Part 6: Dream Team! The Complete Guide To Managed Transportation

Welcome back to another edition of our Dream Team series. Last week, Andrew Welling shared his best practices for overcoming cross-border shipping challenges. Today, we’ve asked David Branson, TA Services’ VP of Managed Transportation Operations, to share his complete guide to managed transportation services.

David has worked in the transportation industry for nearly 20 years, having held roles in Transportation Management System (TMS) administration and implementation, project management, managed transportation operations, and warehousing & distribution. Today, David leads the Managed Transportation team at TA Services — helping customers realize the value of a strategic partner in transportation management. Read on for his complete guide to managed transportation services.

What is managed transportation?

Managed transportation involves a shipper outsourcing its shipping strategy and execution to a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. At TA Services, our approach is to listen and learn about our customers’ logistics challenges. We do this by considering areas such as their carrier sourcing & procurement, technology, execution, visibility, freight audit & payment process, and business intelligence.

Once our deep dive into the shipper’s logistics process has been completed, we can then figure out the best strategy to help them focus on their core competencies, save money, and improve their own customer’s experience. Simply put, we don’t exist without creating additional value for North American shippers. Choosing a 3PL for managed transportation services allows for collaboration between the shipper and the logistics provider — while still allowing the shipper to focus on their core competencies and growing their business.

What are the benefits of managed transportation?

Time to focus on core competencies and growing your business

Transportation management is not core to most businesses, so handling it in-house can use up a lot of time, capital investment, and resources. By partnering with a 3PL provider for managed transportation services, you can delegate many of these time- and resource-consuming tasks. Ultimately, we’re experts in this area, and outsourcing your logistics needs to a 3PL provider like TA Services will allow you and your business the ability to focus on your core competencies, improving your customer experience and growing your business. In other words — make more, sell more.

Improved shipping operations

Creating shipping strategies is what 3PLs do — it is core to their business. They understand the industry and its trends and how to mine data for opportunities. They can help you create a strategy unique to your needs, access quality carriers, and improve your overall shipping operations. Whether it’s choosing the right modes or consolidating shipments, a 3PL partner can help.

Access to innovative technology solutions

Partnering with a 3PL provider for managed transportation services also means getting access to an advanced transportation management system. You should partner with a 3PL company that lives and breathes transportation management, which means they put a lot of time, energy, and money into innovating their technology. This will allow you to stay ahead of the game with industry-leading technology — without needing to put your own resources into research and development.  

More visibility with reporting and analytics

A managed transportation partner provides a better look at your operations, with real-time, end-to-end supply chain visibility. With everything being managed and tracked in one place, you’ll gather better data and analytics with advanced reporting and actionable insights. A managed transportation partner can take those insights gathered from the data — paired with industry expertise and knowledge of trends — and use them to help you create a custom shipping strategy.

Lower transportation spend

By managing your transportation services more efficiently, you can lower your overall transportation spend. Improved and more efficient shipping operations lead to fewer unnecessary costs. Ongoing rate management and optimization will ensure you’re getting competitive rates from the right carriers. And by leveraging a 3PL partnership for managed transportation services, you can eliminate several back-office overhead costs related to procurement, transportation management, billing, and more.

Access to guaranteed capacity

3PLs leverage their size and scope to build relationships with quality carriers and negotiate the best rates. By partnering with a 3PL provider, you’ll get access to capacity that might otherwise not have been available to you. With labor and carrier shortages being such a hot topic in recent years, being able to leverage this capacity is now more important than ever.

How does TA Services approach managed transportation?

At TA Services, we take a four-stage approach to managed transportation: understand, design, plan, and execute.

Understand

In order to provide the best service, we first need to understand your business. We start with a rapid network assessment to learn about your business goals and logistics challenges — reviewing your operations and analyzing your freight spend data. Even when clean data isn’t available, we can help find solutions for collecting and organizing data that will allow us to provide the best recommendations.   

Design

Once we’ve analyzed where you are at today, we can start designing a shipping strategy based on your business goals and requirements. No two strategies look the same, so we use our industry expertise and analysis of your data to create an approach as unique as your business.

Plan

Beginning to work with a 3PL partner for managed transportation services can be a big change, and we don’t take that change lightly. Our Managed Transportation team is comprised of experts in project management and change management. We design project timelines, ensure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, and outline immediate and long-term goals — all to ensure a smooth implementation process. 

Execute

Implementing your 3PL partner is just the beginning — from there, the real work begins. TA Services’ Managed Transportation team works to handle the day-to-day operations while also always looking to grow and improve your shipping strategy. Leverage our people, processes, and technology to see immediate improvements across your operations and spend as well as long-term efficiencies for your transportation management operations.

Interested in learning more about how TA Services can deliver strategic managed transportation services for your business? Reach out to speak with a member of the team today.

And be sure to come back next week for the final installment of our Dream Team series. Charles Dismuke, TA Services’ CFO, will be sharing his thoughts on the technology innovations that will have the greatest impact on the supply chain industry in 2022.