Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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technology Full circle TMW Systems acquired, primed for growth T ransForum 2012, the annual user conference of TMW Systems and the trucking industry's largest technol- ogy gathering, was different than its past six years on one account – the size of the audience. The Orlando Peabody convention center ballroom was filled with 1,500 people during the keynote address by David Wangler, chief execu- tive officer. Perhaps more noteworthy was the fact that Wangler announced TMW was part of a global publicly traded company, Trimble Navigation. In August, Trimble purchased TMW for $335 million, which one can assume is many times the amount that two private equity firms quietly paid TMW founder Tom Weisz in 2005 to acquire the company. Since then, TMW has had the capital to make large acquisitions. The first was rival Maddocks Systems in 2006. After adding Maddocks' TruckMate to its TMWSuite line of enterprise resource planning systems, TMW acquired complementary products in TMT Soft- ware (fleet maintenance management) and IDSC (business intelligence and asset 'AN ENTIRE SPECTRUM': Acquisi- tions and TMW's own products have created a large market. ECONOMIES OF SCALE: The company can use its resources to improve processes and best practices. NEW PRODUCTS, BIG BACKING: TMW's management team plans to keep the momentum going. optimization) in 2007. TMW bought another rival, In- novative Computing Corp., in 2009. In 2011, it acquired Appian Logistics and gained a foothold in route planning and optimization schedul- ing. These acquisitions – added with TMW's organically grown products – have put the company in a position to serve "an entire spectrum of surface transportation business needs," Wangler said. TMW now provides end-to-end software systems with focused comple- mentary products to more than 2,300 different transportation companies. As everyone knows, acquisitions remain complex transactions long after the ink is dry. For its part, TMW has to sell and support multiple ERP software platforms with overlapping features. On the other hand, the company has been able to scale its resources to improve pro- cesses and best practices in development, implementation and support. "In a large organization, where more people are doing the same things, they are likely to get better at it," Wangler told CCJ. One example is the company's Vancouver office – the former Maddocks headquarters – developing a new less- than-truckload module for TMWSuite. Another byproduct of scale is deeper relationships and integration opportuni- ties with other technology suppliers to the trucking industry that share mutual customers across TMW's platforms. The company announced two new products that it says are the first phase in a new wave of integrated functionality to serve the complex needs of diversi- fied transportation providers, with or without fleet assets. The products lever- age sophisticated algorithms based on the core Appian product, DirectRoute, to consider consolidation and mode shift opportunities, lowest-cost carrier and carrier performance levels. TMW Transportation Modeler is designed for bid proposal and strategic network planning. TMW Mode Planner is used to plan customers' shipments into optimized loads automatically in order to produce lowest-cost transportation op- tions to be executed using TMWSuite. With these and other new products hitting the shelves and with Trimble's backing, TMW plans to keep the mo- mentum going. "We will run the business more or less autonomously, " Wangler said. "If we liked what we were doing before, we will continue to do that." David Wangler, chief executive officer of TMW Systems, spoke to 1,500 people during his keynote address at TransForum 2012. MAKING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS WORK FOR YOUR FLEET BY AARON HUFF AARON HUFF is Senior Editor of Commercial Carrier Journal. E-mail ahuff@ccjmagazine.com or call (801) 754-4296. COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2012 29