Exploring the Functionality of Transportation Management Systems

This report provides a comprehensive overview of Transportation Management Systems (TMS), categorizing them into Domestic, International, and Global systems. It details the functionalities of each, including route planning, optimization of transportation modes, and management of supply requests. The report also examines routing systems, highlighting their advantages in terms of implementation speed and cost-effectiveness, while also pointing out their limitations in real-time monitoring and cost optimization. Furthermore, it explores transport scheduling systems (VRS) and their use of optimization algorithms for various criteria like vehicle loading and cost minimization, emphasizing their ability to create and analyze strategic changes in transportation organization. The document covers the application of these systems in managing the flow of products, information, and funds across borders, as well as the importance of tools for optimizing delivery requests and multistage optimization.

Transportation management automation systems TMS.
This class of systems is designed for all types of transportation, including sea, air, rail, road
transportation with full or partial load, transportation of individual cargo, as well as support for
the management of our own or outsourced vehicle fleet. According to the classification of the
consulting company Aberdeen Group, the TMS class systems existing on the world market can
be conditionally divided according to their functional characteristics into three main groups:
internal TMS (Domestic TMS ); international TMS (international TMS ); global TMS {Global
TMS).
Internal TMS includes functionality for assessing and routing transportation, optimal
selection of transportation modes, as well as a suitable carrier for them, management of supply
requests, support for the main consolidated delivery tasks: route with N stops, order splitting,
cargo audit.
International TMS includes in its basic functionality support for the organization of
multimodal transportation (auto, air, railway, sea), contract management, distribution
management, as well as audit of tariff calculation, execution, cargo. The extended functionality,
in addition to the basic one, includes tools for optimizing delivery requests, multistage and
multimodal optimization, as well as estimating the cost of freight transportation in dynamics.
Global TMS is a program that manages the flow of products, information and funds across
borders, including security screening compliance, import and export customs clearance,
preferential agreements, and finance.

Transport routing systems use GIS - geoinformation systems (maps of the road network
indicating the average speed, traffic restrictions and other road parameters) to designate the
optimal (in terms of the minimum distance or minimum delivery time) delivery route to the
client, determine the delivery zones in reference to the target service level. A distinctive feature
of this type of systems is the monitoring of transportation at predetermined "checkpoints" of the
route in automatic mode, through warnings received by the system from GPS navigators, mobile
phones or special sensors installed in the vehicle. With the help of such systems, you can create
plans for the delivery of goods for the next day and adjust their execution in real time, based on
feedback from monitoring systems. The advantages of routing systems include the speed of
implementation and low costs for software licensing and implementation, which makes them
affordable even for companies with a small fleet of their own trucks. At the same time, it should
be remembered that the main costs after the implementation of solutions of this type will be the
costs of acquiring from the developer relevant cartographic materials necessary for the
functioning of routing systems.
The disadvantages of this type of systems include the impossibility of automatic route
planning with the help of monitoring "in real time"; optimization of transportation in the system
occurs only by the criterion of distance or delivery time, without taking into account its costs In
addition, transport routing systems can be used only for planning routes in one direction, which
makes it impossible to use the same vehicles for reloading or "loopbacks", multiple loading and
unloading during the route.
Transport scheduling systems - VRS

The system provides automation of transport planners by using various built-in optimization
algorithms for a wide range of criteria (strategic indicators that are most critical for a particular
company), such as:
 Optimal loading of the vehicle;
 Minimization of transportation costs;
 Reduction of downtime or empty vehicle mileage, etc.
Unlike simple routing systems, I / C systems use optimization models, in which a centralized
plan of traffic flows is created from all warehouses along the company's supply chain, a week or
a month in advance, and allow automatic comparison of different scenarios of transportation
plans obtained using various algorithms. The use of I /? 5-systems enables planners to create and
analyze scenarios of strategic changes in the organization of transportation using built-in
graphical and tabular analytics, for example, the impact of replacement or unification of their
own transport fleet on strategic indicators.