Today, the most prominent technology facilitating better planning, optimization, and execution of transportation operations is a Transportation Management System (TMS). Hence more supply chain leaders from around the globe, as well as manufacturers, distributors, eCommerce companies, and other businesses that need to manage supply chains, rely on TMSs to meet their customers' expectations and ensure the efficiency of their logistics operations. This results in the constant expansion of the TMS market, making the TMS vendor landscape more complex and highly competitive. Considering that TMS is as good as its data, vendors should leverage any technology to ensure excellence.
This article explains how modern iPaaS solutions can help TMS providers stand out from the crowd in such a harsh market and ensure further business growth.
If you try to Google iPaaS query, you will most likely find several definitions explaining the concept of iPaaS. One of those will be given by Gartner, who describes the idea accurately and concisely.
"Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations." Gartner.
IPaaS helps to connect any systems and applications and ensures a seamless flow of real-time data between the same. Also, it accelerates and simplifies how integrations are built and executed. So, whether you need to establish connectivity between business partners, their systems and applications, or nail down hybrid, IoT, or API integration, iPaaS is the answer.
A TMS business depends highly on connectivity and data exchange between different stakeholders. So, by leveraging iPaaS, you can gain a competitive advantage through better connectivity management and real-time information sharing across all stakeholders of your platform.
Finding an iPaaS that will work the best for your business might be challenging. The main problem here is that there are as many options you can choose from as the definitions of the concept.
While some vendors offer their integration platform as a tool with a set of adapters, pre-built connectors, and business rules your IT team must work with to build connectivity, others will offer a fully managed integration service where all the work - from integration architecture design to its implementation and maintenance - will be done by a vendor's team.
To make the right choice here, you need to clearly understand the amount of work and resources required for in-house integrations. Moving integration development and management obligations away from your IT staff to an iPaaS vendor's team is often more efficient and economical. So, if you feel that in-house integrations might be challenging, it is better to look at vendors such as Youredi, which provides iPaaS-based data connectivity solutions as a fully managed service.
One more distinction between different integration platforms can be a business focus an iPaaS vendor has. Since the TMS business is operating in a specific niche - Supply chain and logistics - the iPaaS that works the best for you should be explicitly designed for this domain. If you wonder why it is essential, the answer is simple - a vendor's skills, knowledge, and expertise guarantee the efficiency of integrations. If a vendor is familiar with your domain, the integrations will be done faster, easier, and consequently cheaper.
For instance, here at Youredi, we provide connectivity solutions and services built on top of our proprietary iPaaS, which was developed and designed specifically focusing on data integrations for the supply chain and logistics domain.
Our iPaaS includes essential features, such as protocol bridging, message transmission and harmonization (translation and transformation), data flow routing and orchestration, data quality management, multitenancy support, and flexibility and scalability for all types of integrations. Combining these features, our integration expertise, and our understanding of the domain's business needs enable us to provide the most efficient solution on the market.
The list of customers and partners is another critical factor to consider before engaging in a business relationship with a vendor providing an integration platform or data connectivity services. This way, you can easily understand whether the vendor is in the same league as you are and how it can add value to your business.
For instance, looking at Youredi's references, you can see names such as Oracle TM, Turvo, TradeLens, CargoX, Awake.AI, ZeroNorth, Myfreight, and many more industry-leading names that have straightened their capabilities using our solutions. Also, looking at the Youredi ecosystem, you will find the top air, ocean, and road carriers, freight forwarders, logistics service providers, and different IT systems connected to our iPaaS. Importantly, Youredi's customers can leverage these connections to enhance their business.
Based on the technical capabilities Youredi's iPaaS provides, we can outline the following six strategies TMS vendors can adopt to ensure the prosperity of their business.
Expanding the functionality of an existing product is often the most apparent strategy to stand out from the crowd. However, in the world of TMS, it is not that easy. Such a task goes hand in hand with adding new data sources, IT systems, or even online platforms (e.g., Supply Chain Execution or Visibility platforms) to a TMS's ecosystem. The challenge is that each relies on different technologies and data formats. Hence, connecting new parties with your TMS requires technical capabilities and knowledge, which you might lack in-house. If you are lucky enough to have all the needed resources, you might suddenly discover that your IT team is already overwhelmed with its workload.
If you face such issues, Youredi can be your secret weapon. Our iPaaS can work with any technology, protocol, or data format. This means you can connect with new business partners regardless of the system, interface, or data standard they use. Plus, we take care of data cleaning, harmonization, validation, and mapping to avoid possible data gaps and ensure that the data vital for you and your customers will be delivered timely with the quality and format you expect.
Year by year, TMS vendors build their unique ecosystems. However, this might not be enough for their customers. So, it is critical to add new parties quickly and efficiently at customers' requests. Youredi's iPaaS allows you to expand your ecosystem as much and fast as you need. Also, Youredi has a vast partner network and ecosystem of pre-connected systems, organizations, software platforms, and institutions you can leverage immediately to expand your existing ecosystem.
Whether the current focus of your business is a road, rail, air, or ocean, helped by Youredi iPaaS, your TMS can easily become multimodal. Which will help attract new customers and bring the existing ones additional benefits. Our team has expertise in data integration for all transportation modes; thus, we will manage the design, implementation, and maintenance of integrations with your partners operating in those domains.
Is your business goal to conquer new geographies, but you are afraid that building connectivity with the new market stakeholders will take years? No worries! With Youredi, you will get it done in a few months. This means your newly built ecosystem will be as strong, or even stronger, than the one you have in your home market.
Whether you have various disparate systems and data sources because of the poor IT architecture of your platform, the low digitalization level of business partners you depend on, or the technical issues of a legacy IT system you inherited from recent Mergers&Acquisitions, you need to fix this issue once and for all. Otherwise, you will have data silos negatively affecting the efficiency of your TMS.
Youredi iPaaS is designed for reliable information exchange between business systems of any kind. Whether they are located on-premise or in the cloud or have different interfaces and use different data types, Youredi can ensure a seamless flow of data.
Today, when it comes to the "should we buy or build solutions?" question, the choice is usually unanimous about buying. And that is the case because building solutions from scratch implies many risks. Hence, if there is a robust, specific, and malleable solution to meet one's needs, starting an in-house development is no longer an option nowadays.
Youredi iPaaS is an excellent alternative to in-house integrations with transport solution providers or other supply chain and logistics systems. With the managed service we provide, you need not care about the integration details - and simultaneously, you can rest assured that you are sharing correct data with your clients and partners. Our experts will care for all your integrations, so you and your partners can focus on your core business instead of building integrations yourself.
As you can see from above, by relying on Youredi, you can easily add new functionalities and services to your platform, expand the business domain or geographies of your operations, expand your ecosystem by adding new business partners regardless of the technology or data formats utilized, and stay focused on developing your core competencies instead of building integrations. All those will make your TMS unbeatable and open up the competitive advantages vital for business prosperity in harsh conditions in today's TMS market.
Interested in learning more about Youredi and the solutions we provide? Book a demo call with our integration experts to see in more detail how Youredi iPaaS can support your business goals.
Recommended reading:
E-book: Transportation & Logistics Execution: Gaining the Competitive Advantage