RFP for a Transportation Management System.
Information on Vendor/Bidder Profile
A brief history and core competence of bidding company. This section allows buyer to capture detailed information about the prospective vendor and the type of support it is capable of offering to meet buyer needs. This section will cover information like:
• General Information: company name, corporate address, telephone number, fax, website, year founded, Company CEO and years with company, senior management team (names, titles, years with company), etc.
• Contact Information: Proposal contact name, Title, Contact address, Contact telephone, Contact e-mail address, and Contact mobile phone.
• Financial Standing: Private or Public, stock exchange and ticker symbol as applicable, Ownership Symbol, Month in which fiscal year starts and ends, YTD Results- consolidated revenue and profit, current balance sheet information, Litigation is applicable, etc.
• Employee Information: Total number, number by function, G&A, other.
• Support: Warranty, Maintenance, etc.
• User Group Information.
• Customer Base Information.
• Training Program: virtual/online web training, on-site training, etc.
Note: attach supporting documents for any of the above information for additional reference.
Bidders to provide response on the below questions in their TMS offer as the following sectional questions comprise ‘Must Have’ features and priorities for shipper’s TMS implementation:

Information on Functionality:
Project Implementation and Project Management:
• Describe your implementation services.
• Describe the implementation process and include the degree of difficulty.
• Do you follow a specific implementation methodology? If so, please describe.
• Describe your project management approach.
• Describe your education and training services, training location, facilities and fees.
• Describe your support policies and services. (24 hour hotline, problem escalation, prioritization, dial-in diagnostic service, service location, support staffing, etc.).

