History
Our time in the trenches has shown that a successful supply chain strategy empowers the users that create and execute shipments to make cost-saving decisions on a daily basis. The key is universal access to a centralized information source in real time.
The MercuryGate solution represents the perfect marriage between new technology and the real-world dynamics. We believe in speed to market, speed to implement, and speed to integrate. That’s the MercuryGate way.
The Genesis of MercuryGate
The Beginning
In today’s market there is a dizzying array of choices available to supply chain professionals for transportation management solutions. Unfortunately many of these choices have been developed from a technology or purely academic perspective. They provide functions without a complete understanding of the real world challenges of the operations and processes they need to support. The result is overly complex installations with unnecessary multi-step methods and screens.
The designers of MercuryGate’s Transportation Management Suite (TMS) come from an operations background, starting their logistics careers working on warehouse floors. There they developed intimate, hands on understanding of the challenges presented daily to shipping practitioners. They were often "victims" of ill-advised, mandated technology decisions that decreased efficiency and increased cost. Typically, other "make-shift processes" were pieced together and benefits, if any, were never realized.
The complimentary backgrounds were brought together to create a transportation management solution for a large electronics company with extremely complex, high volume transportation needs. The resulting system was highly successful and started saving the company millions of dollars when implemented. The team continued to enhance the technology and add new functionality. This solution continues to be a cornerstone of the company’s distribution process.
Consulting Experience
Their expertise was then leveraged by consulting with other companies, domestic and international, many who were large corporate enterprises, about their transportation management needs and requirements. They developed leading edge alternatives that blended both technology and process into successful strategies and solutions. These engagements brought the team face to face with broad representation from all the involved parties faced with transportation management concerns, including prominent shippers, major carriers and complex logistics companies across many industries. This allowed them to gain more valuable experience by working closely with representatives from all areas of the logistics market, from executives to the shipping dock, further enhancing their general industry knowledge.
The leaders were frustrated when looking for real solutions that would actually work and solve the transportation problems faced in the market. Many of the new or existing solution providers approached transportation management from a shipper view or a carrier view but rarely both. Other solutions were "webafied" with an Internet front end was thrown on top of existing silo applications. "Cost Savings" meant automating existing inefficient processes. "Network Based" resulted in large, proprietary, inflexible, and costly batch applications. Underlying architecture supported one-to-one relationships or at best one-to-many. Missing was a strong many-to-many transportation management system that could serve as the backbone for a comprehensive value driven solution.
The Vision
A solution designed and delivered from the ground up for the Internet, to take advantage of the strengths of the World Wide Web, was seen to have enormous value. They knew that such an application would require a complete new design using the latest Internet-based technology, allowing companies of any size to benefit from its use. They recognized that a revolutionary new approach was needed to meet the ever-evolving needs of the transportation arena.
The MercuryGate Solution
MercuryGate’s Transportation Management System (TMS) is designed to be an operations level, mission-critical, planning and execution logistics solution. It automates an evolutionary path for revolutionizing the shipment management process. TMS provides the common data and message sharing offered by pure exchanges, but it does so based on the actual transaction versus today’s translation. Data is no longer duplicated across the enterprise, and data-mapping expense is reduced or eliminated. Users share a common execution platform with the capability to see the same data, at the same time, in the same format in a true operations level, collaborative environment. Proactive capabilities allow practitioners to focus on exceptions.
The designers of MercuryGate’s solution further understand that the cost of new solutions can be prohibitive. To that end, MercuryGate provides a lower cost and lower risk method of implementation. This allows logistics managers to see immediate results without the large upfront outlays usually associated with new technology solutions. MercuryGate’s executive management team recognizes that there will be an ongoing cost for new technology requirements as they continue to develop in the logistics arena. MercuryGate has built an open solution that will grow with the industry making it easier to take advantage of the exciting changes and opportunities. MercuryGate can help your business grow and prosper by letting you do more with less.
The Future
Technology alone cannot create a more efficient shipping process. Technology and the Internet are often seen as the savior of logistics problems. While simple data sharing in common formats is an important step forward, it does not necessarily change the inefficient processes that created it or the resulting downstream errors. MercuryGate understands that it takes the combination of new technology and new business processes to vastly improve the transportation management problems for companies in today’s complex logistics world.
MercuryGate offers a solution created from the ground up… a solution built and designed for the Internet. It is a multi-enterprise, operations level, Transportation Management System that delivers a real supply-chain solution to a very real logistics problem. Our commitment is to deliver a system to support your transportation management needs. Come take a look at us. Come see the future.
MercuryGate International… a solution for today and tomorrow!