Don’t Let Your Aging TMS Throttle Your Company’s Growth
Bannockburn, Ill. – There comes a time in every company’s life when the question “Is our existing software helping or hurting our organizational growth?”gets asked. With technology advancing quickly, new automation capabilities continually being introduced, and marketplace demands in constant flux, companies need robust, cloud-based solutions that can meet those demands.
Supply chain software—specifically, transportation management systems (TMS)—is one area where companies are paying more attention right now. From older proprietary systems to monolithic on-premises solutions to the infamous “Excel spreadsheet, email, and phone call” approach, the limitations of these options have become glaringly obvious in the current business environment.
High upfront and ongoing maintenance/licensing costs aside, aging TMSs can also be resource-intensive to maintain and “out of touch” with the modern transportation environment. They’re also vulnerable to cyberattacks, difficult to scale and often unable to integrate directly with other software solutions. As your company grows and needs change, replacing or augmenting your existing tech stack with highly-scalable cloud solutions will help it easily adapt to evolving requirements.
Your TMS: The Brains of Your Supply Chain
As the brains of the supply chain, the TMS continues to evolve and grow right along with the organizations that use the software on a daily basis. Whether it’s optimizing routes, selecting carriers, tracking shipments, tracking proof of deliveries or automating the billing/invoicing process, the TMS removes much of the manual work from the transportation management process. By automating and optimizing these and other functions, the solutions help reduce costs, enhance efficiencies and improve customer relationships.
“TMS solutions enable a company to have tighter control of their transportation operations, optimize costs, improve efficiencies, and have improved visibility into the movement of goods,” Gartner points out in its latest Transportation Management Systems Reviews and Ratings. And as centralized hubs for managing and optimizing all aspects of transportation, TMS systems also help companies make informed decisions and streamline their logistics operations.
Unfortunately, these and other benefits are out of reach for companies that stick to using aging, on-premises TMS applications that were put in place years or decades ago. A proprietary TMS presents a completely different set of problems, especially if the individuals who developed and maintained it for all these years are no longer with the company. A cloud-based TMS, on the other hand, is highly scalable, can easily adapt to changing business requirements and offer reduced risk of security incidents and data breaches.
With Gartner pegging total global cloud computing spend at $675 billion this year—more than 20% higher than 2023’s $561 billion—companies clearly understand the value of moving their software off premises and into the cloud. The cloud offers better accessibility, actionable data analytics, automatic backups, quicker deployments and lower overall costs. It also provides the optimal software delivery method for TMS, which has to be able to manage the entire transportation lifecycle of an order or shipment.
This isn’t the Time to Pump the Brakes
Aging, on-premises and proprietary TMS solutions can throttle corporate growth in several different ways. Mike Horvath, COO at Revenova, says one of the biggest problems is the additional strain these systems place on internal IT resources. Those IT teams not only have to keep the TMS up, running and relevant for internal users, but they also have to make the system accessible to outside partners (e.g., carriers, business partners, customers, etc.).
To be most useful, this information-sharing must be as close to real-time as possible, otherwise those partners may wind up making decisions based on inaccurate data.
“The logistics environment today is all about communicating information and engaging with both customers and business partners in as near real-time as possible,” Horvath says. “If your TMS can’t tell you where every order is, when they’re going to reach the destination and how much it’s costing to ship each order, then it’s time to begin exploring new options to either replace or augment your existing transportation management setup.”
Drive Down Your Transportation Costs
The way an existing TMS was architected, and how it’s been updated over time, are other problem areas that many companies are facing right now. With customer demands changing, business partners demanding better supply chain visibility and investors/acquirers seeking targets that have their “supply chain technology acts together,” companies running on legacy software that’s been overly customized or can’t integrate with other systems could soon find themselves running behind the rest of the pack.
“In most cases, legacy software solutions are architected in a way that once you start to customize them, you can’t go back and use the original vendor’s upgrades; the workarounds and requirements are simply too intensive and expensive,” Horvath says. “At that point, you’re basically on your own.”
If any or all of these challenge points sound familiar, it’s probably time to rethink your TMS approach and consider a cloud-based solution that not only eliminates these problems, but also gives your company the firepower it needs to be able to transform its TMS into a centralized transportation management hub, enhance visibility across your network, identify the best possible routes and carriers, and begin driving down your transportation costs.
To learn more about Revenova TMS Request a Demo. Follow Revenova on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) for the latest updates and news about Revenova TMS, the original CRM-powered Transportation Management System.
