We believe the MercuryGate TMS is truly the best transportation management system on the market. However, the TMS features are so vast that many customers still underutilize the platform.
1. TMS Features for 2024: Automated Workflows
Only a small percentage of our customers have created defined workflows. Not every user adopted the best-practice workflows MercuryGate provided during implementation. If you haven’t defined what your ideal workflows look like, you are missing out on one of the system’s superpowers.
Obviously, workflows help with things like people forgetting steps. Not having a workflow also makes it harder to onboard new employees because you’re giving them a blank screen and expecting them to know every step. Conversely, a guided workflow tells them what to do next.
As an example, let’s say a carrier knows a load will encounter a detention charge and alerts you.
It’s a difference of a minute or two versus hours spent looking back 30-45 days to determine if the charge is valid. Now, try repeating that process every single time it happens.
However, suppose you take advantage of MercuryGate’s defined workflows and the dynamic rules that alter those workflows only when certain conditions are met. In that case, you ensure that things get done right AND efficiently.
2. TMS Features for 2024: Exception Management
Managing by exception allows you to look only where attention is needed. Without it, you may divide your attention across dozens of tasks in chronological or some other order.
For example, let’s say your job is to secure capacity.
When you email a carrier to see if they’ll accept a load, you don’t sit at your desk to wait for a response. You move on to other tasks, hoping you remember where you are with the load and not forgetting to check for a reply.
Time passes, and you can’t remember if you got that load secured. The panic sets in. You’re manually searching for the load acceptance. And if the load is not covered, you start the process over again with less time to get the load secured.
When you use exception management, you see green, yellow, and red highlighted information that shows you where and when to focus your time. It also flags top priorities for the day based on your role and pre-defined organizational criteria.
Imagine returning from vacation and all the important emails in your inbox were flagged and all the clutter was pushed to the side. Wouldn’t that be nice?
MercuryGate’s exception management capabilities do that for everything, every day. This TMS feature empowers people and teams to prioritize focus, take action expediently, keep freight moving, and, ultimately, create happy customers.
3. TMS Feature for 2024: Optimization
Are you putting all freight into the TMS? If not, you’re missing out on strategies to reduce freight spend. Optimization is a cost-reducing TMS feature for shippers and logistics service providers.
Optimization pre-determines which orders go together while respecting your business constraints to maximize the utilization of all available trailer space. Optimization even weighs the trade-off cost of estimated C02 emissions.
We even make it easy for you! If you want to take advantage of optimization but still aren’t sure where to begin, engage with our Optimization as a Service team and we’ll do the work for you.
4. TMS Feature for 2024: Final Mile
Final Mile is a powerful yet underutilized product that now integrates directly into your MercuryGate TMS.
Let’s be real. You can have the most efficient supply chain, but if you don’t pick up things when you say you will or deliver on time, you won’t have happy customers. Taking the step to control your first or final mile provides critical benefits:
- Routes are optimized.
- Drivers easily follow plans and communicate exceptions.
- Dispatchers efficiently react to intra-day changes.
Whether you are an LTL carrier, managing white-glove deliveries, delivering parcels, or managing courier operations, the Final Mile solution can be easily configured to meet the needs of your business.
5. TMS Feature for 2024: TMS-Embedded Visibility
Ask five different people what visibility means. All of them may give you a different answer. Many of those responses concern answering, “Where is my stuff, and when is it coming?”
But let’s face it, if you were 100% confident in on-time delivery, you wouldn’t need to care about the ETA status. Sure, it’s nice to know the location of your order, but the real power of visibility in your business comes from the choices you can make and actions you can take based on that knowledge. That intelligence-informed execution is why it is so important to have visibility connected and embedded in your TMS.
Everyone will find themselves in a similar situation at some point. What you do to get yourself out of it and prevent a repeat scenario in the future — that truly matters. MercuryGate TMS is equipped with visibility features that take you from tracking shipments to taking informed action across your entire freight network — for all modes in all geographies.
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