Why Transportation Management System (TMS) Integration Is Important

By Roni Taylor: Spireon, Vice President of Industry Relations

Chances are you’ve already made a significant investment in acquiring and implementing transportation management software, including software to help you with your dispatch operations and fleet preventative maintenance efforts. When it comes time to add a GPS-based telematics solution to your arsenal of tools, make sure you choose one that protects the investments you’ve already made in the software you’re currently using. The best way to do this is by selecting a solution that offers simple, cost-effective, rapid integration.

A telematics system that integrates easily with other third-party software systems not only maximizes the investments you’ve made in your current systems. It also provides future-proofing by ensuring integration with other systems you may acquire down the road. What’s more, an integration-ready telematics system will increase your efficiencies and visibility by integrating all the data captured by all your systems in one centralized location, reducing the number of keystrokes it takes to get to the information you need.

Telematics that integrate with third-party dispatch and logistics systems provide expanded visibility to your yards and trailer pools. You’ll be able to see which trailers are at which location, whether those trailers are loaded or empty, and if they were emptied on time. You can also see when a trailer has been sitting at a customer’s location for an extended period of time, an indication that it might be used as a storage facility.

With this increased visibility comes improved trailer utilization. You’ll be able to see which trailers are sitting unused in a yard, and redirect those trailers to other customer locations with greater demand and revenue potential. This visibility also comes in handy when renegotiating contracts. Say your contract with a customer stipulates that you have five trailers at their location at all times. Your data, however, shows that two of those trailers haven’t been reloaded in a while. You can now share this information with your customers to negotiate a better deal, allowing you to free up these trailers and put them to better use.

An integrated telematics system additionally helps in right-sizing your trailer inventory at each location. Look for an integration-ready system that captures and delivers trending information revealing how many trailers you have at each customer location, as well as how many of them have been sitting idle or unloaded and for how long. This information tells you when you have too few or too many trailers at a location. Armed with this information, you’ll see how many trailers you actually need at each customer site and balance your inventory accordingly.

Any fleet manager will tell you: manual yard checks are a massive waste of time and resources. An integrated system enables you to automate the time-consuming, inaccurate manual yard check. You’ll know exactly which trailer is at which yard, and whether that trailer is loaded or empty, simply by looking at a web-based dashboard, interface or report. The most effective integrated solutions will also send you automatic alerts the moment a trailer enters or leaves a yard, so you’re keep in the loop at all times. No more paying a guy to count the trailers manually. No more calling the customer to do the check. And no more inaccurate or outdated checks.

Your integrated telematics solution offers advantages for your customers as well. With a more balanced distribution of your trailer inventory at customer sites, you’ll be able to make sure you have the right trailers at the right location at the right time. Which means your customers won’t be left with a warehouse full of product to load, and no trailer to load it onto. You can also use your integrated solution to share information with your customers, keeping them in the loop. You’ll be able to tell them when a deliver will arrive and unload the trailer so they can be ready for it. If there is an unforeseen delay, you can let your customer know the cause and how long the delay should last.

As mentioned before, the best telematics solutions will integrated seemliness with commonly used maintenance systems like TMS. This comes into play in your efforts to staying on top of your preventative maintenance and complying with CSA scores. Many of the safety issues that plague trailer and result in bad scores are related to preventative maintenance. Tires wear out, brakes become faulty, and ABS pins go dead. With increasing pressure to maintain a higher score than your competitors, maintaining your equipment properly is more important than ever. A telematics solution that’s integrated with maintenance software can help you dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your preventative maintenance, which also allows you to maintain a good score.

An integrated telematics solution should be able to show you a complete history of each trailer in your fleet. The most effective integrated solutions will allow you to generate reports and access views that reveal the exact number of actual miles each trailer has driven as well as the exact routes they’ve taken — last week, last month, or last year. Look for a system that provides a breadcrumb trail that enables you to recreate a trailer route if need be. Historical views are also important if you transport goods across the border to Mexico. With an integrated solution, you’ll be able to continue monitoring and tracking the trailer even after it’s been handed over to another carrier licensed to haul in Mexico.

So now we’ve established the importance of choosing a telematics system that allows for easy integration with your other systems. Now comes the task of finding the right integration-ready solution and solution provider. To help you evaluate the integration-readiness of your system and solution provider, look for these three primary competencies: In-house integration experience, pre- and post-integration support; and openness of the system’s architecture.

First and foremost, your telematics system provider should have an integration expert on staff who can manage your integration projects from start to finish. Additionally, your provider should have built strong relationship with leading trucking software vendors that support ease-of-integration between their systems and yours.

Once the integration is complete, ideally you should end up with a unified solution that captures an unprecedented level of rich data from all your systems — preventative maintenance, dispatch, logistics, fleet tracking and more. But beyond assisting the with integration process, your solutions provider should also help you make sense of your raw data with easy-to-use, intuitive web-based tools and interfaces as well as expert support. Be wary of the solutions provider who abandons you once the integration is over, leaving you to wade through a sea of unintelligible information.

Many telematics systems are built on proprietary platforms with closed code, making it difficult, cumbersome and costly to integrate with other third-party systems or add features and functionality based on specific customer needs. When comparing systems, look for a solution with an open architecture that supports interoperability with commonly used trucking software. Ask the solutions provider if they’ll be able to quickly add the functionality you may want as your needs evolve. And last but not least, make sure the system will easily scale to accommodate your growing fleet and data demands.

There’s no doubt that an integration-ready telematics system is a smart investment. By choosing a solution that easily integrates with your other transportation management software systems, you’ll be able to unify, leverage and maximize all your systems to expand visibility into your fleet. You’ll also be able to capture an unprecedented level of real-time and historical rich data you can use to increase trailer utilization, improve customer and driver satisfaction, automate time-consuming manual tasks, increase accuracy and efficiencies, perform more effective PMs, and drive the profitable performance of your trailer fleet.

For further information contact: 

Joel Norris, VP of Sales, Spireon Asset and Trailer

(614) 486-5195

jnorris@spireon.com