Transportation Optimization For Everyone

February 27, 2019

The transportation industry has seen many changes in recent years. Shipping processes have become increasingly complicated. More organizations are doing business globally, online shopping is accelerating, and customers have growing expectations for fast (and inexpensive or even free) delivery. For organizations seeking benefits of transportation optimization, the transportation management system (TMS) has replaced spreadsheets and manual processes for many companies, but is it enough?

A TMS certainly provides an advantage in examining and understanding your shipping processes. With a TMS, all your transportation data is in one location making it easier to see trends and issues.

While a growing number of organizations have embraced technology to manage their transportation strategies, it can still be challenging to develop efficient load and route plans. That’s where optimization comes in. While transportation optimization software used to be “nice to have,” managing transportation in today’s complex environment requires going beyond the status quo. Yet many businesses continue to think optimization is too complicated or only for the largest shipping requirements. By using route optimization software, you will be able to look at freight movements holistically, analyze your shipments, rates, and constraints, and improve your decision making.

Is it really a TMS without Transportation optimization?

Many TMS solutions on the market today already have optimization built into the software. In fact, most industry experts will tell you that any system without load and route optimization is not a true TMS.

Without optimization, you might be able to execute shipments, but not with the efficiency that most logistics operations require to manage the complexities found in the industry today.

What can transportation optimization do for your business? When you input data into an optimization tool, it will build an optimal plan that is ready to be executed in the TMS based on provided details including planned shipments, available pool points for consolidation, cross-docking and deconsolidation, and any constraints.

When looking for an optimization tool, it’s important to consider the impact that changing conditions will have on your transportation strategy. These conditions can include delays from unforeseen circumstances like weather, fluctuating market demands, actions of your competitors, and how your suppliers and partners are performing.

MercuryGate Transportation Planning takes your real-world data to design effective plans. Data may include contract rates, schedules from your TMS, live fuel index, accessorial charges, LTL rates, international geocodes, and actual mileage.

Transportation Planning uses all this data to perform “what-if” scenario modelling of your transportation network. This allows you to take advantage of opportunities to consolidate shipments, shift modes to reduce costs, use multi-point optimization, zone skipping, or pooling. These “what-if,” real-time scenarios are crucial for your transportation strategy perform in an optimal way. They allow you to identify opportunities in-route for adding efficiencies and edging ahead of your competition. While it may sound complicated to consider all these variables, sophisticated optimization tools can help you simplify the process.

Because transportation optimization is quickly transitioning from “nice to have” to “must have” for more organizations, we have recently introduced a new implementation model for Transportation Planning.

Optimization+ is our customer-centric approach that accelerates implementation by putting you in control and allowing you to determine the scope and speed of your implementation. We provide access to the MercuryGate team of optimization experts and documentation, but Optimization+ will enable you to implement Transportation Planning at your own pace – potentially providing you with faster set-up and faster return on investment.

If you’re ready to strengthen your multimodal transportation strategy, there’s no better time to embrace optimization and take a closer look at the benefits it can bring to your business.