Peter Yost Archives

Guest Commentary: Is Your TMS Pulling Its Weight?

Guest Commentary | By Peter Yost • 12/10/2013

Can you name all eight of Santa’s reindeer (nine, if you count Rudolf)? I did an unscientific survey of those around me and found most could only name Rudolf plus three others. Everybody seemed to remember Dancer and Prancer but most couldn’t come up with Comet and Vixen. It’s a good thing Santa remembers them all because it takes at least eight reindeer to get him off the roof and around the world in just one night. Maybe he could get started with three or four, but could he successfully complete his journey without cutting some corners?

Like Santa’s reindeer-powered conveyance, your Transportation Department has options available to get the job done. But, are you using all of the options available to do the best job possible? If you have a TMS, you’re likely using it to manage rates, select carriers, tender shipments, and to track shipments up to the point of delivery. If you’ve accomplished this much with a TMS, congratulations, you’re doing more than about 65% of all shippers.

Below are eight (one for each of Santa’s reindeer) ways you could use a TMS to improve efficiency and process, and like Ebenezer Scrooge, squeeze every last penny of cost out of your process.

1. You probably started your TMS project to manage shipping costs for your high-value freight, inbound or outbound. Drive savings across your enterprise by using your TMS to manage your transportation network, domestic and international, inbound and outbound.

2. Traditionally, shippers look to their TMS for load and route building and overlook the optimization of their entire network. Some cost saving techniques available include shipment consolidations, eliminating empty backhauls, cross-dock opportunities, zone skipping, simultaneous planning inbound and outbound shipments, what-if analysis and modeling, and managing the carbon footprint.

3. With constantly changing markets and rates, procuring and maintaining the best possible rates can be a nightmare. Your TMS can solicit spot quotes or long term bids from carriers, help you evaluate the bids, select the right carriers and convert them into contracts. It can also reach out to public load boards or to web-based services (ex. Parcel contracts) to find the best available rates.

4. If your shipments cross water or borders, you have additional data to track and documents to create, plus denied party screening and contract management to consider. Your TMS will collect the necessary information to create the import and export documents and then submit them electronically to the appropriate government agencies.

5. Every interaction within your transportation management process creates a data trail. You need visibility to this data from origin to destination. While shipment status and cost are important, don’t lose site of the decision support capabilities that your TMS offers. Perform transportation modeling, optimal carrier selection, performance management, in-transit partner collaboration, and delivery confirmation, just to mention a few. Add analytics to the process and improve your efficiency and customer satisfaction.

6. How do you manage carrier invoices? If you’re outsourcing Freight Audit & Payment, have you integrated your freight pay partner with your TMS so they have access to the most current rates and carrier information? Have you considered managing the process in-house? You can use your TMS to match pay invoices, audit, allocate and manage accruals.

7. When you have a damaged freight claim, is the claims management process integrated with the TMS to collect the data and manage the claim properly to ensure this process does not slip through the cracks?

8. Your TMS is accessible by mobile devices so you can stay in touch when you’re away from the office. Track your shipments, communicate with your carriers, confirm deliveries and continuously monitor important metrics.

In the spirit of the season, and with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, I offer you this adaptation of the first five paragraphs of “T’was the Night Before Christmas”.

T’was the month before the Christmas season, when all through the warehouse
The forklifts were stirring, the trailers here and about.
The shipments were all queuing for their destinations with care,
In hopes that late deliveries soon would be rare.

The orders were placed all complete and double checked,
While visions of on-time pick-ups were updated and set;
And the Warehouse Manager in her sports coat, and I in my coveralls (for some reason),
Had just settled in for a long shipping season;

When out in the lot there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my office to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The sun on the lot full of shiny fifty-three foot trailers
Gave a sparkle of efficiency to the brand new eighteen wheelers,
When, what on my computer screen should appear,
But a browser and buttons, then I knew not to despair,
With a user interface, so easy and fast,
I knew in a moment it must be a TMS.

More rapid than eagles over the Internet it came,
As I clicked and selected, I called the features by name:
“Now, Optimize! Now, Rate! Now, Tender! Now, Audit and Settle!
On, Documents! On Tracking! On, Analytics and Reporting !
To the DC, to the retailer! To the start of a long haul!
Now ship away! Ship away! Ship away all!”

