Installing a transportation management system can yield big savings and boost your customer service—but you have to do it right.

By Peter Bradley

In a recent posting in "Logistics Viewpoints," an online newsletter published by ARC Advisory Group, analyst Steve Banker reflected on two companies that had recently implemented transportation management systems (TMS) with an eye to reducing costs and improving service.

In one case, the company achieved its goals, wrote Banker, a member of ARC's supply chain and logistics consulting team. But in the second case, the firm had only limited success.

What made the difference, Banker concluded, was not the software, but how the customer managed the implementation. The first company had strong executive support. The second had a sales team that ignored the TMS forecasts for delivery times, promising faster service to win business—a move that ultimately led to complaints about "late" deliveries.

He wrote, "When I have talked to companies with failed supply chain implementations, they typically do not blame the software company. Rather, they admit that the fault was their own, usually because they couldn't change their internal culture, especially if a project requires the sales force to change the way it wants to do business."

In an interview with DC Velocity, Banker expanded on that theme. "When I talk to end users who have had bad implementations, they often say that while they would like to blame the TMS vendor, they have to admit that they have to take a lot of the blame," he said. "They did not have enough buy-in, they did not have enough training, they did not have good project management skills."

So how can companies avoid these pitfalls and ensure a successful implementation? We asked several experts for their advice. What follows are their four steps to TMS success: ...