TMC Blog

It’s important to tailor transportation management systems (TMS) to individual corporate users. But the technology can also be customized to specific industries, particularly in cases such as the chemical sector where there are many special needs.

According to the American Chemistry Council, the chemical business is a $ 720 billion industry that is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy. More than 96% of all manufactured goods are directly touched by chemistry. Read More...

Outsourcing arrangements come in many shapes and sizes, and one that has gained ground over recent years is where the service provider’s team is physically based in the client firm’s offices. As well as offering the traditional benefits of outsourcing, onsite teams promote a close affiliation between the two organizations. But the participants must lay the groundwork first if both parties are to derive maximum value from these relationships. Read More...

The skyrocketing cost of fuel is reason enough to take as many miles out of distribution networks as possible without compromising service levels. But aside from helping to control diesel consumption costs, these efforts yield an environmental payback that transportation practitioners should not overlook.

Shippers and service providers are looking to cut fuel consumption in a number of ways. Here are some examples.  Read More...

In cost-conscious times like these freight professionals often turn to familiar sources of savings such as network design and carrier negotiations to trim the organization's transportation budget. But there are other, less obvious, ways to meet savings goals.

Tender lead time, tender and pick up day of the week, and carrier size preference are all examples of cost-cutting levers that are easy to overlook. A lack of research into these mechanisms over the years has helped to keep them in the background.  Read More...

If you have ever wondered whether aggregating low volume lanes is a way to lower full truckload costs then conjecture no longer; research shows that such a strategy can achieve savings of up to 15 percent over spot market rates.

The research project was sponsored by C. H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. and carried out by Julia M. Collins and R. Ryan Quinlan, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Master of Engineering in Logistics program. Using two years of event data for roughly 500,000 valid, historic truckload transactions supplied by TMC, a division of C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc, the researchers analyzed the impact of lane aggregation on rates. Read More...