Project Requirements:
Demonstrate how your software facilitates a logical business flow for the major processes that follow. Along the way, point out additional features that your software has available that would improve our processes or provide additional benefits beyond our specified requirements.
Freight Load Building and Optimization:
• Orders from the WMS system need to be downloaded to the load building software. Downloads of the orders must be accepted by the software with the options of doing it automatically or by manual intervention.
• Errors from each download must be shown on an error report that may be displayed on a screen or printed by the planner. The planner must be able to correct the errors in the download file.
• Ability to select groups of orders by warehouse location, geographical location, business group, and routing group for creating shipments.
• Carrier equipment availability needs to be tracked for truckload shipments based on commitments with the carrier.
• Orders selected must be viewable for the planner. A maintenance function is needed to make adjustments to the orders in such fields as delivery date and time, zip/postal code, parcel indicator, and other miscellaneous fields.
• There must be an identifier on orders containing items with hazardous materials.
• The TMS must have a freight load builder and optimizer to get the lowest transportation costs. It is necessary to dynamically build loads and have the ability to save the optimized results.
• The TMS must have the ability to generate the VICS Bill of Lading (BOL) numbers for the loads. The TMS must store the VICS BOL numbers with the load information and pass them with load information on the load tenders and to our WMS.
• Tariffs and rates for TL, LTL, CZAR, parcel and expedited rates, pool distribution rates, inter-modal rates, and accessorial charges must be maintainable manually and from other sources.
• Parcel rating will not be incorporated into the optimization process.
• All files needed for planning and optimization need to be maintainable. The files include carriers, consignee, shipper, distribution points, geographic, zip codes, product, equipment, and driver information.
• The optimizer is required to have parameters that may be maintained in order to get the lowest cost of shipping for a batch of orders.
• Shuttle dock loads which are loads containing finished goods that come off the production lines at the manufacturing plant, branch transfers loads, and truckload customer orders need to be received by the TMS with a ‘to be approved’ status.
• Audit trail reports from the files that are maintained should be available on demand by the user.
• All screens displayed must have a screen print option or utilize the windows print capability.
• “What if” analysis and comparison capabilities are needed to fine-tune the loads and direct shipments?
• A function is needed to assign carriers, set up appointments, and print Shipment/load manifests. Pool carriers will be ranked by least cost.
• Carrier appointments, track and trace, and all status messages regarding the open shipment file need to be accessed via the web.
• The ability to print load tenders at detail and summary levels is needed with options to auto-tender by EDI, e-mail, or fax (Order of preference).
• Special instructions that may come with orders passed from our WMS to the TMS are to appear on the load tender document as well as the EDI 204 transaction.
• The software must contain service standards that are maintainable through parameters. The parameters include consignee hours of operation, truck speed, delivery windows, drive times and unloading time per hundred weights (cwt.).
• All shipment and load information must be stored in the TMS for analysis and management reporting.
• The software must be able to upload shipments/orders files for use by our WMS system.
• Load confirmation (actuals) from the WMS system need to be downloaded to the TMS software. Downloads of the actuals must be accepted by the software with the options of doing it automatically or by manual intervention. Confirmation is to be done at the item level, Weight variance is to be allowed at load confirmation, and the ability to change the carrier at load confirmation is needed.
• Loads need to be changed to a history status automatically, when the actuals are received by the TMS from the WMS, except for those with errors. If updates are only to SKU information – weight, case, cube, the load should be automatically updated and put into a history status without any manual intervention.
Freight Bill Payment:
• Freight Bill Payments module must have the ability to pay by the following methods: Self Invoicing (Auto Payment), Match and pay, Accessorial and other charges which are received after the original freight bill is vouchered.
• Startup of carrier payments in match and pay mode with the capability to migrate by carrier to auto-pay.
• Ability to add unplanned charges, such as accessorials, is necessary.
• Freight Bill Auditing and review is necessary for out of tolerance freight bills. The ability to set payment tolerance for a percentage and/or dollar amount is needed.
• Reconciliation of freight payments is needed to show any bills that are outstanding, identify the payments that were under charged or over charged, or whether duplicate billing has been produced.
• Freight Cost Allocation by weight will be needed to pro rate the charges based on the following splits - Load, Stops, Shipments, Orders and SKUs.
• Ability to calculate and accumulate freight expense by specific general ledger account numbers and cost centers/departments.
• Freight accruals will be generated by the package.
• Freight Cost Analysis will be needed by the Traffic Department to see that we are shipping at the best cost that is available. Analysis reports needed are: Freight Carrier Summary which shows Carrier Name/Number, Freight Charges by Charge Code, Weight, Number of Invoices, and Cost per Cwt., for the current month and year to date; and Billing Analysis by Shipping Division, Sales Division, by Charge Code by Shipping Division showing within weight ranges, Number of Invoices, Avg. Invoice Dollars, Avg. Weight, Percent of Total Weight, and Avg. Cost per Cwt.
• Freight Bill Cost per Cwt. which shows Branch, Product number, and cost per cwt. for various ranges of shipment cwt.
• Ability to produce the Transportation Analysis report that summarizes Customer sales in dollars and weight, Customer freight costs, and Branch Transfer weight and freight costs. The report will have comparisons for the current month current year vs. current month last year, and current month YTD vs. current month last YTD.
• Ability to add vendors to the Freight Payment system.
Freight Accruals:
• Hierarchy of freight cost allocation; Load, Stop, Shipment, WMS Order / Document Number, SKU
• Types of loads: Branch Transfers (1 stop or multiple stops), multi stops, Single stop Pool loads, Multi-stop Pool loads, LTL Shipments combined into loads, Parcel Shipments, etc.
Carrier Claims:
• Claims Management – Online Functions: Carrier Name or Number to Claims Cross-reference and Carrier Claims Display / Maintenance
• Claim Items Display / Maintenance.
• Claims Management – Reports.
Generic Requirements:
• Ability to download shipment, payment, and claims information to Excel or a report writer for inquiries, reports and analysis.
• Report writer, such as Crystal Reports, to produce the various reports/queries that are needed by management for analysis and decision making. The report writer will have a control limit for the number of records a user may access for queries and reports.
• Security for allowing personnel to do specific functions on the system. Only the transportation planners and supervisors should be able to plan and build loads using the load builder and optimizer. Only the freight payment person and the supervisor may pay the freight bills. Only an assigned person and a supervisor may perform the claims management functions. Only an assigned person and a supervisor may perform rate maintenance.
• Archiving and purge functions are required for all files whose records are no longer needed.
• Specifications on rates, accessorials, Carrier information, Export files, EDI, etc.
1. Rates - Accept rates from a diskette from a carrier to be loaded into the system
1.1 “What if “ analysis for analyzing rates
1.2 Rate shopping to get lowest cost carrier: LTL and TL
1.3 Copy capabilities must exist for the various types of tariffs
1.4 Use existing tariff structures including discounts at the zip code level and/or weight ranges
1.5 Standard look-ahead (deficit weight) rating is included in carrier contracts
1.6 Reasonability and validity checking for all carrier rates 2. Accessorials
2.1 Accessorials by Carrier for all origins vs. individual origin tables
2.2 Accessorials by Customer
2.3 Reporting capabilities from accessorial files; historical retention and reporting capabilities; graphing capabilities or capability to export to a spreadsheet program
2.4 Accessorial adjustments must be easily made with the ability to be copied across multiple carriers, especially ones like the fuel surcharges that have to be adjusted weekly 3. Carrier Information
3.1 Street and e-mail addresses are needed for each carrier, one of each type of address for dispatching, payments, claims, customer service, and sales representative
3.2 Rank Carriers by performance, which will take precedence over the least cost carrier 4. Export Files
4.1 Generate the freight expenses and accruals daily
4.2 Generate freight payments daily
4.3 Shipment information appended to daily to build a monthly file 5. EDI
5.1 Ability to generate the following EDI transaction sets:
5.1.1 Load Tender transactions
5.1.2 Shipment Status transactions

Information on Technology:
• Data and Data Security: data security messaging/ email capabilities, archiving, audit trail, recovery and restart capabilities, etc.
• Provide detailed information on General Software Architecture.
• Provide detailed information on System Architecture.
• Provide detailed information on Network (LAN) / Communications / Operating Environment.
• Provide detailed information on Technical System Requirements: General, System Interfaces, Security and Application Support.

Works Consulted:
Hannon, David (2005), “Shippers Identify ‘Must Haves’ on Their Wish List,” Purchasing (December 8), pp.47-48.

The 2009 TMS RFP template.