Intro to TMS + ERP: The Best of Both Worlds
The ERP & TMS Come Together to Create New Business Value
Does your business need a Transportation Management System (TMS) or an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system? For supply chain managers, the answer to this question is increasingly becoming “all of the above.”
Over the last 30 years, Enterprise Resourcing Planning (ERP) systems have evolved into large-scale systems that form the foundation for most modern businesses. The ERP is a nearly ubiquitous system used by thousands of organizations to manage business information, providing a high-level view of company activity and performance.
However, mainstream ERP systems have noticeable and well-documented gaps in transportation management functionality and have often failed to deliver the magnitude of value demonstrated with a dedicated TMS system.
New study highlights importance of a TMS with an ERP
A study by Ohio State University’s Jim Hendrickson reported 86 percent of the respondents believe their ERP needs to be supplemented with other supply chain execution automation. In fact, the report mentions that an external TMS solution is most often cited as the system needed to augment the ERP software. A dedicated TMS helps in enhancing transportation efficiency, providing real-time dashboards, enabling better decision-making, and handling numerous tasks that cannot be addressed by ERP systems.