Transportation Management Software: Benefits, Key Features, and Top 5 Solutions

If you are a shipping company owner, you must have face problems like increasing operational costs, lack of last-mile visibility and communication gaps, compliance with transport regulations, suboptimal fleet capacity utilization, and failure to meet ever-evolving customer demands.

These challenges may become even more prominent if you still rely on traditional planning methods, such as:

• Paper-based delivery planning and documentation
• Excel spreadsheets 
• Phone calls
• Disparate systems to manage transportation business aspects

This is where transportation management software comes in handy. It helps optimize delivery routes, identify run-time issues, and make real-time edits, making transportation operations seamless. 

In this blog, we’ll walk you through what a modern transportation management system is, its key features, and business benefits. We’ve also compiled a list of the top 5 transportation planning software solutions to help you make an informed choice.

Introduction to Transportation Management Software

Transport management software (TMS) is a digital tool (or software program) that helps manage logistics operations involving the movement of physical goods by land, air, water, or a combination of transportation modes. It includes creating routes, tracking their progress, and making real-time route adjustments.

Why businesses need a TMS

Transportation is a critical part of supply chains. Managing it manually can be overwhelming and inefficient. Businesses need a TMS to:

• Cut costs: A TMS can help you choose the most cost-effective routes and carriers, saving money.
• Save time: Automating processes like scheduling and tracking lets teams focus on other tasks.
• Improve visibility: With real-time updates, you always know where your shipments are.
• Ensure accuracy: A TMS reduces the risk of errors in planning and documentation.
• Enhance customer service: Deliveries are faster, more reliable, and easier to track.

In short, a TMS gives businesses better control over transportation while reducing hassle and expenses.

Overview of TMS capabilities

A TMS is packed with features to make transportation management easier. Here’s what it can do:

• Route optimization: Find the fastest and most cost-effective ways to transport goods.
• Carrier selection: Compare carriers to pick the best one for your needs.
• Shipment tracking: Track shipments in real-time, ensuring they stay on schedule.
• Cost analysis: Get detailed reports on transportation expenses to find areas for savings.
• Freight management: Simplify processes like freight auditing and invoice management.

Some TMS tools are also customizable, allowing businesses to tailor them to specific needs. Whether you want to focus on lowering costs, improving delivery times, or enhancing customer satisfaction, a TMS can help.

Who uses transport management system software?

Businesses that ship, transport, or receive goods regularly use transport management software to streamline logistics operations and deliver goods quickly and efficiently.    

The primary users of transport management system software are:

• Manufacturers
• Distributors 
• Wholesalers
• Third-party and fourth-party logistics providers like DHL, USPS, and Amazon

Different industries that depend on transport management software include:

• Retail, automotive, and manufacturing 
• Pharmaceutical and healthcare 
• Foodservice and restaurant delivery 

Key Features of Transportation Management Software

1. Efficient routing 

The success of shipping or logistics companies largely depends on efficient route plans. Therefore, your TMS must let you create optimal routes, considering multiple constraints, including delivery time windows, capacity constraints, and traffic patterns. 

2. Automated load planning and delivery assignments

Manual load planning may be time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, look for automated load planning capabilities with capacity optimization software that consider vehicle capacity specifics, such as maximum permissible weight or volume, drivers’ working hours, and customers’ availability.

3. Reporting capabilities and data insights

Analyzing your shipping performance regularly helps identify and address areas of improvement. Your transportation management software must let you track key performance indicators, including on-time delivery rates, fuel consumption, and capacity utilization.

4. Real-time tracking and communication enhancement

Fleet tracking is key to identifying and resolving potential issues proactively to ensure deliveries stay on track. Hence, you must seek GPS-based tracking in your transportation management software (TMS) to ensure visibility into delivery operations. Moreover, it should let you chat with in-transit drivers to promptly determine and address their concerns or queries, preventing major disruptions to ongoing operations. 

5. Mobile access for on-the-go management

When drivers mark a delivery complete, they should let you record it digitally. Hence, looking for a transportation management system (TMS) with a dedicated mobile app for drivers is advisable. Besides, this app must let drivers view daily schedules, follow planned routes, and switch to a third-party navigation app like Google Maps or Waze to enable focused driving.

Benefits of Using Transportation Management Software

Transport management system software (TMS) helps shipping companies plan and forecast network requirements, optimize routes, manage carriers, track shipments, handle the payment process and settlement, and provide insights into network KPIs.

Here are the advantages it provides.

1. Cost savings: Financial implications and ROI

A transportation management system helps optimize routes to reduce the time and distance traveled to ship goods, reducing fuel consumption and excess vehicle wear/tear and associated fuel costs and repair or maintenance costs.

Moreover, a TMS solution helps automate route planning, freeing up fleet or dispatch managers’ time to focus on business-critical tasks, and facilitating rapid business growth.

Transportation management software also lets you plan loads based on vehicle capacity specifics, such as weight or volume, and dispatch them to the routes that maximize their capacity utilization. 

It helps accommodate delivery and pick-up requests and edit the sequence of loading and unloading based on urgent requests, helping cover more stops per journey and reducing trips.

