January 25, 2022
How Modern Logistics Companies Are Turning COVID Chaos into Long-Term Business Efficiency
T-M-S. Three simple letters that can inspire confidence or instill fear. After all, how many truly understand what is happening inside of that black box? Most in the supply chain world understand that a transportation management system (TMS) utilizes advanced heuristics to optimize loads, however, in the context of TMS the definition of “optimized” can be subjective.
Most commonly, optimized means aggregating shipments into the best possible groupings to produce the lowest cost loads that honor all associated constraints related to service mode, shipping windows, capacity, and equipment. However, these are just a few of the possible solution inputs. Since the modern TMS can have hundreds, even thousands of different settings that influence the optimization output, how can you be sure that you are getting the best possible results?
Optimize Your Way for Best Results
Enter best-of-breed TMS products. Blue Yonder Transportation Manager is a perfect example, it features a robust user interface that makes it simpler than ever. It takes the guesswork out of the configuration process and defines your needs in a flexible, scalable way.
For example, planners may choose to perform on-demand optimizations of one or more shipments in real-time. Alternatively, your organization might use batch optimization for TMS to schedule runs on a set cadence. Either way, you don’t have to be a SQL developer or know how to write XML to define the optimization criteria.
It’s Not Rocket Science
Blue Yonder TMS allows users to build simple searches using the plain English names of fields and then converts those to the needed format with a few clicks. Alternating between out-of-the-box optimization strategies from TMS, such as direct routing, movement through hubs, or continuous moves, is also as simple as selecting the relevant option from a drop-down menu.
- Want to be sure your dock schedule is accounted for in the planned output?
- Want to further automate your load tendering processes?
- Need to make sure your preferred carriers are getting their contracted volume?
Each of these tasks, plus many more, can be integrated into your standard optimization workflow.
