What the World Needs Now: Another TMS?

Well, it only took 3.5 years for my prediction to come true.

In an April 2022 post titled, “Supply Chain Visibility: A Product Or Feature?” I wrote the following:

Does it make sense to implement a supply chain visibility solution if you don’t have a TMS, WMS, and YMS?

I believe the answer is no.

And that is why you’re seeing supply chain visibility providers expanding beyond visibility too. Both Project44 and FourKites, for example, have recently introduced their own yard management solutions. I believe they will continue to expand their solution footprints further, most likely into TMS, and start to compete more directly with some existing partners.

Last week, Project44 announced “the launch of its Intelligent Transportation Management System, a next-generation, multi-modal solution that transforms fragmented logistics into unified, AI-powered decisions.” Here are some excerpts from the press release:

Traditional TMS solutions, plagued by long implementation timelines and rigid architectures, cannot keep pace with today’s dynamic logistics landscape. As a flexible, modular, cloud native solution, Project44's Intelligent TMS delivers powerful core transportation planning and execution functions, significantly reducing deployment time and cost compared to traditional systems.

“Our Intelligent TMS is fundamentally different. It wasn’t bolted onto a visibility platform; it was born from it,” said Jett McCandless, Founder and CEO of project44. “By unifying transportation management with our Decision Intelligence Platform, we are giving our customers the ability to automate what was previously unautomatable. This is not just a better TMS; it is the future of transportation management.”

The press release provides a long list of AI powered capabilities, including multi-modal planning and optimization, dynamic rate management and booking, intelligent carrier selection, slot booking and yard integration, and freight procurement and mini-bids.

I haven’t been briefed on the solution or seen a demo yet, so I can’t comment on its capabilities. Instead, I’ll focus my comments more broadly.

First, as I’ve said many times before, a TMS without a network of connected carriers and other trading partners is like a laptop or smartphone without internet cell service — useful, but only until the point of execution. Then it’s just an isolated brick.

That’s why, as I highlighted almost exactly five years ago in “TMS: Everybody’s Favorite New Partner,” real-time freight visibility providers like project44, FourKites, Shippeo, MacroPoint (now part of Descartes), Sixfold (now part of Transporeon), and others formed partnerships with almost all leading transportation management system vendors in the market over the years.

Why was there so much interest in partnering with TMS providers? Here’s what I wrote on August 26, 2020:

For real-time freight visibility providers, shippers are demanding those integrations because, as I wrote in TMS Visibility: See, Observe, Then Do, “the reason companies want visibility is not just to see and observe, but to do something with the data and insights collected. It’s the doing, the actions taken to improve their transportation and logistics operations, that ultimately delivers value.”

Simply put, transportation management systems are like the athletic kid everybody wants to play with at the playground because they will make your team better and provide you with a better chance of winning.

Or if you prefer a Hamilton analogy, these partners all want to be “in the room where it happens” — that is, they want to be in the app where transportation happens for shippers, which is their TMS.

Therefore, I would argue that project44 and its peers in the real-time freight visibility realm really have no choice but to expand their value proposition into TMS and beyond, which they have all been doing to remain relevant in the market. At least those that haven’t been acquired already by other vendors with broader solution footprints.

Simply put, real-time freight visibility providers have been encroaching on their partners’ turf for some time, with yard management and dock appointment scheduling capabilities, for example, but none had dared to cross the TMS red line — until now.

Another point I want to make: In the press release, project44 characterizes its Intelligent TMS as a “flexible, modular, and cloud native solution” and contrasts its deployment time and cost to “traditional systems.”

But what is a “traditional” TMS? Do they even exist anymore?

Sure, any vendor launching a TMS today has the benefit of leveraging the latest technologies from the ground up, and they don’t carry any technical debt from previous versions and architectures, which offers some advantages. But “traditional” TMS vendors haven’t been standing still all these years — they’ve been enhancing their solutions too, either via acquisitions. Which, of course, comes with integration challenges.

Also, there is no such thing as a “traditional” TMS vendor anymore. As I’ve written about many times in the past, the business models of software vendors, logistics service providers, and consultants have been converging for many years, and the lines between them continue to blur.

More than a decade ago, I wrote a post titled, “Guess Who Announced New Transportation Management Software Functionality Yesterday?” Here’s how it begins:

If I ask you to guess who announced new transportation management software functionality yesterday, who would you guess?

My bet, is that you would name a software company, perhaps a TMS vendor like some of our sponsors, but the right answer is actually a third-party logistics provider.

Yes, a 3PL.

Yesterday [June 23, 2015], Ryder announced the launch of Ryder TranSync™— “a patent pending, automated technology tool used to provide Ryder Dedicated or Transportation Management Solutions customers with dynamic transportation planning.”

Fast forward to May of this year, when Uber Freight announced “the launch of the industry’s first scaled AI logistics network, powered by its proprietary logistics-specific large language model (LLM) and embedded directly into its transportation management system (TMS) and logistics platform. With this launch, Uber Freight is reimagining how shippers of all sizes manage transportation — placing AI at the center to drive better decisions, faster execution, and stronger performance.”

And just this week, C.H. Robinson launched Always-on Logistics Planner, “a coordinated service model that brings together dozens of AI agents embedded into customer operations…Built on C.H. Robinson’s global TMS platform and fueled by data from 37 million annual shipments, the Planner integrates AI agents that manage shipment tracking, document processing, invoice auditing and more. These agents act as digital teammates—learning, adapting and optimizing in real time to support customer goals.”

The bottom line is that the landscape of TMS providers is much broader and diverse today than a decade ago.

And this brings me to my final point. Where is this all heading?

I believe project44, FourKites, Uber Freight, C.H. Robinson — and several others I haven’t mentioned yet in this post, like Alpega, Transporeon (which was acquired by Trimble), Descartes, Infor Nexus, Elemica, WiseTech Global (via its acquisition of e2open), Blue Yonder (via its acquisition of One Network), and even SAP (via its SAP Business Network) — are all marching toward becoming Supply Chain Operating Networks (SCONs), which I define as follows:

SCONs are industry networks that connect shippers, carriers, manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, logistics service providers, and other trading partners with each other. Instead of companies creating hundreds or thousands of one-to-one connections with their trading partners, they make a single connection to the network where their current partners and thousands of other prospective partners are also connected.

I’m out of time and space to go into this further, but to learn more, please visit our Better With A Network research site. In a nutshell, I believe that Marc Andreessen’s famous quote from 2011 that “Software is eating the world” needs to get updated. Today, it is more accurate to say that “Software and networks are eating the world” — especially in the supply chain and logistics world.

Nucleus would posit at this point, that our multi-carrier, multi-customer, multi-industry network provides all of these network benefits. As well as, allows for customers to connect to the operational expertise and execution that software alone lacks.

Source: Talking Logistics