The days of neatly fitting into a particular lane of services – 3PL, freight brokerage, etc. – are long gone. If you’re not looking to get out of your lane with new services, you will fall behind. The power of modern transportation management system (TMS) software is an essential piece as your organization navigates the transition to ecommerce offerings.

An ecommerce transformation means rethinking distribution and fulfillment. Customer loyalty is built on more than a good product at a reasonable price; it’s about the ease and speed of fulfillment and the entire experience of the exchange. As 3Gtms’s own JP Wiggins has said, “Shippers now not only need to have the best products at the best price, they have to also have the best logistics….A TMS allows companies to craft their own fulfillment offerings, essentially turning those organizations into e-commerce powerhouses.”

A TMS is arguably the most connected supply chain management software in a company’s portfolio; it is connected within the four walls of a company and communicates with internal systems; it also sits outside the company and exchanges data with vendors, customers and trading partners. Its central position within a company’s pantheon of software enables it to create a comprehensive picture of what’s going on and deliver a higher level of fulfillment visibility than ever before. In its 2019 TMS Market Update, Logistics Management concurred,

“As the true workhorses of the supply chain management software cluster, transportation management systems (TMS) have become the ‘must have’ for companies that—working under the pressures of e-commerce and omnichannel—need to move beyond clipboards, spreadsheets, and phone calls to manage their increasingly sophisticated transportation networks.”

The 3Gtms Visibility Platform gives customers the ability to gather, translate and share information from internal and external systems, including from shippers, carriers, mobile applications, financial systems, emails, portals and more. This makes TMS software central to any ecommerce offering by delivering control tower initiatives that result in clearer insight through visibility-driven workflows. Companies have a single point that provides full visibility into the flow of data and the tools to act on the data; delivering unprecedented enterprise visibility and new opportunities for cost savings, automation and efficiency, including:

  • The ability to automate exceptions and respond faster to service disruptions
  • A single, comprehensive view of total transportation spend
  • Improved control and visibility of trading partners with real-time freight information
  • Automatic identification of shipment problems and the ability to notify involved parties in advance
  • The ability to avoid possible disruptions before they happen by gathering, translating and applying analytics

Ecommerce isn’t reserved for the largest companies with the largest budgets. Learn more about the 3Gtms Visibility Platform and how it can help your organization master ecommerce.