Very small businesses: how can you manage your supply chain with TMS software?
Transport software & TMS
Digital solutions for agile logistics
Find out what Jérôme BOUR, CEO of DDS Logistics, had to say at the Top Business Supply Chain conferences by Supply Chain Village. What is the vision of the challenges and possible solutions for developing agility within transport organizations?
The COVID crisis has put logistics organizations to the test. It has shown that a supply chain must be agile to ensure service continuity. This need for agility applies particularly to the transport link. It is an essential link with customers and suppliers, and at the same time the most fragile because it depends on stakeholders outside the company.
Agility for the transport link
Agility is the ability to quickly reconfigure operations to adapt to a new situation. Of course, without exploding the cost of its operations. For a transport organization, our vision is that this is done on three levels:
- First, it is the ability to reconfigure its flows: change the mode and type of transport.
- The second level is to be able to quickly change service providers. If you only have one referenced carrier for each destination, you don’t have this capacity to adapt.
- And the crisis has introduced a third level, which is being able to reconfigure your teams. Not only allowing them to work from any location, at the office, on another site, or teleworking. But also to be able to share information and tasks with others, internally and externally.
Solutions for an agile transport organization
Digital transport platforms
The first family are the digital transport platforms. They will offer either intermediation or collaboration functions. They will make work processes more resilient and responsive.
Join2ship, for example, is designed to digitize the chartering process in collaboration with carriers. It is therefore the means to give its own teams agility in their daily work, the means to make its teams work anywhere. And of course this type of tool is indispensable in times of containment to secure its employees. It is also the solution to work easily with its carriers. With Join2ship, they can collaborate with you anywhere, on their mobile phone or PC.
A digital platform also allows them to perceive their environment, providing visibility on transport. This traceability information is the basic material to make its organization agile. Join2ship, for example, provides real time traceability, but also a predictive ETA calculation, to anticipate necessary actions, and alerts that will be automatically triggered in case of an event, such as a delivery delay impacting the planned receptions.
TMS
The second level of solution is MSD. A solution such as DDS Shipper includes collaboration and platform visibility functions. It also covers transport planning and tariff management functions, providing cost control and automation capabilities.
A TMS also makes it possible to prepare several transport plans in advance, with different modes and types, and several potential carriers. It therefore provides agility through the ability to switch easily to another mode or another provider, while assessing the impact in terms of cost.
The agility provided by a TMS is also the ability to adapt to very diverse and sometimes volatile costs. It means, for example, working with tariff-based operations while being able, for each shipment, to switch easily to the spot quotation requested from several service providers.
In the end, a platform such as Join2ship or a TMS such as DDS Shipper makes it possible to gain agility while at the same time being more productive and having visibility over flows, and even to control and reduce costs.
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