In our previous post, we outlined what a freight broker is and what they do. Freight brokers don’t own fleets of trucks or make goods for sale, but they are essential to today’s modern supply chain. But to really make their businesses stand out, a freight broker needs a TMS to pull everything together.
A TMS is the secret weapon in a freight broker’s arsenal. It lets them plan better, manage cash flow better, and even find new business easier. The days of spreadsheets, pen, and paper are gone. To succeed in today’s world, you need to let automation take of parts of your business for you so you can focus on building your business.
And then you take that to the next level with a TMS in the cloud and a lot of your worries just disappear. More and more business are moving critical software to the cloud, and a cloud-based TMS is the smart move for freight brokers in 2022.
What if you didn’t have to worry about software updates or installation or servers to run the software? How about software that worked wherever you can get online, just open a laptop, launch your browser, and start getting things done. Imagine being able to have employees work from home or even from a customer or carrier location and have all the same tools they have at the office.
Stop worrying about your servers and just serve your customers
When you have your software installed on a server (or computer) in your office or even your server hosted somewhere, you have to always worry about that server. Is it backed up? Is it up to date? Has it been hacked? Installing software on your own servers is putting all your businesses eggs in one basket.
Cloud-based or Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions like Tailwind TMS take the worries about updates, security, and backups off the table. You don’t ever have to worry if your data is backed up or you have the latest version of the software because all of those things are taken care of behind the scenes for you.
Stop being stuck in the office
The past two years taught us we need to be completely flexible with where (and when) we get work done. If critical software only works in one place—your office—how well does that work when often the office is the last place work getting done?
SaaS solutions, like Tailwind, let you take your business wherever you are or need to be. If you want to get work done sitting on a deck with a view of the water, what’s stopping you? Tailwind isn’t. If you need to update and send invoices while traveling or on the road and you can only do that from your office, what’s the chance you’ll lose business.
Keep the office with you. Be flexible and adaptable wherever business happens.
Why a TMS like Tailwind works for freight brokers
Like carriers in intermodal trucking, a TMS is an essential part of a freight broker’s toolkit. Today, shipping is way too complicated to rely on memory, a spreadsheet, and a contact list. Today freight brokers, like all parts of intermodal trucking and shipping, leverage software to keep their business running smoothly and grow their business too.
Wouldn’t it be nice for a system to make sure invoices go out right away, carriers are paid quickly, and you can see the whole picture of your cash flow? Face facts, it was hard to run a business in the best of times, and right now isn’t the best of times.
A TMS doesn’t just keep you organized, it takes the little things off your plate so you can focus on the big things. A TMS does the tedious things like invoicing and scheduling. It can find the best routes so you can build a stronger relationship with your carriers.
Here’s just some of what a TMS like Tailwind offers you:
- Dispatch Management
- Customer Database
- Customer Quote Generation
- Customer Portal
- Carrier Management
- Carrier Portal
- Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable Modules
- Routing
- Scheduling
- Trip logs
Imagine customers being able to see up to date statuses of their shipments or read and approve quotes. What if you didn’t have to go to three different systems just to generate a quote and send it to a customer? What if a single tool could do that?
When you switch to Tailwind TMS in the cloud you’re unlocking a freight broker power tool. You can get more done, faster, and wherever you decide your office is that day.
And then you can spend more time growing your business or even doing some of the other things you like to do.
