An examination of the impacts of transportation management systems

INTRODUCTION The rapidly changing area of information systems (IS) has created a number of challenges for transportation professionals. Practitioners must evaluate current systems, make budget allocation decisions to purchase new systems and software, and employ TMS to measure and improve the operational performance of their organizations. However, there is a lack of benchmark data regarding the relationships between TMS and other supply chain management information systems (SCMIS). Therefore, a goal of the research is to identify gaps in the current LIS literature and research. These gaps provide a foundation for the examination of the impacts of TMS within the transportation organization and across the company. Also, the findings highlight the data areas that are being collected and used to support transportation operations and assist transportation and information managers' decision process. After this introduction, there is a brief overview of the relevant literature. The methodology section discusses the data collection process. The results cover both the basic data and present interesting relationships between TMS and other areas of the organization. Finally, the managerial implications and conclusions are discussed. LITERATURE REVIEW A large number of articles have been written on the various aspects of LIS and TMS. A complete review of all of the previous literature is beyond the scope of the current research. However, a number of original studies have helped to establish the field of LIS (House and Jackson, 1976; Lambert et al., 1978). These previous studies have framed much of the LIS research that has followed. Also, there have been two recent articles that presented extensive literature reviews (Williams et al., 1998; Whipple et al., 1999), All of these articles helped to frame the overall format and goals of the present study. One key point made repeatedly in previous literature is the constant evolution of the field. TMS, LIS and SCMIS systems are constantly changing. Therefore, a current study was needed to update previous findings and to evaluate new and emerging trends. Various studies had collected different types of information including usage of various programs, usage rates over time, data collection elements and a number of other factors (Waller, 1983; Kling & Grimm, 1988; Langley et al., 1988). Also, there were a number of transportation management system specific trends examined in a series of articles beginning in 1975 (Gustin, 1984; Gustin, 1993; Gustin, 1995). Changes and updates in a number of new IS programs and concepts have been developed since the final Gustin survey (Gustin et al. 1995). Other recent studies have discussed new types of supply chain management tools (Harrington, 1997), inventory related software (Maclead, 1994; Forger, 1999), functional execution systems for logistics and operations (Smith, et al., 1998), and transportation and distribution software suites (Anonymous, 1998). In addition to these new SCMIS and TMS improvements, two of the most important changes that have also received extensive attention in the current literature are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) (Bradley et al., 1998; Shaw, 1998; Bradley et al. 1999a; Piturro, 1999) and Electronic Commerce (EC) (DeCovny, 1998; Bradley et al. 1999b; Brooksher, 1999; Witt, 1999). The literature review also identified a gap in the previous research. While there was some reported research on the impacts of TMS, no broad overview of TMS or its relationships to other areas of the LIS was presented. DATA COLLECTION A primary goal of the research was to gather LIS/TMS information from appropriate users. Therefore, a mailing list was derived from two sources: the Council of Logistics Management and the Distribution Computer Expo attendee list. To reach large numbers of logistics and transportation professionals that were users and knowledgeable of LIS/TMS, each list was prescreened to eliminate unlikely candidates. …