Carrier Selection & Connectivity Software

Through the use of transportation management software (TMS), users can enter and maintain routes, discounts, contracts, insurance details, contact information, rates, and route comparisons in one system that unifies all aspects of carrier management.

Descartes Transport Management's Carrier Selection module makes efficient use of all this data by assisting you in choosing the best carrier to handle every shipment while monitoring carrier performance and comparing actual performance to expectations.

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Carrier selection & connectivity solutions in detail

• Automated Carrier Selection

  Descartes TMS goes beyond common carrier selection, quickly assessing a predefined range of user-established decision criteria, such as contractual obligations, shipping lanes, shipment priority, cost and a carrier’s past performance. The carrier selection module evaluates how best to send a shipment and identifies the best method, simplifying the communications with carriers by sending shipment information, monitoring deliveries and payments.

  The module will suggest the lowest cost method for sending each packed item, deciding whether it’s best to dispatch it using your own fleet or via a third-party carrier. The module also enables the combining of shipments to lower costs, making suggestions over whether to aggregate orders, place them on multi-drop routes or pool the shipments.

  All the latest carrier rates and any special deals you have negotiated are stored to assist with parcel rating, manifesting and labelling with fully compliant interfaces to carriers such as UPS, FedEx, DHL and many others. The Descartes Solution is one of only a few to maintain full compliance with integrated package carriers such as the UPS Ready program. 

  The Carrier Selection module also records when operators/planners deviate from the optimal or system selected ideal carrier and provides an analysis of extra costs incurred, helping you to control spending.

• Contracts

  Contracts are the “heart” of Descartes Transportation Management, rich contract functionality has been developed within the solution so that it can handle multi-modal agreements with considerable flexibility, but allow for ease of set up around pricing agreements.

  The solution will support thousands of contracts and millions of rate lines in real time. It has fully definable geographical definitions for lanes, zones and transit times that can be incorporated into each carrier’s profile. Agreement dates can be managed with notifications for contracts that are due to expire, plus the ability to manage carrier insurance and to only select carriers who have valid insurance at the time of a tender.

  Descartes TMS can also deal with mode specific contract rules such as LTL freight class mappings, discount structures, and coverage areas.

• Tendering & Booking

  Shipments can be offered to carriers, and their responses managed within the software.

  For UK road carriers, tenders are sent out via email containing hyperlinks back to the software enabling them to accept or reject bookings via the carrier portal, while for air and ocean carriers, tenders can be communicated to the carriers via the Descartes Global Logistics Network (GLN). For those carriers not on the Descartes GLN then the system also accommodates more manual methods such as telephone and fax communications.

• Labelling

  The carrier selection module can also generate compliant labelling for the major integrated parcel carriers. The Networked Transportation Management System carrier module may also be used as a parcel manifesting system and shipping label generation system.

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