Companies are having to reduce costs, protect cash flows and reduce the environmental impact of their operations. The software publisher DDS Logistics believes that its Transport Management System, now with added options, provides practical solutions.

Cost reductions are never more ardently sought than in times of crisis. For transporters and shippers, improved organisation of transport circuits and grouping goods to be shipped to the same destination can offer substantial savings. This is the promise of the Transport Management System (TMS) published by DDS Logistics, the leading French supplier.

Its computerised solution is designed to optimise transport management practices and has two main advantages: tracing and cost management. DDS Logistics solutions can :

• choose the most suitable and economically advantageous logistics and transport plans;
• track and monitor the activities of each link in the transport chain, to ensure that cost reduction does not impact on service quality;
• calculate the ‘total delivered cost’. Manufacturers and distributors need to know the cost of their supply chain as accurately as possible. To be able to make an objective judgement about the best source of supply they must be able to calculate the total delivered cost for each product (including purchase price, customs fees, transport and logistics costs before actual placement);
• manage finances in such a way as to foresee and monitor costs and margins over the entire Supply Chain.

Overall, the system can produce savings of up to 15% on transport bills, recovering investment costs in 6 to 18 months.

Lower transport costs and less pressure on cash-flow
There are two ways of deploying these systems: by purchasing licences or by using the hosted ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) model. Almost half of all new DDS Logistics customers choose this second solution, which is expected to become increasingly popular. How does it work? Under a SaaS contract, DDS Logistics rents out the software to the customer for an agreed monthly fee. The desired options can be accessed 24 hours a day over the Internet from any computer. No maintenance is necessary. “This method avoids the need for companies to commit sizable sums in advance, which is a considerable advantage for SMEs, particularly at the moment” explains Jérôme Bour, CEO of DDS Logistics. “SaaS keeps investment costs to a minimum as it does not require the purchase of any dedicated equipment. Having several offices ‘share’ software and data on a single server means that companies can spread costs.”

For Serimax, world leader in automatic welding for off-shore pipe-lines and Number 2 for on-shore, DDS Logistics has set up an original solution: the company pays an annual fee and then pays for each shipment. The cost is therefore dependent on volumes delivered – a sort of ‘Pay-Per-Use’ system.

Calculating the environmental impact of company activities
Better-organised transport circuits or the use of a single truck where several were used before quite logically have a favourable impact not only on costs but on the environment as well. On this last point, DDS Logistics has gone even further by bringing out a module designed to ‘Manage CO2 Emissions’, capable of simulating and calculating emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (N2O, O3) generated by multimodal freight transport chains. It can even suggest which transport scheme will be best adapted ecologically and economically by considering criteria of cost, delivery time and service quality as well as the least polluting modes of transport.