Why choose a flexible TMS?
Photo by Hans Peter Gauster
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Why should you worry about a flexible TMS (Truck Management System)?
A real example
Nobody knew the country would lock down early in the pandemic. Nobody knew there could be a pandemic at all for that matter. Shutting down and working from home? Very unlikely.
The idea would have been laughable in 2019. Then COVID-19 hits and many offices turn to temporary remote work. An idea new to many (We’ve done this since 2009). It’s a real struggle.
Difficult to execute with planning. Seemingly impossible without planning.
How do you handle phones? Transferring lines? Do we have somebody come in daily and sit alone to manage inbound calls? Hire a call service?
How long will this last?
Those with a cloud based TMS could just stay home and work. Those with a self hosted TMS had to scramble to find ways to take that part of their back office home with them. Maybe trying complex networking solutions.
Spending thousands on IT department help to make something workable. What a mess!
While there’s many ways to accomplish remote work with a self hosted TMS – planning is required.
Nobody planned for this event. Suddenly we’re having to work from home?
Dr. Dispatch to the rescue
Dr. Dispatch is a desktop TMS that can run in our cloud OR you can self host.
Due to having a flexible TMS, our customers were able to temporarily move to our cloud and work remote until they returned to the office.
At that point we simply moved their software back to their hardware. No problem. 1-2 hours tops.
Try that with a web application! I’m not aware of any web based TMS that can do this for you.
This let us keep several companies open through the pandemic.
After the lock down we moved their stuff back to their office. Do we want to do this weekly? No.
This works the other way too. What if there are cyber attacks and cloud outages in the future? Push comes to shove we can mail you a cd of the software and your data from the cloud to self host until things improve.
We often have a customer start out self hosted and move to the cloud as needed.
What about flexible business operations?
Dr Dispatch is also unique in our dual authority system.
Dr Dispatch comes out of the box supporting 1 brokerage based company and 1 asset based carrier (TL or LTL including intermodal).
The customer, shipper, and receive lists are shared between both companies (And can be restricted by our multi-user security module). Move a load from the carrier side to your brokerage side in a single click.
Owner Operators can use cloud or self hosted options.
We sometimes have a carrier start as an Owner Op, maybe a husband and wife team. As they add and expand they become a full carrier.
Not a problem with Dr Dispatch.
Maybe the following year they open a brokerage. Maybe then they need to move into our cloud for remote agents.
We can handle about any business. Dr Dispatch truly is a flexible TMS.
