How to choose a transportation management system (TMS)?

Choosing a transportation management system (TMS) is a crucial step that will determine the success and development of your company in the future. Therefore, the choice of TMS must be taken seriously. How to make the right choice when there are a huge number of different transportation management software available on the market? To do this, we have prepared a complete guide to choose a transportation management system for your company.

What should I look for in a transportation management system?

You should ask yourself this question even before you start searching for and choosing a transportation management system. The answer to this question will help you form the technical requirements for the future TMS and a complete list of features that the transportation management system should implement.

What are some of the core features of a TMS you need?

There are many transportation management systems and all these software products have their own feature sets. Sometimes it can be a daunting task to make a choice between them. Therefore, you need to make a list of the core features that your company needs. This list will help you quickly choose the transportation management system that best suits your company's needs and weed out those TMSs that charge extra money for features your company doesn't need.

The list of the core features of a transportation management system may include, for example:

• Customer management
• Drivers & payroll management
• Trucks & trailers management
• Loads & trips management
• Income & expense management
• Reports
• etc

Which type of transportation management system platform is right for your company?

There are 2 common types of TMS platforms with their own pros and cons:

• Custom local software solution designed for your company's needs and hosted on your company's servers or computers.

  Pros:

  1. Implementation of all the features that your company requires
  2. Ability to make changes or develop new functionality at any time
  3. No monthly payment is required

  Cons:

  1. Expensive initial product development (may be in the millions of dollars)
  2. The need to maintain your own development and support team or to involve a third-party team of professionals (depending on the system, it can be from several thousand dollars to several hundred thousand dollars per month)
  3. Time to develop and implement (may take up to a year)

• Software as a service hosted on cloud servers or high-speed servers of hosting providers

  Pros:

  1. Does not require investment in development
  2. Does not require a development and support teams
  3. Contains the most commonly used features of the transportation management system used by most transportation companies
  4. You can start using it immediately after a simple registration procedure

  Cons:

  1. The need for monthly payment (from $99 per month, depending on the system)
  2. To make changes or add new functionality, it is necessary to convince the service management of the appropriateness of such changes.

Define the TMS goals and benefits you want to achieve

What goals and benefits are you trying to achieve by implementing a transportation management system in your company? The answer to this question will help you in choosing the best TMS.

The goals and benefits of implementing TMS can be, for example:

• automating the management processes
• reducing operating costs
• reducing paperwork
• Increasing income
• etc

Define the budget for the implementation and use of the transportation management system

One of the main arguments when choosing a TMS is the amount of money that you need to spend on implementation and monthly use. After all, there may be a situation when high requirements and goals are set for TMS, but there is no budget for this.

It should be understood that a custom solution for the needs of a particular company will require huge investments. First for development, then for support, and for making changes, if necessary. Such a system could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The cost of a SaaS solution will be much lower. The cost of SaaS TMS can range from free to several thousand dollars per month. If you search well, you can find a completely free SaaS solution that will fit all your requirements and can help you achieve all the goals assigned to the transportation management system.

What would be the most effective transportation management system?

What else should you pay attention to when choosing a transportation management system?

TMS should have a simple and intuitive interface. This will facilitate the work with the system and reduce the time for personnel training.

A good transportation management system must be scalable. No one knows how the trucking industry will change tomorrow, but TMS must be able to quickly adapt to new realities.

TMS should be able to implement various integrations with other systems such as load boards, ELD, etc.

Transportation management systems must be reliable and secure.

Why is Trucking365.io TMS the best choice?

Trucking365.io TMS is completely free and works as a SaaS platform.

Trucking365.io TMS has all the features you need to run your company successfully out of the box.

The Trucking365.io development team is ready to make changes to the workflow of TMS for the needs of your company, as well as add to develop and implement integration with any system your company needs for successful work in the shortest possible time.

The Trucking365.io support team is ready to quickly answer all questions and quickly resolve issues that arise when working with TMS.