’re using a TMS that requires manual processes to stay up to date and coordinated with multiple systems or takes too long to achieve organization-wide implementation, you could easily be losing money!
• Do you have an answer to rapid market changes? Today’s dynamic transportation market is changing every corner of the industry from e-commerce, buying patterns, reductions in lot sizes, mass customization, and a need to stage goods closer to the end-customer – not to mention the demand for ever-faster delivery. These business challenges need a fresh approach to the transportation market and its technology platforms.
• Am I maximizing the potential of automation? Current TMS platforms give shippers world-class automation solutions with plug-and-play speed and efficiency. With dynamic collaboration across multimodal carriers, automation enables intuitive scenario planning, real-time route optimization, 24/7 network optimization, pricing, scheduling, and many other benefits. However, automation isn’t the whole picture, as its effectiveness can depend on the team behind the scenes. That’s when the choice between any TMS and the right TMS becomes a game-changer.

Time for a New TMS?

To put it as simply as possible, if your TMS hasn’t brought you significant savings, you need a new one. CLX TMS enables world-class transportation solutions with plug-and-play speed and efficiency. The CLX Logistics Deployment Methodology ensures on-time projects that deliver ROI at go-live, offering positive cash flow in one to four months and full cost recovery well within the first year. To augment and enhance our Transportation Management Services, CLX Logistics provides real-world expertise with customized supply chain services that ensure you deliver on time in full every time. CLX TMS lets you:

• Optimize networks for load planning, contracts, and route guides
• Solve capacity management issues for all freight flows
• Resolve specialty equipment and product compatibility challenges
• Automate freight payment processing, booking, visibility, and alerts
• Execute carrier agreements and dashboard logistics carrier compliance and cost metrics
• Gain supply chain visibility across all regions and facilities
• Comply with stringent regional and global regulations
• Centralize information to improve workflows and lower administrative costs
• Continuously identify savings and improvements after go-live

CLX TMS’s fully integrated carrier network brings real-time visibility into your entire global and domestic supply chain. Supported by CLX Logistics’ unmatched expertise, adaptability, and flexibility, you get the absolute best planning and execution capabilities across your network.

Want to learn more? Check out our Infographic: 5 Signs You’re Ready for a Global TMS.

Contact us to talk about your chemical logistics needs and start using CLX TMS right away.