Overview

Overview

C-TMS is a transportation and logistics solution that reduces costs by optimising transport management across depots, manufacturers, retailers & carriers, providing central planning and management services. C-TMS focuses on improving the whole transport management process, including order generation, planning, execution and administration, and payment. The C-TMS system known as the Managed Transport Services Host System, operates on an Oracle 10g database. The host system provides interfaces to customer systems, sophisticated order entry templates and reporting. Links to transport planning tools, real-time tracking and execution tools and Oracle Financials accounting package, support the whole process. C-TMS allows all or just selected functions of the system to be utilised according to customers’ particular needs.

The C-TMS system incorporates several elements, order entry, order management, routing / scheduling, tracking and continuous improvement. These enable complete visibility of the optimisation process.

Order entry can be achieved in several ways, electronic interfaces enable the process to be fully automated, manual entry allows last minute requirements to be met and the ability to enter these via the internet allows flexibility and simplicity.

The order management functionality enables the system to create point to point orders encompassing the collection location, delivery location, time windows for these to be achieved and the vital information about the products and their size, weight and quantity. These items known as transport instructions are then available for routing.

Based on specific requirements set by the customer’s priorities the system takes the transport instructions and optimises them into trips. During the optimisation process the system interrogates available resources, all locations to be visited, specific rules and regulations and the laws that the vehicles operate under and produces the most efficient schedule.

Once the trips have been accepted and are en route then the in cab tracking systems can offer real time information to the customers and the planning centre. The system uses GPS (Global Positioning Satellites) to pin point vehicle locations. The in cab equipment enables drivers to update collection and delivery information as they actually occur with detailed information including quantities against product code. The systems enables the planners to add emergency trips to the vehicles giving a flexible real time service to the customer.

Continuous improvement is a key part of any service; the C-TMS system enables this through detailed reporting and flexible configuration. C-TMS is used to measure the operation against Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

The power of the system has made it an invaluable part of many services provided by OBS's customers to their own customers. In order that the system is available to provide full optimisation it is positioned with a strong infrastructure backbone and is supported by a dedicated Applications Management team. The main applications are located on IBM P570 mirrored servers within specialised data centres. This enables the service to be available twenty-four hours a day seven days a week on a high availability basis.

C-TMS Host Modules

The C-TMS solution for each client is made up of an “C-TMS Host” configuration and the third party applications to which the host is interfaced.

The C-TMS Host configuration is made of a selection from a series of modules depending on the client’s specific requirements.

A specific configuration of modules for a client is known as the “C-TMS Host” system for that client.

This wiki attempts to define the functionality of the C-TMS Host modules currently available.

Throughout the wiki the term C-TMS is used interchangeably to refer to either the “C-TMS Host” or the C-TMS integrated solution.