Let’s say you’ve just deployed a new ERP system. After pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into an effective deployment with responsible change management, you’re ready to move on to the next phase: integrating logistics solutions into your technology stack.
Most businesses in this situation have finally gained a broad level of visibility into their corporate resources, and their next goal is to tackle logistics visibility. Invariably, the next thing that gets typed into Google or ChatGPT is “transportation management software.”
There will be plenty of businesses for whom a TMS is non-negotiable, but for many others, the knee-jerk reaction to look into TMS solutions may be unwarranted. More and more, lighter-weight technology solutions are making it possible to skip the TMS and still get strategic logistics visibility via other solutions.
This has a number of obvious advantages: firstly, it means lower total cost of ownership and a simpler, faster software deployment. Instead of adopting another broad, complex solution to try and achieve visibility and then adding more specialized solutions on top of it, you can gain visibility from within a solution that’s already best-of-breed in an important functional area—e.g. the last mile.
That might sound too good to be true, but in this post we’ll dig into the ways that evolving technology trends in logistics make it possible to gain strategic logistics visibility without a TMS. We’ll also cover the practical steps you can take to make that happen.
To get started, we’ll need to lay out exactly what we mean by visibility. After all, it frequently means different things to different people, and the way that it gets used can be broadly wishy-washy.
The important things to remember about data in logistics is that it usually has an exceptionally short half-life. Blink and you’ll find that it’s gone out of date. That’s why real visibility is about having timely, relevant information at your fingertips whenever you need it.
Historically, that’s been the promise of your typical TMS system: you can see rates, first and middle mile plans and statuses, transportation plans, reports, etc. But because these items are all spread out across the supply chain and often pulling in data from disparate systems, there’s not always a guarantee that you’re seeing the most up-to-date data.
There’s also no guarantee that you’re visualizing that data in the most intuitive way. If you have to hunt for information and spend your time deciphering opaque dashboards, you’re not operating with full visibility. Likewise if, for one reason or another, you don’t feel that you can fully trust the information you’re seeing by default.
All that being said, logistics visibility of the sort that we’re talking about can be a powerful thing. It can help you to ensure that you’re building efficient plans and executing on them successfully, and it’s the basis of true data-driven decision-making.
The question is: how do you achieve it without a TMS?
According to Gartner, a transportation management “supports multimodal planning and execution of the physical transport of goods across the supply chain. It allows a shipper to manage varying levels of transportation complexity across multiple transport modes and geographic regions.”
In other words, a TMS can cover anything from managing first mile deliveries to choosing air freight providers. Naturally, there will be a huge amount of variation in the capabilities and emphases of any given TMS options. That said, they mostly comprise complex, heavy-duty solutions that require complex integration processes.
If your gut is telling you that that doesn’t feel entirely necessary for your needs as a delivery organization, you may well be right. Modern SaaS delivery management software, for instance, can give you the visibility you need into first and middle mile transfers and other logistics activities without requiring you to adopt all the features of a TMS wholesale.
This kind of deployment essentially cuts out the middle man. Even with a TMS, you’d likely need a specialized solution to handle last mile logistics and delivery management anyway. But the right delivery management solution can provide you the visibility you need without all the extra bells and whistles.
In practice, you’d want to deploy your delivery management solution in such a way that you achieve streamlined data integration with your ERP, WMS, POS, and whatever solutions you’re using for the first mile and middle mile. You can then leverage your last mile solution as a single source for data across your transportation network—all with an eye towards optimizing delivery operations.
The benefit of leveraging a delivery management solution to gain logistics visibility is that your TCO is generally lower, your implementation costs are less significant, and the change management hurdles you’re likely to face are less intense.
This tradeoff is worth it if you don’t need a TMS for things like comparing freight rates and planning multi-modal shipments, but still want to ensure data visibility and the reduction of logistics silos. In other words, if your biggest hurdle in logistics is getting the right goods to the right customer at the right time, getting your logistics visibility through a delivery management solution can be just as effective with a lower cost and a lighter lift.
Here are a few steps to make that happen in practice:
This helps you treat your entire fulfillment chain as a single, cohesive whole. You’ll have the tools to drill down on the most costly and complex stage (the last mile) and improve cost efficiency there, but without losing sight of the larger process and the way that each part is interconnected.
The result is a smarter, more connected, more cost-efficient supply chain and improved logistics viability across the board.
Getting logistics visibility without a TMS is possible—and for many businesses it’s the simpler, more cost-effective option. The biggest challenge is just finding the right delivery management software to empower true logistics visibility without a complex software deployment.
Here, SaaS-based, AI-powered software is your friend. Look for a vendor that has a long history of successful implementations and a strong data visibility game.
Curious to learn more about what that looks like in practice? Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our experts today—we’d love to walk you through it.