Peter Yost is the Director of Business Development at MercuryGate International. He has 30 years of experience in technology sales & marketing, including 10 years in the logistics industry. He is responsible for MercuryGate’s domestic and international partner ecosystem that is expanding the company’s reach into Europe, Asia and South America. Peter has a BBA in Marketing and Information Technology from Georgia Southern University.

Guest Commentary: The Top 15 Signs You’re Ready for a Cloud-Based TMS

Cloud/Software-as-a-Service | By Peter Yost • 07/02/2013

Since September of 1985, David Letterman of The Late Show has been amusing viewers with his Top 10 lists. Because we’re enjoying a holiday this week, let’s use that format to explore the technology tipping point for logistics companies.

There comes a time when growing companies need to take a long look at their current state and their prospects for the future and ask themselves, Do we have the tools and the talent we need to get to the next level? Can we scale our current operations to manage new growth? Are we able to take on new projects and expand our service offerings? Can we continue to service our customers and remain competitive with the systems we use today?

For logistics companies, the answer to these questions will determine if they rapidly accelerate to the next level and leave the competition in the rear view mirror or get left in the dust. Where is your “tipping point” for investing in best-of-breed transportation management technology? With a TMS market adoption rate below 40 percent, it’s clear there are still many companies struggling with these questions.

In the spirit of The Late Show, we offer the following list of the top 15 signs you’re ready for a cloud-based transportation management system:

15. Your “optimization engine” has a gray beard and sits in a room no one else dares to enter.

14. To you, “optimization” is about planning the shortest route to work.

13. You call the airport for “Control Tower Visibility.”

12. Carnac the Magnificent plans your transportation.

11. The only collaboration you do is with your team to decide where to have lunch.

10. You have more control of your children than your bookings.

9. Your customers know about your shipping problems before you do.

8. “Track & trace” is looking out the window to see if the truck has left the dock.

7. 10+2 equals a migraine headache.

6. You think “in the cloud” is where the angels live.

5. You have more than one computer monitor on your desk to manage your transportation.

4. You use a dart board to select your carriers.

3. You prefer a trip to the dentist rather than dealing with cost allocation.

2. You just overnighted a package across the street.

Drum roll…and the number one sign you’re ready for a cloud-based TMS:

1. Bob, who has been booking your shipments for 30 years, just bought a retirement condo in South Florida.

If any of these hit a little too close to home, it’s time to ask yourself, “Am I at my technology tipping point? Will a cloud-based TMS make me more competitive?” Recent studies show that today’s cloud-based solutions are scalable and fully functional, easy to implement and are more cost effective than traditionally deployed software solutions. One well-known industry watchdog reports that by 2015, 90 percent of government and businesses will leverage some aspect of cloud computing.

Whether you’re an early-stage, rapidly growing business or a mature, global enterprise, a configurable cloud-based TMS will improve your ability to be competitive and service your clients. If you’re approaching a technology tipping point, maybe it’s time to take down that dart board, dismiss Carnac, find another use for the “optimization engine,” and send Bob to his condo in Florida.

Guest Commentary: Transportation Management Wasn’t Always This Easy

Guest Commentary | By Peter Yost • 04/02/2013

Today’s logistics departments have a lot of options for systems that help them plan and execute the shipments that drive their businesses. It wasn’t always this easy though. A brief look in the rearview mirror will help us appreciate how we got here and the direction we’re heading.

Every time I plug my $20, 16GB USB memory stick into my computer I recall my days marketing 856MB disk drives for $26,000. If you remember those days, then you’ll probably also remember 300 baud acoustic coupler modems, green screens and token ring networks. How about Hollerith cards, dot matrix printers and SCSI cables (pronounced “scuzzy,” my all-time favorite industry term)? Yes, we’ve come a long way!

Meanwhile, over in the transportation department, loads were being planned on blackboards, columnar paper and there was a lot of eraser dust on the floor. Rooms full of planners spent their days with telephone headsets talking to clients and carriers negotiating rates, scheduling pick-ups, tracking down the status of a load, and confirming deliveries. I remember my first time entering the “war room” of a large company’s transportation department and being amazed (and a little intimidated) at the frantic pace, intensity and volume of the voices in the room. The only technology I could see was the row of fax machines along the wall and some Xerox machines, which is what we used to call all photocopiers.

