How to save time using TMS automation, machine learning and AI
Discover where where efficiency gains occur, where accuracy improves and what it means to your bottom line in your freight transportation management.
- Blog
Summary:
Integrating automation and machine learning into transportation management transforms execution speed and accuracy.
By assigning repetitive workflows such as rating, tendering, and exception handling to automated logic, shippers and logistics providers reclaim operational hours and strengthen cost control.
Evidence from multiple deployments indicates productivity gains of 60–80%, with additional benefits in service reliability, scalability and data quality that compound over time.
Inefficient transportation carrier selection, manual shipment execution and unreliable data all limit growth and create risk for shippers and 3PLs. You can limit the impact by using automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline processes and save time in your transportation management.
Within a transportation management system (TMS), shippers and 3PLs use these rapidly advancing technology solutions to:
- Assign routine decisions to automation
- Avoid bad decisions that drive up costs
- Focus on decisions to advance your business
As a result, many are realizing significant cost savings today. Further, the technology empowers scalability that ensures teams continue to manage transportation efficiently tomorrow.
This blog focuses on where TMS automation saves time, accelerates execution and improves outcomes in your freight transportation management. We’ll quantify where those efficiency gains occur, where accuracy improves, and what it means to your bottom line.
Finally, a few use cases highlight what’s possible as automation and AI-based capabilities power the future of supply chain execution.
In This Article:
- Automate transportation management to save time and money
- Streamline processes: 2 areas where TMS automation provides ROI
- Why broader analysis drives ongoing efficiency gains
- Applying artificial intelligence in transportation management
- Real-world success in transportation automation
- Intelligence-driven automation for the future supply chain
Automate transportation management to save time and money
When it comes to return-on-investment, shippers and 3PLs buy a TMS to save money. Alone, automated carrier selection allows users save time in execution by tendering the lowest rate that meets each load’s unique requirements
However, lowest cost per shipment isn’t always the best outcome for your business. Beyond the least-cost routing guide, additional efficiency is accessible when you use automation to optimize and execute the best multimodal transportation moves based on the current environment.
By automating decisions that meet diverse shipping needs and consider real-time activities elsewhere in your supply chain — especially at scale — you can eliminate time-consuming manual work and errors that create downstream costs.
Keep in mind: anything not automated requires manual execution, from the initial load tender through invoice audit and payment.
As service expectations accelerate, if you’re not automating execution everywhere possible, the rate of business will exceed your ability to do things manually.
Your competitive advantage could be in jeopardy among peers already leveraging automation to streamline processes, improve productivity, and protect margins.
Streamline processes: 2 areas where TMS automation provides ROI
Often, shippers and 3PLs depend on multiple full-time employees to tender loads, manage complex multimodal loads, load planning and modeling, and other time-consuming manual activities. More processes that weigh on resource productivity: carrier onboarding and management and responding to customer status inquiries.
Here are two areas where automation within the TMS alleviates that burden.
- Save time spent on load tendering
Rating each specific load manually based on its unique characteristics can be time intensive. Doing it across hundreds of shipments is unscalable. Often, the fastest default selections miss savings opportunities. Re-sorting to familiar carriers or modes doesn’t always translate to lowest cost or best service for that load.
Automation can even eliminate the manual effort needed to check all the boxes in a tender list–along with the other follow-up workflows in the event of a tender rejection, re-rate, or other disruption.
Infios TM users can reduce time spent load tendering by 80% using automation to eliminate manual processes and elevate priority activities where human intervention is needed to keep a load moving and customers happy. Using the solution, shippers and 3PLs can:
- Tender loads to the most qualified carriers across all modes
- Schedule and tender loads to carriers in a desired sequence
- Manage changes to loads continuously and adjust for disruption
TMS automation ensures freight shipments are optimally rated. Also, it avoids significant risks created by choosing the wrong carrier in scenarios such as temperature-controlled shipments, closely regulated cargo or other variables that dictate service.
Tendering every load to a qualified provider prevents costly mistakes that jeopardize customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reduce time spent tracking and tracing
Transportation management systems (TMS) with control tower capabilities empower users and end customers with decision support. Visibility-rich technology solutions also efficiently communicate ongoing shipment status awareness across the entire lifecycle.
Orchestrating that information across other management platforms — ERP, WMS, OMS—improves visibility to internal stakeholders and supports better customer experience.
Using control tower visibility and decision support, Infios TM users can realize a 60% reduction in the time spent responding to tracking and tracing inquiries. Shippers and 3PLs streamline processes and enhance service by:
- Accessing data by any known reference
- Tracking loads across all modes in a single interface
- Granting access to updates through EDI, XML, email, web portal, web services and mobile devices
- Alerting users to delayed shipments and estimated time of arrival
- Permitting consignee visibility of inbound freight via web portals
- Assigning activities and monitoring compliance
Ultimately, by relying on automation within the TMS to eliminate manual workflows, you spend less time searching for answers every time a customer asks “where’s my order and will it be on time?”
Broader analysis drives ongoing efficiency gains
Visibility into real-time transportation activities within the TMS enables faster service and performance analysis. Decision-support information is easily accessible when every freight shipment activity is managed within a single platform, from procurement and shipment execution to freight claims, invoice audit and payment.
While driving cost and time savings, this in-depth awareness also helps identify workflow missteps that may be fueling waste elsewhere.
Analyzing process milestones can help identify where delays occur and why. Are there routes, users, roles, or customers where manual intervention is routinely required? Often those exceptions can be solved.
Automating this analysis, too, and applying ongoing refinement of strategies for transportation and execution based on the gathered supply chain data--that can drive sustainable efficiency gains for shippers and 3PLs.
Applying artificial intelligence in transportation management
Automations directed by artificial intelligence streamline processes and save time. Serving as a transportation management co-driver, they can augment your existing resources.
With access to end-to-end network activities, AI can operate in an agentic role to manage exceptions, coordinate activities between systems, communicate status updates, and execute recurring processes. There’s potential for AI applications to execute countless supply chain processes, such as determining the rate to charge for a lane or the optimal route to move an international shipment.
By continuing to eliminate manual workflows and improve end-to-end decision making, transportation management platforms enabled by AI empower shippers and 3PLs to dedicate their workforce toward future challenges.
Blog: Why supply chains need to think, not just work: the case for connected supply chain execution.
Real-world success in transportation automation
Infios control tower visibility drives efficiency and collaboration across a vast global logistics footprint for Mölnlycke. Learn how rapid onboarding and the configurable Infios platform unifies transportation operations, supports data-driven decisions and improves management over carriers tasked with delivering critical medical products.
Additional resources: Automate and streamline supply chain management
Blog: Connecting the dots: how integrated OMS, WMS and TMS drive agility
Blog: The next decade of AI in supply chains: from hyper-automation to autonomous commerce
Blog: Beyond planning: how AI agents are re-defining supply chain execution
Blog: Freight optimization with AI: How to unlock cost savings, speed and visibility in your supply chain
Intelligence-driven automation for the future supply chain
As resource constraints and cost pressures affect other operational areas, transportation management system (TMS) automation can help you save time in load tendering, track and trace inquiries, and administrative tasks. Limiting human intervention to exception management improves productivity and minimizes errors throughout shipment execution and financial settlement.
Advancing automation from that baseline capability offers unlimited possibilities for improving future transportation operations. Beyond streamlined process tasks, a TMS operating in an intelligent supply chain execution platform elevates supply chain decision-making to support better outcomes and drive efficiency gains across other parts of your business.
