Transportation Management Systems Features and Functions
Transportation management systems should provide the basic components of a shared information system to support collaboration, rates, routes, roles, transaction sets, documents, and information exchanged to facilitate the booking, execution, and settlement of transportation movements.
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System Definition and Implementation
The TMS should include tools and applications to enable the user to create profiles for all contracts, associated carriers, and trade lanes for inter-modal and multi-leg moves. This should support regional as well as international transportation movements. The key to the successful operation of the TMS is a robust foundation created during the system implementation.
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Planning
Building upon the data model established during system implementation, the TMS should include application tools to enable the user to link rates, routes and contracts to shipment, product, supplier/customer and carrier data. Additional features include tools to enable route and equipment optimization. In the case that these functions are addressed in point applications the TMS should support the interactive sharing of data with these external applications.
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Execution
The TMS should enable the user to seamlessly interface with order fulfillment applications to make the association between products, origin and destination relationships and transportation movements.
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Shipment Tracking
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Analysis
Data gathered through the execution stages should be available for analysis and reporting, both real-time queries and ad hoc and structured reporting.
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Transportation Network Optimization
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Product Technology
This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.
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Supply Chain Management (SCM) Features and Functions
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