Shipwell TMS: Must-knows to Manage International Transport

What is Shipwell TMS?

Shipwell is a Transportation Management System platform that helps manage transportation requirements, makes cargo movement visible and connects to billing systems to simplify operations. It offers data-driven automation with powerful analytics to save time while improving efficiency. Shipwell TMS can help shippers, carrier businesses and third-party logistics service providers with shipment planning, capacity sourcing, performance tracking and financial settlements.

Main Shipwell TMS Features

Shipwell Transportation Management System

The Shipwell cloud-native transportation management system offers automated solutions to replace manual tasks, built-in load optimization and routing guides to make operations more efficient. Further, it streamlines financial processes using built-in integrations and billing tools and offers insights into pricing, player performances, etc. to optimize costs.

Shipwell Visibility

Shipwell offers end-to-end tracking of shipments for visibility across the supply chain. By factoring in traffic and weather updates, it also provides responsive ETAs. By empowering you to identify shipment exceptions early, it helps take proactive measures to ensure deliveries are made with minimal delays. It also centralizes communication and leverages web/app-enabled messaging to ensure you stay connected to carriers and customers at all times.

Shipwell Integrated Network

Shipwell can be easily integrated with existing processes and systems to expand capabilities, centralize operations and optimize logistics. The integrated network plays a part in every stage of the supply chain from consolidating orders and sourcing shipping capacities to ensuring visibility and managing invoice payments.

Shipwell Competitors

SAP TM

SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) is a general TMS that helps businesses manage domestic and international cargo movement in an efficient, cost-effective manner. It simulates situations to help forecast shipping requirements, synchronizes order schedules and automates rate evaluations to streamline freight management. It also offers visibility over cargo movement and creates insightful reports for better resource management.

Oracle Transportation Management

The Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) platform helps businesses manage and control transportation activities across different supply chain stages. It covers multiple modes of transportation over several countries. OTM identifies historic patterns to identify the most efficient carrier and route combinations, makes transit time predictions and automates billing and payments to smoothen operations.

Kinaxis

Kinaxis is a supply chain management software aimed at creating a transparent supply chain network, building resilience with the ability to act faster and eliminating redundancies. This cloud-based solution helps manage demand and supply requirements and inventories as well as sales and operational planning. From strategizing to operations, the Kinaxis command and control center helps you take charge of the entire operation.

Shipwell May Not Properly Manage Ocean Transportation

As a general TMS, Shipwell is helpful for managing transport requirements. But, it may not be as specialized in ocean transportation as you may need. Hence, it may be necessary to integrate it with other shipping solutions. BuyCo’s Container Shipping Platform is a platform that can help you fill in the gaps. When you are comparing shipping platforms, below are a few points to keep in mind.

Features Needed to Manage Your Ocean Transportation

Controlled Access

There are many parties who collaborate on planning your shipments. This may include company employees, freight forwarders, partners and customers. Instead of sending hundreds of emails between parties, centralizing the data makes collaboration so much easier. A lot of the information may be sensitive in nature. You may need a Container Shipping Platform like BuyCo that lets you control data access while ensuring smooth, centralized communication.

Efficient Container Scheduling and Booking

A large percentage of cargo traffic travels across ocean routes. There are many carriers and many TMS are not connected to all the ocean carrier systems. Thus, when you need to schedule shipments, you have to visit individual websites for quotes and shipping schedules. It takes too much time and is inconvenient. You can avoid this by using a Container Shipping Platform that consolidates schedules, rates, allocations, emissions and other types of data from all carriers onto a single platform. Thus, your search is simplified and you can weigh multiple criteria to find the best carrier and schedule for your needs.

Accurate Container Tracking

Given the limited connectivity with ocean carriers, your TMS may not be able to always provide accurate tracking information. You cannot rely on only one source of data. Container Shipping Platforms like BuyCo gather tracking information from multiple sources so that you have complete end-to-end visibility over cargo movement and are always aware of your shipment status irrespective of whether it is in transit or in a warehouse. It also leverages AI and machine learning models to predict accurate ETD/ETAs and provide early updates to possible disruptions.

Robust Reporting over your Container Shipping

Many aspects of container shipping operations may be conducted outside of the TMS. Hence, the reports provided by the TMS may offer only a partial view. You might miss out on information regarding KPIs like overall volumes, allocation usages, freight forwarder and carrier performance, detention and demurrage, CO2 emissions, etc. By using a Container Shipping Platform that allows you to execute the entire container shipping operation on the same platform, you can access data about all aspects of the operation and get more accurate reports.

Shipwell Integration

Lastly, you need to ensure that the Container Shipping Platform you choose can be integrated with Shipwell. You must be able to extract data as well as share data to keep the operation flowing smoothly.

BuyCo: The Best Solution to Manage Container Shipping along with Shipwell

As a general TMS, Shipwell offers a number of useful services. However, it has limited connectivity to ocean carriers because of which, many shipping operations are executed outside the platform. Integrating Shipwell with BuyCo helps bridge these gaps and bring all shipping activities on to a central platform.

BuyCo aids in connectivity, communication, transparency and analytical reporting. At the planning stage, it consolidates information from 95% of all ocean carriers, forwarders and other partners to make comparisons and scheduling easier. It also centralizes communication while allowing you to control data access.

With BuyCo’s multi-sourced tracking data, you always know where your cargo is. What’s more, you get early alerts to potential disruptions so you can act proactively and keep shipments on schedule. This not only keeps operations flowing smoothly, it also maximizes customer satisfaction.

Further, BuyCo provides insightful analytical reports on various KPIs ranging from carrier performance and allocation usage to CO2 emissions and timely deliveries. This allows businesses to evaluate existing systems and make changes wherever required to optimize the same.

BuyCo and Shipwell together can play a big role in improving resource management, automating tasks and streamlining operations for more efficiency.