Embracing an Ocean TMS might initially appear to be a substantial leap, but its benefits hold the potential to transform large-volume shipping operations, rendering them more efficient and streamlined. If you're considering the adoption of an Ocean TMS, it is crucial to explore key dimensions that highlight the potential for maximizing Return on Investment (ROI) gains. Today, let's dive into the "Increased Execution Efficiency", the first dimension in which your Ocean TMS should help you have ROI gains much higher than a general multimodal TMS.
An industry-specific survey among shippers has identified the top two challenges in international shipping – finding the best rate quotations and booking. About 35% of respondents of the survey list delays due to manual processes as the top challenge, followed by delays in getting rate quotations
(30%). Though automation is the best way to address these challenges, rate quotation and booking processes are automated only 7% and 6% of the time.
By using an Ocean TMS, your teams can automate and increase the efficiency of activities on which they spend countless hours, such as vessel selection and booking.
Here is how:
By improving the vessel selection process
Shippers spend a lot of time searching for vessel schedules – you have to visit multiple websites and dig out details using the schedule search tools of each carrier. A multi-carrier Ocean TMS increases the efficiency of this process by providing all the data you need in one place. It frees up the time of your teams as they can look up details without having to visit multiple websites.
More importantly, it lets you search vessels and plan shipments across all carriers based on several criteria, such as:
-
Best routes based on distance
- Best rates across your contracts
- ETA reliability
- Delivery dates
- Pre-negotiated rates
- Allocations
- CO2 emissions
Tools like BuyCo automate your vessel selection process and automatically find the best schedules for you, even in mass, bulk, and scale. It instantly gives you access to the shipping schedules of 97% of global carriers and integrates with your freight forwarders.
To calculate your ROI, consider: “How much could I save by instantly finding the best vessel schedule forme from all carriers, in seconds?”
By improving the booking process
An Ocean TMS streamlines your booking process and help you save money and time in the following ways:
Search Schedules:
An Ocean TMS lets you search for schedules for all carriers in one place. No need to look on different websites or transfer data for booking. The data is already found in the solution to start the booking process
Book and track:
You book vessels and track the status of your shipment orders directly from the platform for all carriers, thus helping you avoid multiple emails between you and your carriers.
Get the most out of your allocations:
The tool would show your allocation status automatically – you don’t have to maintain complex XLS sheets to track it. It further gives you your allocation/consumption ratio in real time and lets you automate the booking process based on allocations.
Automate the process of sending booking requests:
Such solutions allow you to send booking requests in an automated manner. Your teams can save the time they spend on manually sending booking requests to multiple carriers.
Leverage data for additional workflows:
An Ocean TMS gives you access to a centralized database. It means you can reuse the data to control workflows like shipping instructions and VGM declaration.
To calculate your ROI, consider: “How much time/money could I save by automating the booking process?”
USE CASE
Alteo implemented BuyCo’s Visibility & Control Solution to increase the efficiency of its processes. With automation, the company could eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks and manage higher volumes of containers with the same number of people per operational team.
To gain in-depth insight about other crucial metrics that influence the implementation of an Ocean TMS, discover our latest e-book :
