Many carriers are still using antiquated means like spreadsheets to manage operations while modern options like transportation management systems (TMS) continue to evolve and become more sophisticated.
Some trucking companies haven’t grown enough to move beyond the use of spreadsheets, but still, there are a plethora of benefits they’re missing by forgoing a TMS, said Jay Delaney, director of product management for TMS provider Magnus Technologies. The biggest benefit, he said, is the ability to approach load planning in a proactive manner rather than a reactionary stance.
Magnus is in the final stages of developing a new tool that aims to solve load planning challenges by using artificial intelligence to give load planners a view into the future to proactively plan freight moves based on market predictions.
“I've got a driver that needs work, and I’ve got capacity, and I match them up at the last possible minute. I do that because of all the variability and all the chaos that exists in transportation. It's hard to plan in advance. There's just too much change and variation,” Delaney said. “You don’t have the ability to actually plan, even though we call it planning. It's more reactionary. And I think part of that is because we're not really managing the network.”
Magnus’s tool, which will be available as part of its base TMS package, will give planners a five-day advanced view that will allow them to predict potential problems – like being undersold or oversold – in the market and make adjustments accordingly to mitigate costly occurrences.
Magnus’ new tool will also consolidate all the data that gets thrown at planners and digest it into useful bits of information by load that they can act on, rather than wasting time trying to interpret it.
In addition to visibility into data surrounding loads and the market, the tool will give planners visibility into their own KPIs so they can understand the impact their decisions have on the company. Planners will be able to see in advance the impact a decision will have on their company. Some of those KPIs include driver satisfaction and decisions they make around deadhead, utilization and shift miles/hours, Delaney said.
