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Anyone who has worked with enterprise Transportation Management Systems like Blue Yonder TMS knows how powerful these platforms can be.
In large enterprise systems, it’s rarely the big features that hold teams back. More often, it’s the tiny cracks — the repeated workarounds, brittle processes, and silent inefficiencies that no one questions because “that’s how it’s always been.”
We hit one of those recently. It started, as these things often do, with something deceptively simple: updating a rate card in Blue Yonder TMS.
The Problem
Our client had a vast and frequently updated rate card, shaped by dynamic pricing strategies and market realities. But every change set off a chain reaction. What looked like a straightforward update actually required translating data into six different Blue Yonder templates — each with its own format, field rules, and nomenclature.
This approach significantly hampered productivity. Business users had to rely heavily on support teams or specialists familiar with Blue Yonder's intricate template structure. Business users — despite being closest to the rate logic — couldn’t own the process. Not only did this delay turnaround time for urgent pricing changes, but it also created bottlenecks that stalled broader transformation initiatives. Even a minor mistake — a missing code or misaligned field — could lead to upload errors, validation failures, or worse, misrated shipments downstream.
The result? Increased operational risk, and a complex maintenance overhead that contradicted the very idea of scalability.
The Solution
We developed an Access macro that takes the client’s original rate card — without any format changes — and auto-generates all six necessary templates.
This small innovation brought massive benefits:
- No Change Management Overhead: The client continued using their existing rate card format.
- Empowered Users: No need for tariff template expertise. Rate changes could now be managed internally with ease.
- Speed and Agility: Updates became faster, error-free, and scalable.
In essence, we made the customer independent of technical teams for future rate uploads, significantly reducing friction.
A Scalable Idea
A small layer that connects how people naturally work with how systems rigidly expect data. We’ve since realized this pattern is repeatable. With light reconfiguration, the same solution could apply across industries and clients. It could form the foundation for a more advanced tool — one where the user drops a file, and AI automatically maps and generates the appropriate upload templates.
What’s Next?
The next evolution lies in integrating Generative AI to understand metadata structures and automate the mapping process even further. Imagine a tool smart enough to interpret any customer rate card and output fully validated TMS upload files — within seconds.
This isn’t about macros or templates. It’s about shifting the mental model of enterprise transformation. It’s about making enterprise tech work for the user — not the other way around. And it’s just the beginning.