5 ways to get fired as a transportation manager

When it comes to running a successful transportation business, you know the drill — get things on the road, and deliver them on time! And there’s plenty of articles out there on how to achieve success in the field, but for some of you illustrious transportation managers out there striving for ever-higher levels of failure in your professional life, we have come up with just the thing. Forget about hitting targets or driving productivity and buckle up — here are five surefire ways to put your career in transportation management into reverse gear and crash straight through any prospect of continuing success!

1. Ignore Efficiency

One of the fastest ways to wreck your career is to ignore efficiency entirely. For example, a Transportation Management System (TMS) provides transportation managers with advanced tools to optimize their supply chain, including real-time data on carrier performance, delivery times, and costs, and allows them to use the system to find backhauls for their drivers or find the most efficient routes for deliveries. By improving efficiency, transportation managers can meet their performance targets and avoid poor performance reviews. By automating manual tasks and providing real-time insights, A TMS can help transportation managers make informed decisions to improve efficiency and cost savings. 

Any worker who is striving for success should never discount efficiency because it is a critical factor in the success of any business, and even more so in transportation management. Improved efficiency can lead to cost savings, increased productivity, and better customer service, which can ultimately lead to increased profitability. In the transportation industry, efficiency can be achieved through route optimization, load planning, order consolidation, optimization of employee resources, and real-time tracking of shipments and driver performance, all of which can be provided by a Transportation Management System (TMS). So by simply not utilizing a TMS in order to prioritize efficiency, you’re going to have a serious challenge in meeting targets, receiving good performance reviews, or remaining competitive in an evolving market, which will put your well on your way to getting your two weeks' notice.

2. Limit Visibility

Being able to see clearly is just as important to the ones managing the trucks on the road as it is for the ones driving them — reduce their visibility enough and both are likely to crash. Powerful visibility tools like Shipwell's TMS provides transportation managers with full visibility native within the TMS platform, including real-time tracking of shipments, driver performance, and other key metrics. For example, they can track shipments from origin to destination, automatically update ETAs based on traffic and weather conditions, and receive alerts when issues arise. By staying on top of critical updates and performance metrics, transportation managers can ensure they can respond to issues early and ensure customer satisfaction. 

It stands to reason that anyone looking to lose their job as quickly as possible would do well to close their eyes to this kind of information, otherwise they may be influenced to make use of it and accidentally improve performance. As well, you can expect your managers to want you to provide such transparency in how well your operations are performing.

3. Reduce Communication

Everyone always says that the key to a good relationship is communication, and the same stands for managing a transportation network management job. So if you’re looking to get canned, communicating less is the path to take.To accomplish a no communication approach, transportation managers will want to stay away from any kind of centralized platform that makes smooth communication between themselves, the drivers, and your customers difficult to avoid  — especially ones that allow for fully remote communication and management of your TMS. The goal here is to increase the risk of miscommunications and misunderstanding, not reduce it.  

Centralized communication platforms like Shipwell's TMS allow transportation managers to quickly share information, resolve issues, and stay on top of critical updates in real-time, making difficult to avoid the poor communication that inevitably leads to the errors, misunderstandings, and/or partner frustrations that someone looking to lose their job is seeking. For example, a transportation manager can use the system to send real-time updates to customers about their shipments or communicate directly with drivers about delivery instructions.  By ensuring that you lack the ability to leverage capabilities like this, you can be well-situated to maintain the level of miscommunication and misunderstanding needed to delay deliveries, increase costs, or damage customer relationships so that you can get back to doing what you love — getting fired. 

4. Choose the Wrong TMS

Sometimes upper management might conspire against you and your goal of losing your job and you’ll be forced to implement a TMS to make your life “easier”. To that the answer is simple — choose one that helps as little as possible. Some, like  Shipwell's TMS, are designed to be easy to use, scalable, and customizable, with features that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of your business. But that won’t help you get fired. Choose one that lacks a modern cloud-based architecture or that is too hard to use effectively, and you will find your manager shows you accountable for the extra effort and frustration. To lose your job, stay pick an older TMS and stay behind the curve – lleap directly into the pitfalls that come with their selection. 

