The Future of TMS Applications: Innovations and Emerging Trends

• March 9, 2023
• By Turvo

By 2027, the global e-commerce market is expected to reach $27.15T, up from $10.36T in 2020. This staggering increase comes with significant changes for logistics professionals, who have become increasingly reliant on complex omnichannel distribution methods to ensure that they’re providing customers with the fast delivery they’ve come to expect.

As e-commerce continues to transform the transportation industry, logistics service providers are eager to see how TMS applications will adapt to a dynamic industry. We’ve dug into the past and future of TMS applications to see how they’re helping today’s 3PLs and brokers prepare for tomorrow’s supply chains.

What Was the World Like Before TMS Applications?

As interest increases in supply chain collaboration strategies, it’s important that logistics service providers take a moment to consider the world before TMS applications.

• Disparate Data Sources prevented carriers from fully understanding their supply chains. Without a single source of truth, logistics professionals were left to contend with multiple perspectives. While data is an essential component of supply chain management strategies, having to contend with multiple sources of information made it difficult for customers to transform raw data into actionable analytics.
• Siloed Systems meant that carriers couldn’t take full advantage of the insights garnered by innovation in visibility and analytics. Without a streamlined platform where all supply chain collaboration systems could coexist, many are often left with information overload without actionability.
• Limited Reach of traditional supply chain management left carriers unable to access vital supply chain information. LSPs could not share vital insights across transportation networks or scale software capabilities to match growth without a cloud-based transportation management system.

For today’s supply chains, a modern TMS provides a solution to these pain points: with actionable analytics, streamlined integration, and cloud-based, cross-platform software applications, today’s TMS system provides LSPs with the solutions they need to maintain resilience in the face of unprecedented supply chain disruptions. But as e-commerce transforms the supply chain, people wonder what’s next for TMS applications.

The Future of TMS Applications

In an interview with Logistics Management, Brock Johns, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, Inc, expressed considerable optimism for the future of transportation management software: “We’re in the middle of the research cycle for the 2023 Magic Quadrant, and based on our preliminary research and data, vendor growth has been strong in the TMS market,” said Johns, “Interest in TMS solutions continues to be very strong as well. We continue to forecast double-digit growth across the market, and especially for small- to mid-sized shippers where the barriers to entry for TMS adoption have receded over the last few years.”

As experts predict boom times ahead for the TMS solutions market, customers are searching for the next big thing in TMS. For growth-minded logistics professionals, we’ve dug into three trends fueling the future of TMS applications.

• Optimized Visibility advancements could help LSPs gain a more accurate understanding of real-time shipping information. Paired with IoT telematics solutions, innovations in transportation visibility stand to help reduce delays, spot inefficiencies and improve efficiency throughout their supply chains. As Chris Cunnae, research director of supply chain management at ARC Advisory Group, told Logistics Management, “The use of an IoT-enabled fleet management solution can boost performance by improving asset visibility and vehicle utilization […] reducing wait times at destinations and providing proactive maintenance-related cost savings.”
• Artificial Intelligence stands to build on TMS applications’ long history of providing LSPs with unprecedented access to streamlined logistics processes. By reducing the workloads, AI-integrated TMS applications will allow a refocus of skilled workers’ attention on revenue-increasing efforts. As Chris Cunnae told Logistics Management, “Artificial intelligence has been, and will continue to be, a key component of TMS.”
• Data Security is of vital importance to any TMS system. With cloud-based transportation management software, it’s vital that customers can trust carriers with their data. Increasingly, transportation innovators are working to bring unprecedented security to TMS applications by providing end-to-end data protection, role-based access controls (RBAC), and transparency measures. In conversation with Logistics Management, Brock Johns underscored the importance of security in a reliable TMS system: “These companies should be thinking about how their data is being secured and what type of certifications the vendor offers. These are important points for anyone that’s choosing a new TMS partner in 2023.”

To see how Tomorrow’s TMS Can Bolster Your Business Today, Turn to Turvo: The #1 Modern TMS Solution.

As logistics service providers contend with a dynamic supply chain, many are turning to TMS systems to bolster supply chain collaboration. With Turvo, LSPs can access an invaluable toolkit of transportation management resources.

• Turvo Collaboration Cloud helps carriers build collaborative processes through integrations across their transportation network, integrating WMS, TMS, and ERP into a single source of truth.
• Visibility Beyond the Blue Dot gives carriers the ground-level visibility they need to make high-stakes logistics decisions in even the most dynamic transportation environments.
• Turvo TMS takes the full capabilities of the latest supply chain innovations and integrates them into a single, scalable cloud-based platform. With Turvo TMS, you can rest easy knowing that software capability can keep pace with capacity.

Schedule a demo with Turvo, and see how the #1 Modern TMS Solution can prepare your growth-minded business for tomorrow’s supply chain today.