Microsoft Excel vs Transport Management System

See how spreadsheets fare against a transport management system. The old and reliable vs the transportation software designed for the job. What works better?

If you’ve arrived on this blog, chances are that you’ve asked yourself at least once “What’s the best software to handle a transportation business?”.

Or what are the benefits of a TMS compared to spreadsheets?

And maybe, you went a step further, and asked yourself, what can a TMS do more precisely (as opposed to Microsoft Excel)?

Well, you’ve arrived at the right place, for we’ve got answers.

The aim of this article is to give you a view on the most important pros and cons between using spreadsheets or a transport management system, to run your business on.

Bur let’s start from the beginning.

Before we can start making any comparison, the whole point of this study, is to place both under the umbrella of efficiency. What we want to find out by the end, is simply, which one is more efficient for your activity.

And if TMS wins (spoiler alert), how much better is it really?

They get the job done.

At the end of the day, that’s what matters, right? Job gets done; things move forward. But how far can you go? How much time until you have a huge database of spreadsheets, full of data, with many duplicates, with employees working full time on managing those?

Slowly but surely, spreadsheets hit severe limitations in several areas; while on the other hand, massive digitalization in all types of companies systematically displaces this historical tool that many supply chain teams use.

Their initial cost is minimal, but the hidden costs associated with them are starting to get high past a certain point. Spreadsheets weren’t designed to integrate with other systems, run routine auditing, solve complex processes or serve as a multidimensional database.

Unless you have a wizard in your team working their magic by using functions everywhere. That somewhat compensates for newer tech, but still adds more work to upkeeping those documents – and those kind of wizards are not easy to find. Moreover, the new generation of wizards choose other tools to specialize in – just imagine what such a person could do with the same deep knowledge and understanding of a TMS software.

Compared to a TMS, spreadsheets hit severe limitations as you have very little flexibility and it’s very difficult to have a strategic outlook on your business from them. It’s almost impossible to work out a cost-effective plan or draw a qualitative report. Unless “you’re a wizard Harry”.

It’s all about data in the end, that’s why we live in “The Information Age” after all.

The need for quality data is pushing all companies out of Microsoft Excel into a more powerful software; a good TMS will ultimately seek to become a tool driven by Machine Learning and AI to power creating better analyses.

It’s not there yet, as the technology isn’t proliferated, but that’s the desired direction to go towards – a TMS acts as a single source of truth that coagulates your entire team and clients around it. To have this tool provide you insights into your operation and help optimize your strategy, is the next logical progression.

The recent drop in freight rates, coupled with rising fuel and insurance costs in the past months are tightening margins for companies in the haulage sector. Every pound you spend on operating costs should bring you added value (not just keep things going the same).

However, companies using spreadsheets are likely missing out on the opportunity to take advantage of all the diverse functionality a TMS can provide.

Many companies still have full-time employees dedicated to scanning PODs and taking calls for updates on the jobs drivers are on (sounds familiar?).

Worse even, each call or scanned document needs a follow up action. Your employees need to juggle several different things one after another – check calls, status updates, send emails or texts. Depending on your SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) there’s a whole process they need to cover.

To which you add the fact that your clients have their own standards, which would love some real-time data and transparency of their delivery to make their lives easier, then it can get pretty stressful to orchestrate a whole concert of info-sharing between parties.

It’s doable, yes; but why go through all that when given a better choice? With a TMS, both of these issues would be completely automated with EPODS and Customer Portal.

In the end, your POD scanner and dispatcher are doing an uselessly heroic work that keeps the company running, but which ultimately is an avoidable and costly waste of their time.

They could push other priorities that are more meaningful by freeing their time with the automation a TMS brings, while also making sure that any institutional knowledge isn’t lost if they leave their role in your company.

EPODs and Customer Portal are just two examples – we highly recommend taking a look at our website to see all the key advantages a TMS can offer.

Searching for an order, an invoice, changing its status, sending it to your clients, partners etc. is doable with spreadsheets. But to work with these in real-time, in a direct way, is not possible. It’s why many companies are turning more and more towards a TMS software.

Instead of investing in more manpower, invest in automation.

SMEs in all industries are leveraging tech to be able to create great products or services, and 10x their growth. It’s way cheaper and has the added benefit that it makes your current employees lives easier.

Implementing a TMS can happen surprisingly fast and bring in a lot of quick wins; especially if it’s very design has taken Onboarding into account (not many thought of this; but we did).

A good TMS increases work comfort, saves time, accelerates processes, reduces risks of errors and litigation straight from its design. Real-time information is a must, as your clients and partners will be much happier to have the comfort of checking where their shipment is whenever they want.

Plus. if anything changes, or something comes up, you immediately know about it.

For example – a driver is behind schedule.

With spreadsheets, you’ll never hear about it, and when you do, you probably have to pick up the phone and make some calls. A TMS informs you instantly, and your client through the Customer Portal; plus, the chat feature let’s you quickly update everyone involved.

Yes, it will take the spreadsheets aficionados some time to detach from their favorite tool – but once they mastered the TMS, they will never go back again.

