What is a TMS?

As your business expands, the work grows with it. From managing routes and schedules to ensuring timely deliveries and keeping customers happy, there’s a lot to handle. Unlike telematics and GPS, a Transport Management System (TMS) offers a comprehensive solution for managing all aspects of your trucking operations - so that you can grow your business, not your workload.

Stratum TMS, for example, is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline the administration, management, financial planning and more.

What time will the driver be available?
Which trailer do I need ?
Are the truck and trailer compliant?
What's my margin on that job?
Can I deliver the load on time?

These are the sort of daily questions that are answered while using a TMS, like Stratum. When you have all of the information you need at your fingertips, you make quicker and better decisions.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how a TMS can help boost your business and make your life easier by increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance, speeding up invoicing, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

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1. Get Your Time Back with Efficiency and Automation

The bread and butter of a TMS is increasing your efficiency and cutting out manual administrative work. Tasks like scheduling, planning dispatch, creating invoices, and filing away documentation eat into your team’s time that could better be spent focusing on more important aspects of the business. Use a TMS to cut out manual work and stop relying on outdated spreadsheets and paper diaries.

Keep track of your fleet and jobs with a rock solid daily plan. Assign tasks efficiently, and communicate with drivers seamlessly through our intuitive dispatching interface.

Set up your central database for all the documentation around your fleet and drivers. Organize due dates for fleet services, CVRTs, driver CPCs, everything available at the push of a button.

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2. Ensure Compliance and Run a Risk-Free Operation

Handling compliance manually becomes near impossible as your fleet and staff grow beyond just a few. The tasks quickly become too much to manage without the right tools. A TMS simplifies this by ensuring all necessary documentation is accurately maintained and easily accessible. This reduces your administrative burden and helps you avoid costly penalties, ensuring your operations run smoothly and risk-free.

A centralized system with clean dashboards and customizable filters puts everything you need at your fingertips.

Need an old cert or document after getting pulled over, or settling a dispute with a customer? Get what you need instantly with no hassle from a secure database.

Don’t bottleneck your productivity by trapping information in people’s heads - or worse, in a file or folder to never be found again.

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3. Get Invoices Out the Door Faster - Take Control of Your Finances

Every business starts the same - Sunday night at the kitchen table, digging through piles of notes and dockets just to get invoices out on time. Then, after it’s all over, you end up making less than what you expected. Not only is this manual work time-consuming and prone to errors, you don’t get the visibility you need to run a healthy business.

Stratum TMS empowers you with the tools you need to streamline your billing process and accelerate your cash flow management to take your business to the next level.

Get a full breakdown of your costs per mile and calculate your margins on every job. Generate invoices in one click and never miss a billing. Export to your accounts made simple with our integrations. Get paid for all the work you do and get invoices out the door on time with a TMS.

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4. Keep Your Customers Happy

Raise the bar for your own service and get the transparency and visibility you need to communicate better with customers. With accurate and up-to-date information at your fingertips, you can quickly respond to customer inquiries and keep them informed about their shipments. Keep them satisfied with the inevitable improvements to your deliveries, billing process, and smarter document management.

When an issue arises and you need evidence to back up your case, Stratum TMS gives you a fully transparent audit log with all your job information (like weights, wait times, PODs, delivery times, etc.) and easy one-button reports to clear up any disputes.

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To finish

Implementing a Transport Management System can be a game-changer for small transport businesses. From saving time and ensuring compliance to keeping your customers happy and getting invoices out the door faster, the benefits are clear. By leveraging the power of a TMS, you can streamline your operations, reduce costs, protect your margin, and set your business up for growth in a competitive market. Don’t let manual processes hold you back—embrace the efficiency and control that a TMS offers and watch your business thrive.

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