The MPO Supply Chain Suite includes a Transportation Management System (TMS) with powerful features to streamline all processes of the transportation life cycle across multiple carriers to help you reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction. The main TMS functions are:
Order Planning: When an order is received, TMS determines which steps are required to execute the order. It also can consolidate the specific orders and select the optimal carriers.
Execution Monitoring: After dispatching the planned orders to the selected carriers, TMS captures the status updates from them. It also provides full visibility to the customer.
Financial Control: TMS supports flexible configuration of rate agreements, which can capture any rate model, enabling accruals, invoice matching and billing.
Performance Measurement: TMS supports standard as well as tailor-made KPI reporting in various formats.
Order Planning
With the MPO TMS planning capabilities, you can optimize your transportation plan to meet the customer requirements in the most cost-effective way. When orders are received, you can analyze them according to requirements and capacity. Based on the analysis, specific orders can be consolidated, and the right transportation modes and carriers can be selected to fulfill them. The feature highlights are:
- Multiple ways to register the orders from different sources
- Product line and shipment package information registration
- Multi-mode (air, sea, road, railway) shipment management
- Flexible criteria to consolidate shipments
- Selection of the most appropriate carrier for each shipment based on price and non-price factors
- Optimal route determination according to the pre-configured network path
- Expected status milestone calculation
- Multi-site and multi-customer order handling
- Relevant transport documents creation
- Dashboard to give an overview of all transport planning
Execution Monitoring
When the fulfillment orders have been created, you can dispatch them to the selected carriers. In the process of execution, MPO TMS can enable proactive monitoring and event management to provide the full visibility of the order status across shippers, carriers and customers. The feature highlights are:
- Multiple ways to dispatch the planned orders to selected carriers
- Generic or carrier-specific label printing
- In-transit label scanning
- Advanced Shipment Notice (ASN) sent to carriers and customers
- Ability to capture status notifications from carriers and match them against the expected milestone
- Event management to handle the exceptions, e.g. delayed or damaged
- Warning alerts automatically sent to relevant people who need to respond and act
- Dashboard to give an overview of all shipment status and events
- Shipment orders track & trace across multiple carriers
- Web visibility into any order, anywhere at anytime
Financial Control
MPO TMS helps you calculate and settle freight costs according to rate agreements and actual shipments. Based on this information, you can book accruals, match invoices received from carriers and invoice to customers. The feature highlights are:
- Rate agreement configuration tool to capture rate structures for carriers and customers
- Automatic calculation of the transport cost to book the accruals
- Cost adjustment based on actual shipments situation and ability to track costs change
- Multiple methods to allocate cost in case of consolidation, based on e.g. items, weight or mileage
- Multiple ways to register the carrier invoices
- Carrier invoices matching within predefined tolerances
- Invoices rejection or approval for payment processing
- Details for customer invoices
- Handling of multiple currencies
- Interfacing financial data to ERP or other finance systems
Performance Measurement
TMS captures the complete history of orders and supports comprehensive reporting features to provide you with Business Intelligence on your transportation services and carriers. The feature highlights are:
- Pre-defined KPI reporting
- Tailor-made KPI reporting with extensive report parameters for selection
- Reports analysis of any period of time, e.g. daily, weekly, monthly and yearly
- Financial analysis reports, e.g. carrier cost and customer revenue analysis
- Operational analysis reports, e.g. daily shipments and carrier performance
- Reports in various formats, i.e. PDF, excel and html
