In the good old days, your transportation management system (TMS) could manage nearly all of your transportation workflows. For the exceptions that did pop up, you could dutifully handle them manually, which took some effort but wasn’t a colossal burden on your time.
Fast forward to today, and workflows have become much more complicated. With custom logistics networks, almost everything has become an exception and it drains an enormous amount of time and manual effort out of your day. So what do you do?
In this article for Talking Logistics, JP Wiggins explains that visibility is at the heart automating exception management. Specifically, a transportation management system that can optimize transportation execution and exception management with visibility-driven workflows. From the article:
Through data integration and the ability to translate and share information flowing in from customers, vendors, carriers, order management, mobile applications, financial systems, emails, portals and more, today’s TMS can become a rallying point for all transportation related events and data for true inter-enterprise visibility.
For example, let’s say a carrier arrives on time but isn’t allowed on site because the facility is too busy. Yet the consignee hits you with a detention or late charge. The right TMS can flag that as an exception and fight the detention automatically.
A modern TMS can act like a transportation control tower that can enable an intelligent “rally point” to bring together different sources, translate that data and automate or present actions as appropriate.
The good news is that the days of managing by exception are far behind us! Read more about automating exceptions and how a modern TMS can accomplish more than ever at Talking Logistics.