Leveraging digital to make transportation an essential part of the customer experience

A global health crisis, a growing labor shortage throughout Europe, and increasingly pressing transportation needs… Faced with a sector under pressure, manufacturers and shippers are relying on digitalization and TMS to ensure an optimal experience for their customers.

Before the Covid crisis, the market for digital solutions dedicated to transport was growing by 5 to 10% per year. Today, after several months of stalemate and in the face of strong demand, it is growing at 20 to 25% per year. Reinforced by the shortage of containers and manpower, digitalization is accelerating strongly. It is in this context that shippers – industrialists and distributors – have realized, in a sometimes brutal way, the essential stake that the smooth running of a transport chain represents. And this is true whether it is a question of time, cost, risk, resilience or CO2. Delivery is now perceived, and rightly so, as a key element of the customer experience. But to meet these multiple challenges, it is necessary to control its flows, from end to end of the chain, regardless of its complexity.

And this control depends above all on a major factor: collaboration between the diversity of players that make up the transport supply chain. These are the very subjects that are at the heart of the digital solutions offered by the sector’s editors. Collaborative transport platform or TMS, these softwares are aimed at large groups or SMEs and ETIs in a lighter version and act on all types of flows and transport modes.

Acting on the optimization, visibility and organization of transport

Unfortunately, digital technology cannot invent new transport capacities, but it can make the best use of those that have been found despite the crisis. Thus, the TMS transport software acts on three levels of action. The first level enables the company to make better use of its capacities and to fill its containers in the best possible way, in particular by means of dedicated optimization modules. Grouping of orders, calculation of routes, etc. These modules enable transport cost savings of between 5 and 10%, and even up to 15% for some users. These elements are then shared with all the supply chain actors, to access a second level of optimization.

This second level of optimization is based on visibility and sharing. Collaborating with the various supply chain actors, searching for information and making it active are among the assets of the TMS. This research and analysis of transport data ultimately enables the quality of service offered to customers to be better measured and the information they are looking for to be passed on to them, throughout the supply chain. In this way, a permanent link is established between transport and product. The last level of action offered by digital transport solutions is a better global organization of national and international flows. Using a digital TMS has a direct impact on the strategic management of operations, offering the possibility of rethinking sourcing, calculating the full cost of products or even CO2 emissions.

Planning, collaboration, visibility, cost and CO2 control, and quality of service management and measurement are at the heart of the digitalization of transport offered by DDS Logistics’ TMS. Whether they are connected or independent of each other, its various modules enable sustainable action to be taken to optimize both national and international operations.