Sharing information with your clients and partners is essential.

Sharing files is easy, but the management effort needed to be invested is considerable – emails, phone exchanges, status updates, worries about the security of data, and react time to unforeseeable circumstances; all need interventions.

Cooperation is more difficult as your partners and clients use spreadsheets in their own way. This can lead to mismatches in sharing and comparing data, which adds more work to align with them. New clients then have to go through a trial-and-error dynamic until you two are aligned.

Discussions and conflict are likely to arise, especially in regards to invoicing.

With a TMS, you just skip all this because the basics are now automated, fully transparent, and (with DriverUp) two clicks away from finding anything you need.

A TMS places all partners in the same ecosystem to interact in real-time on data, processes and operations, drawing from a single source of truth.

Which assures the authenticity of data, and streamlines your operation.

The more spreadsheets you create, the more your staff is going to put effort into keeping these in order rather than focus on higher priority activities. In this respect, they hinder your growth as they scale up very badly (you need more of your employees to get into complex and creative equations just to get by).

Ultimately, they can become enormous, and you’ll need to invest in some more manpower to keep them up.

Microsoft Excel is not a multi-tool. We’ve all heard the saying “use the right tool for the right job”, right? Spreadsheets weren’t made to carry your complete logistics planning.

Yes, people have found creative ways to use it when there was no better option available, but now there’s a whole market to choose the ideal TMS software from, and you should leverage it to your advantage.

A good TMS software will have BI features built into it, which enable you to analyze data quickly and accurately, allowing your team to make data-driven decisions.

“Data-driven decisions”, how many times we’ve heard this over the past years from every business and industry on the planet? It’s almost a fetish in modern companies to boast data-driven decisions; that’s how valuable it is.

Overall, what you want, is less overhead, and better data.

With Microsoft Excel, almost everything has to be done manually. The same order ends up in one spreadsheet for planning, then in another one for invoicing. This bears weight on your operational costs, and if you’re unlucky to get some human errors, you’ve got a nice mess on your hands to sort out.

It’s just free stress.

Moreover, mediocre data quality makes it harder to evaluate and plan for the future.

Your employees need to find the right dynamic organically by trial-and-error – then teach the new ones themselves with practice (fingers crossed it all goes well).

It’s a tried-and-true method yes, but now there’s a better way.

The true differentiation between spreadsheets and TMS is how you turn those features into customized solutions for your operation. At the micro level, you use them to your advantage in order to stay on top of things every day; and at the macro level, you use them to inform your decisional process.

All data is efficiently and seamlessly aggregated into the TMS through our features.

This optimizes your team’s efficiency as they don’t jump from app to app, to gather and align info.

You need 100% accuracy to build on. As long as your data is going to be heavily manipulated every day by your employees, human error is bound to happen at some point.

This often translates into delays in payments (1/3rd of invoices are inaccurate).

Meaning that your clients are wary of every invoice they see, and if anything is incorrect, time-to-cash increases as the clock is restarted.

While the complexity of your business grows and your team expands, a TMS system will keep enabling you without breaking the bank.

There is a huge opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.

The technological barrier to secure big-name clients is getting higher for haulage companies with each year. This is an issue now, and it’s only going to grow more, as their expectations grow, because other companies started integrating tech into their workflow earlier.

Your clients want real-time data on which they can rely, so that they can plan in advance and adjust everything from warehouse staffing to the location where goods will be stored.

As more shippers become more tech-enabled, the gap between carriers using the right tech and the ones who don’t, will grow. As a result, there will probably be a point where they refuse to work with anyone relying on spreadsheets to run their business.

That point isn’t that far away. And as the world keeps getting “crazier” it just keeps accelerating. #insertAItech

The indirect cost of using spreadsheets far exceeds the problems you can have by implementing a TMS.

They’ve served you well, but since there’s a better alternative on the market, nowadays they just increase time-to-cash and require dedicated employees for basic tasks a TMS can do automatically.

Spreadsheets may be free, but ultimately, they are nothing more than just a huge opportunity cost.

And it’s going to become harder and harder for you to find freight if you don’t adapt.

You will gain a lot by leaving spreadsheets to history: real-time info, quality data, better work dynamic for your employees, little to no human error, shorter time-to-cash, less overhead, full transparency, and a better overall position of your company to tackle the future.

By this point, we’re just concerned for the future of transport SMEs in the UK.

We know the landscape; we know we have a lot of family microenterprises in UK that have been built on tradition that withstood the test of time.

But we live in accelerating times, and we must adapt – to which the solution today, is a smart TMS software that can help enable your business to transition into the digital era.

Lastly, if this article left you curious to know everything that a TMS is and does, here’s a piece on that – complete with information on what it is, how does it work, why it’s important to have one, benefits, features, integrations, and even main TMS vendors in the UK.

And if you still have questions – probably this one will help. We took to Google and answered the 10x main questions people had about TMS software to the best of our knowledge.

That’s all folks. Drive safe! o7