Unlock the Power of Real-Time Visibility

For manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers alike, supply chain disruptions have significant costs and consequences. To avoid the increasingly expensive impact of late shipments, unreported delays, detention or other disruptions, shippers require higher levels of visibility. Likewise, customers are demanding up-to-the-moment information on the status of their freight, including constant communication and in-transit updates about pending arrivals or delays. Real-time transportation visibility, paired with exception management and actionable analytics, enables shippers to react when there is a potential to significantly disrupt fulfillment or delivery operations. According to Gartner’s 2018 Macro Trends in TMS report, improving visibility was the #1 driver for companies surveyed.

Improving Fulfillment Experiences with the Promise of Real-Time Shipment Visibility

When reviewing individual vendors, companies are still looking at functionality, performance and scalability, and vendor experience as the main selection criteria. Surprisingly, ROI only comes in at fourth place while, further down the list, service and support, user experience (UX), and implementation expertise factor strongly in selecting a particular solution. Some of these criteria can fluctuate, depending on the size and complexity of the end-user company's transportation operation. For example, a smaller, simpler organization will give larger preference to a simpler, but easier-to-implement and train, solution with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). A larger, complex organization might give preference to more experienced solutions with more advanced capabilities, and deal with higher TCO and complexity of implementation. Often, these higher costs and complexities are offset by higher operational needs as well as productivity.

Gartner's Viewpoint of the TMS Market

The leading TMS vendors (those that qualify for the TMS Magic Quadrant) all support the core elements of a TMS. Functionality is just one of the many criteria on which end users evaluate the vendor. There are, however, additional considerations that influence the selection criteria of TMS providers. Some of these considerations have evolved in the past year.

As a shipper, you do business with numerous carrier partners. They all vary in terms of the technology they use, the capabilities they have and the type of visibility and compliance they can provide. Although EDI is widely used, from a visibility perspective it is becoming antiquated under the demands of the modern supply chain. While adequate for sending batched status-updates, the lack of real-time support means an inability to predict key milestone events, such as arrival time. Notifications for weather delays are, ironically, themselves delayed. Therefore, track-and-trace teams spend a significant amount of time manually calling and emailing carriers to discern the last-known location of shipments and other relevant details. Entire operations become reactive instead of proactive, as advanced planning utilizing predictive or prescriptive analytics becomes impossible.

In the modern world of digitally influenced commerce and rising consumer expectations, shippers must be able to leverage real-time visibility through solutions like Descartes MacroPoint™ paired with learning transportation systems like Manhattan TMS. Together, they enable companies to proactively identify problems that impact freight movement so as to solve, resolve or mitigate the associated costs and consequences of such disruptions. According to the Manhattan Associates 2019 Supply Chain Transportation Study, end-to-end supply chain visibility and traceability ranks in the top-five, most-important supply chain initiatives for 2019.

"Importantly, a lack of visibility often creates internal and external warehousing and transportation inefficiencies, and an increase in transportation costs."– Gartner’s 2018 Macro Trends in TMS Report

TMS Unlocks the Power of Visibility

Because each shipper has its own technology setup – and there are hundreds of thousands of carriers out there – connecting and testing each one with any TMS solution can be an expensive, time-consuming barrier to gaining total shipment visibility. Descartes MacroPoint solves that problem by offering “one-to-many” connectivity, onboarding a variety of different carriers, as well as a variety of devices in the actual trucks. The data is then made available to a solution like Manhattan TMS in real-time. The result is a TMS integrated with more than 135,000 carriers right out of the box, for real-time visibility of every truck in your network. Descartes MacroPoint has developed the largest network of connected carriers by integrating with new technologies and onboarding hundreds of new carriers monthly.

The Sum of the Parts

Despite best intentions, disconnected transportation solutions can actually create more internal and external inefficiencies around transport, yard management, warehouse management, inventory operations, and fleets. This leads to noticeable increases in costs. Working as one, Descartes MacroPoint and Manhattan TMS give shippers better planning and optimization through real-time visibility. That’s because visibility is knowledge. It’s insight. It’s a competitive advantage that can transform data into tangible benefits to significantly impact the way you plan, optimize and execute logistics on a daily basis.

The benefits are wide-ranging and significant:

• Better receipt planning – With up-to-date notifications of load arrival at different locations, receivers can better schedule their yard, docking and labor needs.
• Reduced labor costs – Because shippers know what is coming and precisely when, they can more accurately allocate the labor and equipment needed to unload and load the trucks, and necessary work in the warehouse.
• Lower carrier costs – More efficient planning means lower receiving and detention times, lower dwell times and lower demurrage charges.
• Improved customer service – Today, communication is the key to customer satisfaction. With better visibility, customers get more accurate updates and notifications to track where everything is. These capabilities can even be automated or offered as self-service, so you can focus on the exceptions.
• Proactive transportation planning – With real-time visibility and constant communication with every truck, it's easy to react to weather events, road closures and breakdowns efficiently. So, you can minimize bottlenecks and delays throughout the transportation network and improve the overall flow of goods.
• Improved shipper preference – In a time of capacity shortages, improved visibility increases your chance of becoming the shipper of choice. Earning a preferred shipper status also leads to better rates and better tender acceptances.

"With Manhattan [TMS] and Descartes MacroPoint, our transportation team gets much greater visibility. The predictive ETA and alerts allow it to be focused on the most critical issues and on improving our supply chain performance significantly."– Mark Donley, Director, Logistic Services, Ahold Delhaize

Real-Time Visibility in Action

A produce shipper is delivering to a grocery store chain, which is increasing its demands for advance notice of when the product will arrive so that it can better manage receiving, labor, inventory and other processes. Real-time visibility keeps the shipper and customer informed – even if there are delays or disruptions.

A CPG company is delivering to a big-box retail chain. If the CPG company misses its delivery window, the trucks often have to wait a day or two to unload, resulting in detention charges and customer satisfaction issues. However, if the company can provide notification that the drivers will miss their window, the retailer will usually make arrangements to get the truck in and out the same day.

A plastics manufacturing company leverages on-time deliveries to improve its vendor scorecard, which allows it to expand the number of products provided to the customer and, ultimately, to increase revenue.

An automotive manufacturer needs inbound material to make its cars. In the past, weather from a polar vortex delayed getting tens of thousands of vehicles to dealers – costing millions in lost revenue. Now, with real-time visibility, the company can realign its shipments and supply chain to mitigate the effects of bad weather and keep production moving.

Real-time visibility also extends inside the trucks. If a shipment is temperature-controlled, the driver gets updates and alerts throughout the journey. This not only saves time by not having the driver stop frequently to manually check the temperature of the shipment, but it also ensures the product arrives in good condition and is approved by the receiver.

The Value of Manhattan TMS and Descartes MacroPoint

• TRACK AND TRACE PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVED BY 50%
• DETENTION CHARGES REDUCED BY 20-25%
• SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
• REDUCED LABOR COSTS
• REDUCED PENALTIES & CHARGEBACKS
• IMPROVED DOCK & RECEIVING OPERATIONS
• BETTER CARRIER PERFORMANCE METRICS

The ability to replace manual or disconnected tracking activities with more automated freight visibility and management performance can improve your entire operation. It significantly increases efficiency gains and cost savings across your logistics supply chain, while freeing up your talented resources to work on more strategic activities that drive value for your business. Plan more intelligently. Lower costs. React faster. Serve your customers better. With Manhattan TMS and Descartes MacroPoint, you get the technology you need to shift your business into overdrive.

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