Last week, I participated in a conference call MercuryGate organized for clients interested in learning more about its TMS Mobile (aka iPhone Portal) solution. If you’re a longtime reader of Logistics Viewpoints, you know I’m a big fan of the iPhone, and that I view iPhone-like apps as the next frontier for software-as-a-service TMS solutions (see “An App Store for Logistics Software”). So, needless to say, I was very interested in what MercuryGate (an ARC client) had to show and say.

In a nutshell, the iPhone Portal is another entry point into MercuryGate’s TMS solution. The ability to create and configure portals (e.g., a portal for customer service to rate or track shipments) is a key feature of MercuryGate’s solution. The company essentially took the same philosophy and approach in creating this portal (user interface) for mobile users. According to Monica Wooden, MercuryGate’s CEO, the entire TMS could be run on the iPhone, but it would require a lot of zooming in and out. So, the iPhone Portal focuses primarily on capabilities that are of most interest to mobile users and work best as an app, namely rating and reports. Below are screenshots from the iPhone Portal.

Screenshots of MercuryGate's iPhone Portal App (Source: MercuryGate; click to enlarge)

The set-up seems fairly straightforward. Access to iPhone Portal is a permission setting in the TMS, and all user permission settings and hierarchies in the main TMS are respected in the mobile app. After a user is granted permission in the main TMS, they launch the Safari browser on the iPhone, enter their mobile TMS web address, and log in. They can then use the “Add to Home Screen” Safari feature to create the TMS Mobile quick launch icon.

A couple of customers on the conference call asked if and when a Blackberry version would be available. A good question when you consider that Blackberry devices have a much larger presence in the business world than the iPhone. The answer: not any time soon. In fact, based on comments made during the call, a Google Android version is probably next on the priority list.

This led me to ask a more basic question: Why the iPhone first? The answer, in one word, is usability. The Blackberry may be a great platform for email communication, but when it comes to surfing the Web and interfacing with applications, the iPhone is still king. Also, as Ms. Wooden pointed out, supporting the iPhone is much easier because there is only one vendor and standard to support, whereas with the Blackberry, there are many variations of devices and configurations.

I also asked Ms. Wooden if there was actual customer demand for this application or if this was more of a “if we build it, they will come” situation. The answer is a little of both. At a high level, MercuryGate’s customers, most of them logistics service providers, are always looking for ways to automate and streamline business processes. So, customers are always interested in capabilities that can help them reduce labor costs and improve productivity. Also, as I highlighted in a previous posting, one of MercuryGate’s customers, Blue Grace Logistics, had already developed its own iPhone application integrated with MercuryGate’s TMS. So, some customers were already heading in this direction. Moving forward, Ms. Wooden says, “We will progress the App based on client requests and see where it takes us.”

I know other TMS vendors are heading in this direction too, and I believe that the rise of TMS mobile apps (or more broadly speaking, “an app store for TMS”) will transform the industry in several ways:

• It will increase the number of TMS users by an order of magnitude or more. This will lead to increased productivity and cost reduction across the industry, as companies replace spreadsheets and fax machines with apps connected to a network.
• The volume of transportation data (e.g., rates, transit times, carrier performance, capacity) flowing through a software-as-a-service network will increase exponentially. This will lead to enhanced benchmarking, analytics, and network design capabilities, as well as predictive technologies that will leverage the behavioral nature of the network data to further optimize shipper and carrier networks.
• It will enable users to execute transportation processes and access transportation information from “anywhere” using a multitude of different computing devices. The next generation of TMS users will not be tethered to their office computers.