Gartner defines last-mile delivery (LMD) technology solutions as specialized, customer-centric transportation management solutions that focus on managing the delivery process by which a consumer receives the products they order online. These solutions provide capabilities for routing deliveries to consumer homes, extending the delivery service capabilities offered to support options like ship from store, curbside and returns. LMD supports internal and external fleets, providing access to carrier networks for non-asset-based shippers. They also provide customer-engagement capabilities, providing a digitized experience to a shipper’s customer that allows end consumers to route, book, track and communicate changes to their shipments through a digital channel.
Gartner defines transportation management systems (TMSs) as software that supports multimodal planning and execution of the physical transport of goods across the supply chain. It allows a shipper to manage varying levels of transportation complexity across multiple transport modes and geographic regions. TMS solutions are utilized by shippers of differing sizes, operational complexity, industries and geographic locations.
Gartner defines a vehicle routing and scheduling (VRS) solution as an application that creates vehicle routes and schedules, considering multiple constraints and service requirements while minimizing transportation fleet costs and mileage. VRS creates repeatable scheduled static routes and/or dynamic routes based on inputs (orders, deliveries and pickups), rules and constraints for meeting objectives. Transportation delivery fleets include both full truckload and last mile. VRS solutions are capable of running both scenario modeling analysis to support fleet sizing, delivery window optimization, long-term planning and tactical optimization for execution of deliveries.