When reading specialized publications, blogs and media headlines about the year ahead in the transportation industry, the opinion is unanimous about the main challenges supply chain organizations will continue struggling with: lack of capacity, rising fuel costs, higher freight volumes, stricter regulations and events like the Brexit.
The ability to react and successfully meet the market demands of 2019 is highly determined by the ability to use digitalization to your advantage, and collaborate with your partners in your supply chain ecosystem. With this in mind, inet invested a lot of time and effort in providing higher flexibility, better usability and new features for global networks in our TMS. The following four milestones of 2018 can positively impact our customers’ 2019 strategy:
1. Agile way of working
In a fast paced and dynamic environment, where changes and disruptions are becoming the norm, traditional software development methods become insufficient to respond quickly to the industry demands. inet thus started the journey to Agile more than a year ago, introducing Scrum and Kanban to more than nine teams. These methods - and more importantly, new ways of thinking - make way for faster, more flexible product development that is able to receive and respond to customer feedback much quicker. Ultimately this has many positive effects, among which are higher transparency, quality and innovation.
2. Powerful planning capabilities
As supply chain networks become ever more complex and global, finding optimal routes and network structures on a daily, mid-term and long-term basis thus ensuring best possible transportation utilization, has become a competitive factor. To complement the inet TMS with a powerful seamlessly integrated planning module, the rights to the 4flow vista® planning software were acquired in 2018. This includes approved features for strategic, tactical and operational planning of shipments adding yet another key capability to the inet TMS. Beyond that, inet and 4flow will continue to expand joint product development in the future.
Find out more about the acquisition here.
3. Enhanced usability
With the redesign of the TMS user interface (UI), an important first step towards a whole new inet product experience was taken aiming at putting the user in the center of inet’s development process. The new UI includes several improvements like fresh and renewed screens design and a higher resolution for better screen space utilization.
Have a look at the new UI here.
4. Integrated Alpega portfolio
We believe in collaboration and creating ecosystems that will be able to meet the sophisticated demands of the future. Therefore, inet joined the Alpega group already in 2017. In this ecosystem end-to-end solutions for all transport needs are developed. As part of the group, inet can offer its customers a broader range of products and services as well as access to a much larger community of carriers, supply chain professionals and more.