To ensure you end up with a TMS that will drive you forward on your goal of unemployment, don’t consider the factors that should go into your decision, such as:

• Functionality: Transportation managers should look for a TMS vendor with functionality that does not align with their business needs. That means avoiding tools like load optimization, shipment tracking, carrier management, and compliance monitoring.
• Ease of use: Usability is a critical factor in the success of a TMS, which is why top-performing transportation managers ensure they select a TMS vendor that provides a user-friendly system that is easy to learn, efficient to use, accurate, well-supported, and customizable. And as someone looking to lose their job, this is what you want to avoid. If a TMS is difficult to use, users may hesitate to adopt it. This can lead to a lack of buy-in from key stakeholders, such as transportation managers, drivers, and customers. Plus, if users are not using the system consistently, the company may not be able to fully realize the benefits of the TMS, such as increased efficiency and reduced costs, and you can be out the door that much sooner. 
• Scalability: Look for a TMS vendor that provides the most rigid, inflexible solution as possible. That way it’s impossible for it to scale as business grows. This can include avoiding features like the ability to add or remove users, upgrade to more advanced features, or integrate with other systems.
• Support and training: You don’t want others to feel confident using the platform, so if a vendor is offering strong support and training on their system, run the other way. Telltale signs that a vendor is going to undermine your efforts in this way can include features like 24/7 customer support, online training resources, and dedicated account managers.
• Cost: Some TMS vendors like Shipwell provide cost-effective solutions that are able to fit within your budget.  This can include features like transparent pricing, flexible payment options, and the ability to customize features to fit specific needs. Don’t even consider options like this unless you want to keep your job.
• Reputation and reviews: When looking for a TMS vendor, you want to avoid looking for any with a strong reputation and positive reviews from other customers — and especially ignore a TMS that is not highlighted in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

5. DELAY DELAY DELAY

Delaying a TMS purchase could be problematic for several reasons, so be sure to work that fact to your advantage when on your quest for the elusive pink slip. First, it can lead to increased costs associated with inefficient transportation operations. Without a TMS system, businesses may rely on manual processes to manage transportation operations, such as phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets. These manual processes are time-consuming, and error-prone, and may result in inefficiencies, delays, and increased costs. Delaying the purchase of a TMS system could prolong the use of these manual processes, resulting in increased costs for the business.

Second, delaying a TMS purchase can lead to missed opportunities to optimize transportation operations. A TMS system can help businesses optimize operations, such as route planning, load consolidation, carrier selection, and freight cost management. By delaying the purchase of a TMS system, businesses may miss out on the benefits of these optimizations, resulting in increased transportation costs and reduced efficiency.

Third, delaying a TMS purchase can result in a lack of visibility into critical areas of the business, such as shipment tracking and inventory management. A TMS system can provide real-time visibility into these areas, helping businesses make informed decisions about inventory levels, order fulfillment, and delivery times. Without a TMS system, businesses may lack this critical visibility, leading to delayed shipments, customer complaints, and lost business.

Finally, delaying a TMS purchase can impact a business's ability to meet customer expectations. In today's e-commerce-driven marketplace, customers expect fast and reliable delivery of their orders. Delaying the purchase of a TMS system may result in missed delivery deadlines, impacting customer satisfaction and leading to lost business.

And if you’re looking to lose your job as a transportation manager, delaying anything that would make a huge positive impact should be music to your ears. 

Increasing supply chain visibility, efficiency, cost savings, and resilience are top of mind for companies across all regions of the world, and it's clearer than ever that the supply chains of the future will need to be agile, flexible, resilient, and digitally networked to mitigate the effects of supply chain disruptions. 

So it makes sense for many to look at investment in a TMS. Yet while TMS solutions have been around for years, many still struggle when it comes to locking down exactly how to accurately measure their ROI — especially as the market becomes increasingly complex.

In this guide, we'll outline the top areas of opportunity and how much ROI businesses typically see, such as up to:

To discover what kind of ROI your own business can expect, download the guide now.

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Our team of experts has spent years determining how to make a supply chain run as smoothly and efficiently as possible, so whether you’re still in need of advice on how to avoid that or actually want to be able to do your job better, reach out to them today.