Phardiag: An Analysis Of The Visibility Of Shipments

Visibility of shipments – In Phardiag the visibility of shipments is acheived through manualy phoning our freight forwarders to see where the goods are at any given time, or loging into our freight forwarders tracking system ( we have 14 different freight forwarder partners ) and updating our customer with the ETA. A TMS would allow Phardiag to put in our 15P reference into the TMS and the TMS would automaticaly log into our frowarders system and give live feed back of where the goods are and the ETA of the goods. When we loginto our forwarders tracking portal we can also see the live temperature of the goods so implimenting this into our TMS would allow us to monitor the temperture of shipment and if there are any excursions outside of the
The use of GPS in Phardiag is essential for our high value loads. Under Phardiag’s insurance police when the value of goods on a truck exceeds a certain value special provisions must be adhered to such as Geo-fencing. Geo-fencing is achieved by agreeing the route the truck is going to take and by the use of the GPS in the truck if it deviates from the pre approved route by 500 meters our forwarder will be notified and pre planned actions will come into play such as alerting the police and a third party freight watch company to locate the goods. For Sea and air shipments it can be more difficult to know exactly where your goods are you have to rely on information provided to the forwarders from the airlines and shipping companies. Phardiag are currently looking at the possibility of introducing GPS tracking onto our shipments for Sea and Air the difficulty with this is, as the goods will be in a container (sea) or a can (air) the signal from and to the tracker can be distorted or lost. So we have decided to look at the possibility for the GPS tracker to include an altimeter so that the tracker will record and broadcast while the goods are on the ground but when the tracker reaches a specified altitude the GPS capability is switched off and again when landing it will turn itself back on again when
Today the software can be leased though cloud based programs. (Solomon 2015)

The disadvantages of introducing a transport management system and GPS tracking in Phardiag can be
• Cost – The cost of introducing a TMS can be quite expensive and the purchase of GPS tracking units for air and sea shipments can be quite high
• Training – Personal will have to be trained on how to use the TMS and GPS
• Less human interaction – With more and more technology being used in transport and logistics the personal touch you receive with person to person interaction is lost.
• Job losses – Modern technology is replacing human requirements.
• Dependency – People are becoming more reliant on IT and have difficulty in doing a process manually.

Conclusion
In the above essay I think I have established the benefits a TMS and GPS can have on Phardiag. With the implementation of A TMS I have described how and where Phardiag will see the benefits’ and disadvantages of a TMS. I believe the advantages of having a TMS outweigh disadvantages of increasing the IT in Phardiag. I have also shown how the use of GPS with shock sensors built in can be of great use to Phardiag in tracking air and sea shipments. So I will be recommending to my boss the implementation of a TMS and the use of GPS with shock