Trans-System Transportation
The Challenge:
For almost 50 years, Trans-System has been the parent corporation for three different operating companies: System Transport, TW Transport, and James J. Williams. With such a strong legacy of excellence in the transportation industry, it understands how important it is to use leading software solutions to optimize their daily operations.
Since Trans-System’s performance is dependent upon the success of its communication and real-time problem solving, many employees were overwhelmed with the vast amount of emails and notifications that they were receiving daily. In its old system, when a task needed attention, everyone in the entire division—and sometimes the entire company—would be notified. Beyond the complexity of its communication structure, finding the information needed to complete tasks was also a hassle.
Managers’ tasks included manually sifting through emails, spreadsheets, and other documents to retrieve information that was immediately needed. One of Trans-System’s main challenges was sitting down with its managers to determine which alerts needed to go to which people and what information was the most valuable to its business operations.
The Solution:
A few years ago, Trans-System transitioned to TMW.Suite and TMT Fleet Maintenance to improve efficiencies and problem solving for all three of its companies. TMW.Suite is a transportation management system (TMS) that helps companies manage business operations from the time an order is placed through final billing. Other benefits include: reducing out-of-route miles and empty miles, capturing load data, and optimizing shipping lanes, among others.
The utilization of TMW.Suite provides Trans-System with the option of compartmentalizing information needed for specific tasks into one dashboard. By integrating TMW.Suite within its internal messaging application, Trans-System and its subsidiaries can be alerted of a problem, find the appropriate contact or their backup, and send notifications through different mediums if a task needs to be completed with urgency. The system also maximizes the proficiency of their communication by giving users the choice to opt-out of certain notifications. By providing more personalization options for notifications, management could decide what information was important for their division every day. Also, supervisors were able to use the integration to TMW.Suite to create, track, report, and approve payments and billing without the hassle of cross-referencing time-stamps and tasks themselves. Even minor actions like knowing the location of a shipment or truck had major effects on the productivity of all three companies.
The Result:
“Moving from a legacy system to TMW.Suite was good for us,” said Corey Staheli, chief information officer of Trans-System. “It has been very helpful for us in delivering a lot of value and providing people with information at their fingertips.”
Trans-System has seen an improvement in the level of communications that goes on within its company. In the first year of use, Trans-System saw a 75% reduction in the number of cargo claims, because it was better able to monitor its fleet maintenance and effectively communicate when issues were resolved. Trans-System attributes improvements in the evaluation of its daily operations and both internal and external communication to the integration of messaging into activities within TMW.Suite.
Trans-System and its subsidiaries are able to save time and money by assigning tasks to the appropriate members of the team to ensure that everyone is focused on what is important to them individually. Additionally, the ease of using TMW.Suite, paired with the software’s immense capabilities in all business procedures, made it possible for team members to receive constant updates on jobs without always relying on memory.
Trans-System used TMW.Suite combined with internal messaging to create a sophisticated notification system that routes the right messages to the right decision makers. This has resulted in efficiencies on the road, and reduced cargo claims by 75% during a 12-month period.
“Moving from a legacy system to TMW.Suite was good for us. It has been very helpful for us in delivering a lot of value and providing people with information at their fingertips.”
– Corey Staheli, Chief Information Officer, Trans-System.