Your factory digitised everything except transport

Manufacturers rely on ERP, CRM and accounting software daily. Yet many still manage freight with emails, spreadsheets and phone calls.

Try a thought experiment. Walk into your finance department tomorrow morning and tell them you’re replacing their accounting software with Excel spreadsheets. Tell them they’ll be doing reconciliations by hand, emailing invoices one by one, and tracking cash flow on paper. They’d think you’d lost your mind.

Now walk over to your logistics team. There’s a fair chance they’re already doing exactly that, just with freight instead of finances.

Across UK manufacturing, companies have spent the past two decades digitising almost every core function. Production planning runs through ERP. Sales pipelines live in CRM. Payroll, HR, quality management: all handled by purpose-built software that nobody would willingly give up. But when it comes to transport, a surprising number of manufacturers are still running on emails, phone calls, laminated rate cards and spreadsheets that would make their IT department wince.

Manufacturers fought ERP, CRM, and accounting software too

Every major business software category followed the same path: people fought it, then accepted it, then couldn’t work without it. Let’s look at some examples.

MRP worked. People didn’t want it to.

Even the production planning systems that manufacturers now take for granted had a rocky start. A 1998 paper on MRP implementation found that while benefits can be substantial, the “success rate of MRP implementation is small.” The problems, it concluded, were “basically behavioural, stemming from a natural resistance to change.” People had to unlearn old habits before they could adopt new ones, and most didn’t want to.

Staff destroyed inventory to prove ERP wouldn’t work

ERP ran into exactly the same wall. When Nestlé USA rolled out SAP, CIO reported what amounted to a rebellion. Nobody wanted to learn the new way of doing things. Help-desk calls hit 300 a day. Turnover among demand planners reached 77% because they were “loath or unable” to abandon their familiar spreadsheets for the new planning models. At FoxMeyer Drugs, a $5 billion pharmaceutical distributor, the resistance turned into outright sabotage. Warehouse workers feared the new automated system would make them redundant, so they damaged inventory and let orders go unfilled in protest. FoxMeyer went bankrupt.

Salespeople saw CRM as a surveillance tool

CRM followed the same script. CIO documented case after case of systems bought and then ignored. A large telecoms company rolled out CRM to over 1,000 sales reps at $10,000 per user; a year later, fewer than 100 were using it. At another firm, a 50-person sales force flat-out refused to use Siebel after a months-long implementation. The pattern was consistent: salespeople saw CRM as a surveillance tool, a way for management to monitor their every move rather than something that helped them sell. Many kept their contacts in personal spreadsheets and inboxes rather than enter data into a system they didn’t trust. Today, 91% of companies with more than 10 employees use CRM.

Accounting software was not “real” accounting

Even accounting software faced pushback. When Intuit launched QuickBooks in 1992, professional accountants dismissed it: no audit trail, no double-entry bookkeeping, non-compliant with traditional accounting standards. It wasn’t “real” accounting in their eyes. Intuit addressed every objection. By 2008, QuickBooks held 94.2% of the retail market for business accounting software.

94% of spreadsheets contain errors

The default defence is always the same: “Our current process works.” But does it?

Research by Ray Panko at the University of Hawaii found that 94% of spreadsheets audited in field studies contained errors. Users dramatically overestimate their own accuracy: asked to estimate the probability their spreadsheet contained an error, subjects averaged 18%. The actual rate was 86%.

These aren’t theoretical risks. In 2020, Public Health England lost 15,841 positive COVID test results because the legacy Excel format they used had a row limit of 65,536. The US Senate investigation into JP Morgan’s “London Whale” losses criticised “spreadsheet-based calculations” conducted with “insufficient controls”.

Now apply that to your freight

Now consider what a logistics manager at a mid-sized manufacturer deals with daily: hundreds of shipments across multiple carriers, each with different rate structures. Every quote requested by email is a chance for a wrong price. Every booking entered manually is duplicate data entry between your ERP and a carrier portal.

What a TMS actually does

A transport management system (TMS) does for freight what ERP did for production planning and CRM did for sales. It puts carrier rates, booking, tracking, documentation and cost management into one place, typically integrated with the ERP system already running the rest of the operation.

When your logistics team creates a shipment, instead of checking laminated rate cards, they see calculated prices from every contracted carrier instantly: real prices based on current rates and surcharges. Instead of emailing five carriers for quotes, the request goes out through one interface. Instead of logging into separate carrier portals, everything feeds through a single system. And instead of one person holding all the carrier relationships and pricing knowledge in their head, that information lives where anyone on the team can access it.

Screenshot of a shipment in Cargoson TMS, with all the user’s carriers and rates already precalculated, ready to book.

This is the approach behind Cargoson, a TMS built for manufacturers. It connects to your existing ERP as a plug-in and ingests your carriers’ rate cards in whatever format they send them. Your carriers don’t change anything. Your team doesn’t re-key anything.

Nefab, a global packaging manufacturer, implemented a TMS after managing multiple carrier portals became unworkable. Their warehouse manager reported spending “20–30% less time per day ordering transportation.” In some of their locations, booking has been delegated to warehouse workers because the system is simple enough – freeing logistics staff to focus on carrier negotiations instead of data entry.

The last department running on spreadsheets

Nobody would ask their finance department to manage the books in spreadsheets. Nobody would ask their sales team to track a pipeline on paper. Those arguments were settled years ago, after plenty of resistance along the way.

Transport logistics runs on the same things finance and sales do: recurring tasks, external partners, and real money behind every decision. Those teams got proper tools years ago. Transport is still on email and spreadsheets.