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CTSI Expands TMS Suite, Tapping 10-Terabytes of Freight Payment and Audit Data

Fifty-year-old freight bill audit and payment company CTSI (formerly known as Continental Traffic Service, Inc.), introduced new data-mining modules to its already robust e-CTMS transportation management system at the D/C Expo in Chicago today.

e-CTMS has many of the same features as other TMS systems, but its hosted, on demand suite, includes analytical and strategic decision making tools, is supported with a 10-terabyte warehouse of freight transactional data, equivalent in size to the printed collection of the Library of Congress.

CTSI believes strongly in the premise that the ability to manipulate and manage information is the key to measuring and managing transportation costs, thus their entry into the already crowded TMS vendor pool.

“We are convinced that our web-based application can provide a full supply chain solution, ranging from order management to information management, or any function in between, efficiently and reasonably,” said Ken Pehanick, Chief Marketing Officer of CTSI.

The Information Management Module mines both detailed and summarized data for reporting, analysis and visual depiction of transportation data. The Modeling & Benchmarking Module calculates cost increases or savings by adjusting variables to re-rate previous shipments.

Why is a traditional freight bill audit & payment service drifting into such swift and deep waters? “We were doing it already,” Pehanick explains. “We have been producing custom applications for our freight billing customers for years, so this is a purely organic shift into the TMS marketplace.”

With Sarbanes-Oxley requirements mandating a higher level of process control, transportation costs are no longer just a line item on an income statement. The broader value is in the aggregated data that is accumulated. Information extracted from freight bills offers new opportunities to reduce transportation costs while not sacrificing customer service performance.