Freight operations leaders continue to run individual lanes of transportation using spreadsheets and phone calls rather than leveraging a Transportation Management System (TMS). The freight operations leader views the 6-month + “project” to put a TMS in place of how they currently manage the transportation for all lanes as unnecessary. The leader has seen other “enterprisewide” software implementations that took 6 months to a year or more to “go live," where the new software runs in parallel to the old way of doing things until the new software is ready to take over. This fear is well-founded for most TMS implementations.
The fear of wasting 6 months is founded for most TMS deployments. However, this does not have to be the case. A modern cloud-native transportation management system (TMS) can be put into production in as little as a week or less to support a single lane or several lanes of freight. This stands in stark contrast to more traditional enterprise software solutions that typically require several quarters of planning and a six-month to one-year implementation effort to support the costs of a large implementation project. The difference between a week and a quarter is not in the capability of the software but in the design of the rollout.
Why "Enterprise TMS Rollout" became synonymous with "long and painful"
The data on this is fairly blunt. Standish Group's widely cited CHAOS research, tracking outcomes across roughly 50,000 enterprise technology projects, found that 66% ended in partial or total failure, not necessarily because the software didn't work, but because the implementation didn't deliver the operational value it was supposed to. For transportation management systems specifically, the pattern is well documented: enterprise rollouts regularly exceed $500,000 in cost and run past 18 months, with carrier onboarding and ERP integration, not the core software, usually the biggest driver of that timeline.
One might expect that problems causing big projects to stall time and again would be obvious and be detected by independent failure analyses time and again. But what turns up again and again are not so much the same problems, but rather a set of design issues with the rollout of a project that can be solved by rethinking it. This necessary discipline for a 10-week project not to turn into a 12-month project with associated costs can be implemented in a data-driven and step-by-step manner, as the authors of this excellent implementation guidance also explain.
The alternative: Start with one lane, not the whole network
The findings from much of this research would be easily fixed by treating the whole of the enterprise in the same way that you treat every other functional area of your freight function. Test a few lanes at one location with a couple of vendors and then see how it all works before you roll it out to the rest of your network.
This is the opposite of the way most TMSs are sold to the enterprise customer. Typically the sales teams sell the entire suite of functionality with complete integration of all trading partners. Then after the contract is signed, they find the real complexities of how things actually work. This includes undocumented rules and work-arounds, abnormal carrier workflows, and poor-quality master data, to name a few. A phase-by-phase approach proves the system on a single lane of freight and vendors at a single location. Once that single lane of freight and vendors at a single location proves value, then the system can be expanded to additional lanes of freight, additional locations, and additional trading partners to continue to drive increased value. This is an entirely different approach than typical TMS sales and will drive entirely different results.
What a 7-Day go-live actually involves
This is the model behind Libera Freight TMS's onboarding process, and it's worth being specific about what actually happens in that week, because "fast" only means something if the steps underneath it are real.
Configure. The platform is set up against the shipper's actual lanes, vendor list, and rate structures, not a generic template that gets customized later, but the shipper's real operating parameters from day one. This is also where the platform's approach to procurement comes in: deciding upfront which lanes should run on direct allocation with known vendors, which belong on contract bidding, and which need the flexibility of spot bidding, so the system isn't forcing every shipment through one workflow from the very first trip.
Connect. Integrations with the systems that already carry a shipper's data, like ERP, existing tracking tools, and vendor contact points, all get wired in for the specific lane going live, rather than every system across the entire network simultaneously. This is precisely the piece that stretches enterprise rollouts to 18 months when attempted network-wide on day one; scoping it to a single lane keeps the same technical work but removes the blast radius of getting it wrong.
Validate. Before the switch actually flips, the platform runs against real shipments to confirm tracking, compliance checks, and settlement calculations behave the way they should by catching data quality issues and workflow mismatches while the stakes are still contained to one lane, not the whole freight book.
Go live. The lane moves onto the platform for real, with the ops team running it end-to-end and building confidence in a system that's already proven itself against their actual freight, not a demo environment. From there, expanding to a second lane, then a region, then the full network is a repeatable next step, not a second high-risk project.
Speed doesn't have to mean cutting corners
The main argument against fast implementation is that you have to cut corners to go fast. A 7-day implementation of a simple tracking, compliance, and settlement tool can only be a trimmed-down version of a 6-month wide-gauge implementation. So in reality, only a single lane of real shipments would be tested for tracking and for compliance and settlement. Not a wide implementation across a network of locations and users in multiple regions of a large organization. That’s where all the extra months are that allow you to test out all the edge cases that you cannot possibly anticipate when you first read through the functional spec and start to design the implementation of a system.
Interestingly enough, the greatest risk to a TMS implementation does not come from implementing the software too quickly but rather from issues with carrier onboarding, untested integrations, and poor data migration. These problems would likely be exacerbated in a broad go-live versus a controlled and tested deployment in a single lane of business. A deployment of the software in modular phases of implementation reduces risk because each deployment can only go wrong in so many ways as opposed to allowing a multitude of problems to potentially arise and go unaddressed in a single, very broad go-live.
Two rollouts, one freight network
It's worth walking through what these two implementation models actually look like for the same shipper, because the difference compounds well past the go-live date itself.
The traditional rollout: A mid-size shipper signs with an enterprise TMS vendor to replace spreadsheet-based planning across its entire network. The project kicks off with a full requirements-gathering phase covering every lane, every ERP integration, and every carrier relationship at once. Three months in, the team discovers that half the "standard" carrier onboarding assumptions don't match how their actual vendors operate, and the integration scope grows to cover systems nobody flagged in the original plan. By month nine, the go-live date has already slipped twice, the ops team is still running the old manual process because nothing is live yet, and internal confidence in the project — and in supply chain software generally — is eroding along with the budget.
The phased rollout: The same shipper picks one high-volume lane to start. In the first week, the platform is configured against that lane's real vendors and rate structure, connected to the specific systems that lane actually touches, validated against real shipments moving on it, and switched live, with the ops team running real freight on the new logistics management system by day seven. Two weeks later, with the first lane running cleanly, a second lane and a second region get added using the same proven process. Six months into the phased approach, the shipper has more of its network live on the new platform than the traditional rollout had after nine months of "requirements gathering," because every week after the first was spent adding proven capacity, not still trying to reach the starting line.
Neither shipper had fundamentally different freight complexity. The difference was entirely in whether the implementation was designed to prove value early and compound it, or to gather requirements for the entire network before letting a single shipment touch the new system.
What this means for evaluating a TMS
If the implementation timeline is the thing holding a freight team back from moving off spreadsheets, the right question for any transportation management system vendor isn't "How fast can you configure the software?" It's "What does your first week actually look like, and how much of my real freight is running on it by the end of that week?" A vendor with a genuine phased onboarding model should be able to answer that concretely: which lane, which integrations, what gets validated, and what "live" means in practice, rather than pointing to a generic project plan with milestones six months out.
That's the real difference between a TMS that's built for a modern rollout and one that's built for a traditional enterprise software sales cycle. Libera's capacity and route planning engine and its approach to freight settlement and margin recovery are both designed to work the same way as the onboarding itself: start narrow, prove it on real freight, and expand once it's working, not once a year-long project plan finally reaches its final milestone.