How a Transport Management System Improves Food & Beverage Logistics

The food and beverage industry is fast-paced, operating under tight deadlines and strict safety regulations. A Transport Management System (TMS) helps food and beverage companies streamline these complex supply chain operations.

Working with fresh food with a short shelf life requires fast and efficient delivery. Many products need cold-chain logistics to prevent spoilage, which can be extremely hard during certain seasons.

Restaurants and grocery stores require just-in-time deliveries, creating a tough logistics management job.

To make it even harder, logistics service providers for the food and beverage industry must be adaptable to supply chain disruptions and tight delivery windows.

But how do you keep up with everything when using manual data entry? The short answer is a transport management system.

A Transport Management System Can Transform Your Business

Trying to cope without transportation management will only hinder your business, leading to inefficiencies, wasted resources, and compliance risks.

Here’s how a Transport Management System can transform your food logistics operations.

1. Improving Delivery Speed and Efficiency

Timely delivery is one of the most important aspects of this industry. Working with food and beverages means freshness is critical. If it’s late, the food is spoiled, and customers are unhappy.

But let’s now consider you have a transport management system. This means you can:

• Optimize routes and avoid being delayed by traffic.
• Automate dispatching and order scheduling to save more time.
• Provide accurate ETAs to improve customer satisfaction.

2. Ensuring Compliance with Food Safety Regulations

When transporting food or beverages, regulations need to be adhered to, such as those of the Food Standards Australia New Zealand or HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) globally.

How can you get around it? Using a Transport management system to:

• Track the shipment’s temperature in real-time to prevent it from spoiling.
• Automate documentation to ensure you comply with safety standards.
• Ensure the food and beverages are handled and stored per safety standards.

3. Reducing Food Waste and Spoilage

A truck loaded with fresh dairy products is en route to a supermarket chain. However, due to poor route planning and unexpected traffic, the delivery is delayed for hours on a hot summer’s day.

What do you do with spoiled products? You have no option but to throw them away, which means extra waste and money down the drain.

But what if you had a transportation management system to minimize these risks by:

• Anticipate delays and travel conditions with route optimization.
• Reduce the time spent in warehouses with faster route planning.
• Monitoring temperature conditions inside the trucks to ensure product integrity.

4. Lowering Transportation Costs

Transportation costs are at their highest ever. According to new data, fuel costs are almost three times the rate of inflation.

The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) recorded that transport costs rose by more than 10% in 2024.

Managing these high fuel expenses can significantly impact profit margins in the food logistics sector. Considering a transport management solution is a smart move.

Here’s how a transportation management system can help with significant cost savings:

• Route optimization helps to minimize mileage and fuel consumption.
• Load planning is a practical way to reduce empty miles.
• Automating carrier selection helps to select the most cost-effective transport options.

5. Enhancing Supply Chain Visibility

In the food and beverage industry, constant visibility over the supply chain is essential. Lack of oversight can lead to unexpected disruptions, which in turn can result in financial losses.

You want real-time insight, which you get with transport management solutions. A transportation management system (TMS) provides insight into whether your deliveries are on schedule and meet safety standards.

Here’s how a TMS provides real-time insight into the movement of goods:

• Real-time tracking gives live data of shipments at every stage. This reduces uncertainty.
• A TMS improves communication with suppliers, customers, and carriers.
• It allows us to adjust to disruptions like traffic delays or vehicle breakdowns.

6. Strengthening Customer Satisfaction

With the rise of e-commerce, there is more pressure on the food and beverage industry to offer direct-to-customer deliveries.

This means dealing directly with customers instead of business operations. It creates individual expectations of high-quality delivery experiences.

The best way to increase efficiency is by sending automated delivery notifications and tracking updates.

Here’s how TMS software can help:

• It sends automated delivery notifications and tracking updates to customers.
• It offers precise ETAs to prevent long waiting times for direct-to-customer deliveries.
• An advanced TMS solution helps businesses quickly resolve delivery issues before they escalate.

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