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TMS and YMS expand on integration and supply chain visibility capabilities, gaining a better handle on warehouse constraints in the process.
The biggest trend within the transportation management system (TMS) and yard management system (YMS) markets is not so much incremental features within each market, but capabilities that blend TMS and YMS with other supply chain solutions and enhance visibility in the process.
Whether you call it process orchestration or supply chain execution (SCE) visibility or integration, leading software executives and analysts agree that TMS and YMS are expanding beyond traditional feature sets to help users coordinate overall processes.
"Warehousing, yard, and transportation processes are pretty much connected at the hip, but today, the systems for these domains are often still run as independent processes," says Dwight Klappich, a research vice president at Gartner. "You can't achieve all the benefits if you manage the processes independently instead of seamlessly. That's why vendors are looking at the intersection points between warehousing, yard, and transportation."
Suppliers are focused on making solutions such as TMS more aware of constraints in warehouses and yards, rather than basing transportation plans solely on traditional factors such as freight cost. YMS, meanwhile, is helping shippers respond to pressures from carriers, and also expanding to address the issue of visibility of shipments in transit.
Warehouse aware TMS
The classic problem, says Klappich, is that SCE applications are used in a sequential process without the integration needed to communicate constraints from one domain to another. A common scenario, he says, is for orders to come down to a TMS, where loads, and shipments are optimized based on factors like lowest cost freight or quickest delivery.
Whether the warehouse or yard can handle those plans in terms of factors such as available dock doors, labor to pick, and labor to load, historically has been considered a downstream execution challenge, says Klappich. However, suppliers are working toward integrated platforms that can address key constraints from each area. "We have opportunities to integrate those areas better," says Klappich.
Data-centric integration between software like TMS and warehouse management systems (WMS) is only a "stop gap" on the road to a holistic platform for execution, according to Mike Mulqueen, a senior director with Manhattan Associates. The real...