Ryder manages growth story

Managed transportation services provider Ryder System leverages JDA’s TMS but wraps around it BI tools and a unique user interface to differentiate in the competitive market.    Managed transportation services are growing quickly these days. Just pop into the offices of the major U.S.-based providers like LeanLogistics, C.H. Robinson’s TMC division, or Ryder, and you won’t find many empty seats.
   A big reason for that is that the time-to-value of such services is shrinking. Time-to-value is well worn software jargon that describes how quickly a company will see improvement (efficiency, cost, or otherwise) by using a system.
   In the case of managed TMS services, the time to value is fast because the dynamics of what those providers are offering has changed.
   “It used to be you added the greatest value when you had the most complex networks,” Dave Belter, vice president and general manager of transportation management at Ryder System, told American Shipper in a recent interview. “Now with the business intelligence, you can add value to the simpler networks. That value isn’t in automation, it’s in the business intelligence. How did the network perform against the best rate in every lane. We can perform that every night. Our practitioners can see what lanes aren’t operating at the highest levels.”
   Ryder has been growing its managed TMS division – a group that essentially acts as a company’s domestic transportation department – thanks to three primary foundations: use of a top-of-the-line off-the-shelf TMS (JDA), proprietary BI tools and a slick user interface wrapped around that TMS, and people to run the system on behalf of customers.
   Other managed service providers (like TMC, LeanLogistics or Echo Global Logistics) tend to use their own proprietary technologies, but Belter said JDA has been a good fit for Ryder to essentially white label and build upon.
   Ryder has been using JDA’s TMS since before JDA’s acquisition of i2 (in fact, back to when i2 was IDLS). But the 3PL tailors its services around JDA’s system, a perfect example of layering differentiated services around an off-the-shelf technology.
   “Our perspective on JDA is it’s a world class TMS,” Belter said. “We want to be the world class practitioner on the TMS, and we spend time building our own interface that wraps around the technology. It allows us to configure it in an agile manner. We’ve built a whole BI suite. It’s highly interactive – it presents areas of cost or service leakage. We’ve built a practice or method around that that formally documents how the transportation network should be managed.
   “Where we’ve done our own builds is in the enterprise data and the user interface around JDA. All the workflows.”
   Ryder’s TranSync product is an example. It’s an add-on to JDA-based TMS optimization engine that allows it to integrate for hire and fleet capacity usage for a single customer.
   “There’s always a balance point of optimal day-to-day execution,” Belter said.
LeanLogistics, incidentally, just released a similar feature in its TMS that allows users to manage fleet, dedicated, and for hire capacity through a single platform. While LeanLogistics sells its software as a standalone, Ryder is all about managed services.
   “Complexity and growth are two areas that customers come to us to solve,” Belter said. “Customers that are more focused on features tend to gravitate toward (software-as-a-service systems). The customer that focuses on achieving value is better looking for us. We’re interested in how they’re going to solve certain problems, and get their networks integrated. That’s a better customer for us, because we’re not a software reseller.
   “The BI is the key feature we use to differentiate ourselves,” he added. “You can create reports, but it’s more to us around the interactive BI where you can get to the root cause of why the numbers are what they are. That gives the customer the point of control that they want. They don’t really want the tactical. They can see as often as they want.”
   Ryder has never hid its use of JDA, which sells its TMS software directly to retailers and manufacturers as well as 3PLs.
   “The lines are blurred a bit – as we’ve said before, we don’t want to hide that we’re a JDA practitioner,” Belter said. “Some of our customers have employed JDA for part of their business and used us for another part because they need to get to the value quicker.”