TMS (transport management system)
A TMS is where a transport order is created and carried all the way to the invoice: truck and driver assignment, route, status updates from the road, documents and freight settlement. In a forwarding company it also covers subcontracted carriers and loads bought on a freight exchange.
A day in a TMS starts with orders: some arrive by email, some from a freight exchange such as Trans.eu or TimoCom, some electronically from a regular customer. The dispatcher attaches a truck, a driver and a time to the order, and the system watches the things that get missed during a phone call: payload limits, ADR qualifications and how many hours the driver has left before a mandatory rest.
A TMS rarely stands alone. Telematics platforms (Webfleet, GBox, Frotcom) feed in vehicle positions and mileage, tachographs and driver-hours software feed payroll, and sales invoices and carrier costs go out to accounting. Polish companies usually buy an off-the-shelf system, for example interLAN SPEED or FireTMS, and build integrations around it.
The usual trap is a TMS that covers half the company. Forwarding runs in the system while the owned fleet stays on a spreadsheet, or the other way round: the trucks are in the TMS and loads bought on an exchange are settled by hand. A second version of the same problem is the order being keyed in again in the ERP, because nobody connected the two systems.
You can tell this is your topic when you learn whether a run made money only after the month is closed. The status of an order then has to be assembled from three places: the dispatcher's head, the driver's phone, and paperwork that has not come back from the road.