It didn’t take long for technology visionaries to spot an opportunity to automate all that chaos. The 1990’s brought a lot of innovation to the traffic department.

1990 – “Blue Screen” transportation systems were being adopted by the most progressive companies to try and control the process. These batch-oriented systems had very limited integration with the company’s accounting systems or with carrier systems.

1993 – Client/server technology evolved and transportation applications started to become more approachable. There was hope that someday the beast could be tamed.

1998 – The big break was the evolution of the Internet and browser-based applications around the turn of the century.

However, the problems were too big to be solved by a communication protocol and a Netscape browser (another blast from the past!). Interconnectivity, scalability and configurability were still big hurdles companies needed to clear. As recently as 2001, a transportation management system (TMS) was still only available to big companies that could afford the multi-million dollar price tag for the mainframe-based software, hardware, installation and support.

Good ideas have a way of persevering. Visionaries and entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to use the emerging technologies to make an affordable and full-featured TMS available to more companies. Now you can implement a software-as-a-service (SaaS) TMS that is highly configurable, multimodal, functional and affordable enough for even start-up companies to use. Today’s on-demand systems share real time information with internal systems and with the carriers moving freight door-to-door, all over the world. These systems take full advantage of mobile devices, take just weeks to implement and offer a complete view of the entire process.

Yesterday’s expensive DASD (Direct Access Storage Device) has given way to today’s cloud. The 300 bps analog connections to mainframes are now high-speed digital connections over the Internet. Green screens have been replaced with flat screens, and batch-oriented, locally-hosted transportation software has been replaced by highly-configurable, cloud-based, real time, and affordable transportation management systems.

We’ve come a long way!

Peter Yost is the Director of Business Development at MercuryGate International. He has 29 years of experience in technology sales & marketing, including 8 years in the logistics industry. Peter is responsible for MercuryGate’s market development and messaging, and he is responsible for the company’s domestic and international partner ecosystem that is expanding the company’s reach into Europe, Asia and South America. Peter has a BBA in Marketing and Information Technology from Georgia Southern University.

Guest Commentary: How to Compete in the Logistics Big Leagues

Guest Commentary | By Peter Yost • 03/13/2012

The weather is warming and trees are blooming. It must be time for baseball! Every year at this time I look over the rosters of my favorite Major League Baseball (MLB) teams and compare how they spend their money to compete and win. The season-long game played in the front offices of major league franchises can be almost as much fun to follow as the game on the field. Which team will find a way to play smarter, compete and win against the big payroll teams?

Last year’s World Series Champions, The St. Louis Cardinals, had the 11th highest payroll in MLB, nearly half that of the highest payroll team, the NY Yankees. The Tampa Bay Rays had a payroll one-fifth that of the Yankees and made the playoffs with the 4th best record in the American League. Clearly, money isn’t the only way to achieve success and win.

Like baseball, young or small logistics companies can compete with the well-established, well-funded companies and win. Just as it was for the Rays in 2011, it happens in business every day; spend wisely, field the right team, provide the best equipment and you will compete and win!

Let’s look at four things young or small upstart brokerage companies can do to compete effectively:

Use big league “equipment.” You would never use a Little League bat to try and hit a Justin Verlander fastball. Make sure your freight brokerage software will keep you in the game. Does it handle all modes and geographies? Will it easily integrate with your customers’ and carriers’ systems? Will it scale as you grow?
Use your speed as an advantage. If you can quickly adjust to an off-speed pitch, you can hit it out of the park. As a broker, you have to quickly adjust business practices and processes to react to the changing market and customer demands. A nimble organization, with systems that can keep pace and adapt quickly, can outmaneuver even the largest and best funded competitors.
Look like a “big leaguer.” When you take the field, look like you belong there. Your web presence and social networks must convey an image of a fundamentally strong company that is a capable competitor. Consider all customer-facing communications as your image and be sure it shows strength and confidence. It doesn’t cost much to ensure a big league image on the field.
Track your “stats.” There’s a reason baseball teams keep and analyze so many stats. It’s not for the amusement of the fans; it’s so they can constantly monitor their performance and make adjustments as required. Logistics companies should do the same thing. Use the tools that are available to measure the performance and profitability of every aspect of your business and make adjustments as necessary.

All this talk about baseball has got me craving peanuts and Cracker Jacks. See you at the ballpark!

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