Challenge
CMS Transport Systems is a transport management system provider, with more than 30 years of experience serving Australian customers. The company’s flagship product, Freight2020, is a fully integrated transport management system designed specifically for the Australian market.
Freight2020 provides users with a complete suite of modular solutions, enabling them to optimize and align a variety of specific business functions. With modules for operations management, financial accounting, fleet maintenance, workforce management and more, the system is designed to give management a clear view of what’s happening across operations at any given moment.
In today’s digital business landscape, customers’ needs are constantly changing and the tools and technology they use need to evolve alongside them. This is particularly the case in the transport and logistics space—the rise of new technology enables logistics providers to give their customers a real-time window into operations, promoting greater transparency and better service.
“The delivery of information is the real challenge our customers face right now—it’s the rapid response of getting that information back to not only their business, but their customers as well,” said Grant Walmsley, General Manager, CMS Transport Systems. “Our customers are not just moving freight now, they’re also the distributors of information. They need a real-time flow through of requests for freight processed in Freight2020 to be successful.”
Solution
As the market leading transport management system in Australia, CMS Transport Systems is always on the lookout for ways to bring even more value to Freight2020 users. While exploring different options, CMS Transport Systems worked with Progress to come up with a unique arrangement: CMS Transport Systems became the first Progress partner to white label Progress Services offerings.
Freight2020 was built on the Progress® OpenEdge® platform, which meant the Progress Services team was able to seamlessly deliver OpenEdge services such as Managed Database Administration (MDBA) to CMS Transport Systems customers. For CMS Transport Systems, this arrangement was a win-win solution: it enabled CMS Transport Systems to further improve the value proposition of Freight2020, while Progress delivered the actual services.
“Progress has enabled us to grow our business above the core Freight2020 product,” Grant said. “We’re delivering more value to our end users through additional extensions to the core Freight2020 application, and MDBA is one of those things. Analytics360™ is another one we’re introducing as well, which will give us a clear competitive advantage over our competition by embedding analytics within Freight2020.”
The new white labeled offerings were put to the test almost immediately. SRT Logistics, a Freight2020 customer, had been infected by a crypto virus that corrupted the company’s auxiliary data. Because SRT Logistics hosted its data off-site and only performed backups every four hours, the incident had a severe impact on the company’s operations.
To address the business continuity and disaster recovery issues made apparent by the crypto virus infection, SRT Logistics worked with Progress Services through CMS Transport Systems to deploy OpenEdge Replication Plus. This gave SRT Logistics near real-time, continuous data duplication that helps the company ensure the uptime of its databases and applications.
“Now with the infrastructure that we have in place, we firmly believe that we’ve covered as much as possible and we can protect the integrity of our customers’ stock,” said Leigh Cripps, General Manager of Finance and IT, SRT Logistics. “We’re delivering temperature-sensitive freight that often has short delivery windows, so we need to be able to get it to destinations as quickly as possible. With Freight2020 and the MDBA service, we have a solution that enables us to do just that.”
Results
Customer expectations for tools and technology are on the rise—if businesses encounter a challenge, there is often a solution for it on the marketplace. This puts the burden on solution providers to offer highly flexible systems and services that can be adapted to customers’ needs as they arise. If solution providers can’t satisfy these needs, their customers will simply find a different tool or technology that can.
The new partnership with Progress enables CMS Transport Systems to stay ahead of the market by implementing new services and offerings for Freight2020 customers. Freight2020 users love the system, and the new white labeled service offerings from Progress Services enables customers to get even more out of their Freight2020 investment.
“Our customers rely on Freight2020 being available all the time, it becomes the lifeblood of their business,” Grant said. “Without the software running, their businesses may grind to a halt—that’s how much they rely on the software and the timely delivery of information.”
“When customers invest in Freight2020 and CMS, they’re not investing in the now, they’re investing in the future,” he added. “Progress is helping evolve Freight2020 alongside the needs of our customers by giving us clear guidance and guidelines on what we need to utilize or build into our application, which enables us to maximize the value we can deliver to our users.”
About CMS
CMS Transport Systems developed its first fully integrated transport management system for one of Australia’s largest transport and logistics groups back in 1978. We are one of the most experienced transport software development companies in the whole world, and 100% of our development and support work is undertaken by our own people, right here in Australia.
About SRT Logistics
SRT Logistics is a refrigerated transport and dry grocery logistics provider servicing wholesale and retail food industries. Based in Tasmania, this transport company is family owned and operated providing a complete suite of freight services throughout Tasmania and Victoria including shipping across Bass Strait.