2. Increased customer satisfaction: Impact on service levels

Transport management software helps track shipments at every supply chain stage, from manufacturers to customers. A TMS enables monitoring drivers’ real-time locations through GPS-based tracking and coordinating with drivers to address issues like vehicle breakdown, or traffic congestion, ensuring timely delivery. 

TMS lets you send up-to-date ETA notifications. This helps ensure real-time visibility into your transportation operations and strengthens their trust and loyalty to your brand. 

3. Enhanced documentation and compliance: Ease in operations

Transport management software helps collect and centralize all delivery-related documents. It lets drivers capture photos of delivered cargo items, receive customers’ e-signatures, and add relevant notes for specific addresses.

Standardizing your delivery documentation can help maintain digital proof of successful shipments and protect your business against lost liability claims. It reduces the chances of ‘fake’ delivery attempts by mandating the collection of photos and digital signatures upon delivery, enhancing your delivery personnel’s accountability. 

4. Support for scalability: Growing with business needs

An advanced TMS solution relies on advanced algorithms to automate various processes, including delivery schedules, route planning, and tracking, reducing human intervention and manual errors. This helps handle the high workload that results from expanding your business without affecting your delivery efficiency.

Moreover, TMS integrates with business systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Warehouse Management System (WMS), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), eliminating data silos and streamlining workflows to support scaling operations. 

5. Informed decision-making: Using data effectively

Transport management software helps track key performance indicators, including:

• Order accuracy, 
• Delivery time, 
• On-time delivery rate,
• Capacity utilization, 
• Cost per order

This provides valuable insights into your shipping performance, helping you identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies through data-driven decisions.  

Top 5 Transportation Management Software Solutions

1. Upper: Best for planning optimal transportation routes

Capterra: 4.6/5 (40 reviews)

G2: 4.6/5 (8 reviews)

Upper is a leading transportation management software solution designed to help companies simplify and efficiently manage last-mile logistics operations. 

Its strength lies in advanced route optimization algorithms that replace guesswork and reliance on outdated tools like Excel spreadsheets to plan routes. 

The cherry on top: these routes are created, considering multiple delivery constraints like delivery distances, customers’ availability, drivers’ hours of service, and priority. 

The result is super-efficient routes that help reduce travel time, distance, and vehicle idling, lowering fuel and vehicle maintenance costs. It also helped increase daily deliveries and productivity by reducing time wasted between stops.

Another aspect that Upper helps transport managers with is vehicle capacity planning and optimization, which remains a constant struggle if done manually. 

Upper’s transportation route scheduling software eliminates this challenge in a quick, 2-step process.

• Set capacity constraints like weight, count, or number of products for individual stops and drivers’ vehicles.
• Select the stops to include in a route plan, pick the desired drivers, hit ‘Optimize and Assign Routes,’ and sit back relaxed. Upper gives you the best routes to maximize your vehicle capacity utilization.

Note: If you have truck drivers, avoiding truck-restricted roads and respecting drivers’ preferences, such as avoiding highways or toll roads, is imperative. Upper transportation scheduling software enables defining restricted delivery zones and setting driving preferences to create routes drivers love while ensuring legal compliance.

Coming to last-mile visibility into shipments, Upper GPS-based tracking capabilities let dispatchers track drivers’ real-time locations and speeds to ensure they are on track and safe—all while keeping customers informed on delivery statuses through precise ETAs.

Upper combines the power of accurate predictions about arrival times with attempted location capabilities to distinguish a fake delivery attempt from a genuine one.

Click here to try it out!

Seamless communication among stakeholders helps coordinate long-haul deliveries. Upper driver-dispatcher software’s chat lets you connect with drivers to identify and address their problems promptly, preventing disruptions. 

Here are some more features that you may love.

1. Advanced route dispatch: Create routes for multiple recurring deliveries up to 5 weeks in advance and schedule their dispatch later to avoid last-minute chaos.

2. In-transit route edits: Add or delete stops or resequence them to accommodate last-minute orders/cancellations, vehicle breakdowns, or accidents.

3. In-app navigation: This feature allows for navigating planned routes from within their dedicated mobile app, eliminating the need to switch between routing and navigation apps and facilitating focused driving.

4. Electronic documentation: This lets you digitally manage essential documents like bills of lading, delivery receipts, and compliance documents.

5. User interface: Upper provides a clean interface with instructions on how to proceed, enabling new users to tap into its full potential, even if they lack tech skills.

6. Free version: Upper offers a free version that lets you optimize a route with up to 20 stops.

Price: Starts at $40 per user per month (billed annually)

2. ShipperGuide by LoadSmart: Best for ease of implementation 

Capterra: 4.9/5 (7 reviews)

G2: 4.6/5 (21 reviews)

ShipperGuide is a leading transport management software solution that provides end-to-end load visibility. It helps manage rates from different logistics providers, tender shipments, and share tracking updates with your customers and team. 

We liked the CarrerGuide interface, which allows for inviting different carriers to bid and negotiate the best freight rates. Integration with visibility and shipment tracking software to update real-time locations was smooth and ensured complete freight visibility.

