Multimodal design is gaining in popularity for Transportation Management System (TMS). Multimodal refers to the different types of transport mode like truck, barge or air. Does multimodal creates more complexity for your TMS? Here are some tips to consider for multimodal design.
To start off with multimodal design, you will need to ensure you have expertise or SME in-house. They are required to tweak and harmonized the multimodal data.
- Transport modes have common grounds. Look at existing data for comparison. Remember the 80/20 rule.
- Find the common fields from your commercial who will tell you their views in cost margin and ease of selling the products.
- Go for simplicity and ease of maintenance in your solution design. If it is more than 5 steps, consider to review and revise your solution.
- Utilise Agile for tweaking and improvement with data.
- Build your multimodal knowledge base. This is incremental efforts and takes time to nurture your in-house capabilities.
Multimodal design are advanced model and sign of maturity in your TMS program. Majority of TMS SME will apply various forms of multimodal approach. Till date, the best solution is not geared toward complex and elegant design but rather on simple and fast approach.
Danny Kwok 