However, entering multiple products on a pallet was cumbersome, as our testing revealed and users reported. Moreover, the NMFC search functionality kept freezing, leaving us unimpressed.

Key features:

• Procurement: Enables handling requests for proposals (RFPs), contracts, and bids to manage your carrier network.
• Shipment Execution: Lets you control shipments with tendering, carrier appointment scheduling, document creation, and complete tracking.
• Audit & dispute: Allows you to audit your shipment invoices to resolve disputes and maintain accurate financial records. 

Pros: 

• Easily traceable flow of order entry 
• Instant and reasonable quoting

Cons:

• Low carrier response rate at times
• Small print on Bills of Lading (BOL) hampering legibility

Pricing: Not publicly available

3. Trimble: Best for large shipping companies

Capterra: 3.7/5 (32 reviews)

G2: 3.5/5 (21 reviews)

Trimble TMS is designed to manage the entire order-to-cash process, starting from load planning to settlements. Equipped with network expansion tools and on-road insights, this software helps automate your administrative and safety tasks.

Trimble’s integration with Titan software helps optimize tank capacity utilization and increase tank uptime, enabling fuel haulers to improve customer service. Users also appreciated Trimble’s customer support.

However, we found Trimble’s design outdated. It also failed to meet our expectations in implementing the latest tech advancements, such as automation and machine learning. 

Key Features:

• Integration: Allows for connecting different popular tools to perform different functions, such as managing fuel cards, tracking assets and hours of service, or maintaining records centrally and efficiently. 
• Predictive maintenance alerts: Enables viewing of crucial asset details to predict service needs and schedule maintenance sessions proactively to reduce downtime.
• Tracking and visibility: Lets you track loads and determine their estimated times of arrival at designated destinations through visually intuitive tracking apps.  

Pros:

• Good customer support with a live agent to answer queries
• Easy customizability to suit business-specific needs

Cons: 

• Clunk and non-intuitive user interface
• Reported crashes while sending documents or retrieving history

Pricing: Not publicly available

4. Descartes AlJex: Best for freight brokers

Capterra: 4.4/5 (14 reviews)

G2: 4.6/5 (359 reviews)

Designed for freight brokers and 3PLs, Descartes AIJex is a leading name in the cloud-based transportation management software industry. It helps manage and automate transportation processes from start to finish.

AIJex’s USP lies in the high speed at which it lets you execute shipments from a single screen. Its EDI messaging lets you exchange critical documents with customers promptly and securely. 

However, the loading speed was lower than desired which kept us waiting for up to 2 or 3 minutes to save the updated information. It froze during freight billing, forcing us to log in again.

Key features:

• Order and dispatch management: Lets you automate order entry, manage your transport requests efficiently, and increase your order management and processing speed.
• Lane pricing: Enables you to view live and historical rates to identify the most affordable carriers in your network from a centralized view, eliminating data silos.
• Shipment visibility: Lets you track your shipments and convey precise ETAs to customers, reducing check calls.

Pros:

• Easy-to-use interface
• Extensive integration capabilities that allow for easy scalability

Cons: 

• Time-consuming and complex setup
• Inaccurate reporting reported by users

Pricing: Not publicly available

5. MercuryGate: Best for shipment lifecycle management

G2: 4/5 (16 reviews)

Capterra: 3.2/5 (16 reviews)

MercuryGate is an intuitive transportation management software solution that helps plan and execute shipping while reducing manual effort. It provides tools to support all the stages of a shipment’s lifecycle, helping companies manage logistics efficiently.

Equipped with vehicle routing optimization, it helps reduce traveling distances from the first mile to the last mile, reducing operational costs. MercuryGate’s Global Sourcing solution helps ensure products fulfill business requirements before shipping.

However, new users’ learning curve is significantly high due to the less intuitive design. As users reported, we felt the number of steps to complete a simple action could be reduced.

Key Features:

• Full shipment tracking: This platform tracks shipments in real-time across all modes—ocean, air, rail, and more—helping you manage inventory and avoid delays.
• Dock scheduling: MercuryGate streamlines dock management in real-time, optimizing loading and unloading at distribution centers to cut wait times and boost efficiency.
• Real-time notifications and alerts: Provides real-time updates and alerts on route changes and delivery status, keeping stakeholders informed and ready to address issues.

Pros:

• Enhanced carrier procurement and contract negotiation
• Automated freight tendering 

Cons:

• Non-intuitive interface, leading to a steep learning curve
• Integration with DAT or TruckStop when posting loads is not smooth

Pricing: Not publicly available

Boost Your Transportation Strategy with Modern Software

To sum up, using the right transportation management software is crucial for businesses to stay competitive. A good TMS can streamline your operations, cut costs, and boost customer satisfaction. As you explore options, consider your specific needs, scalability, and integration with existing systems.

Look for features like real-time tracking, route optimization, and data analytics to help you make smarter decisions. Remember, the best software is one that aligns with your business goals and adapts to your evolving needs. Thus, take your time to research and compare options. 

Want to experience the difference the right software can make? 

Sign up for a free demo and see how modern transportation management solutions can transform your operations.