TMS Application & Configuration Manager (CarLo) · emagine 180031

A transport management system is only as good as its configuration. Here is one you can break in the next 60 seconds.

This page runs a small TMS in your browser: one distribution centre, three countries, fourteen orders. Every lever below is named after the things the role owns — business rules, planning parameters, master data, workflows, country templates — and every change you make is re-planned live and written up as a change request. Built by Greg Nowak as a working answer to “why you?”.

Open the cockpit ↓
No backend, no login, no tracking — the planner, the EDI feed and the change log are all simulated client-side. The posting this answers.
Interactive

The configuration cockpit

Tonight’s outbound plan from the Aarhus DC. Change the configuration on the right and watch the network, the KPIs, the EDI traffic and the change log react. Try switching consolidation off, pulling the cut-off back to 14:00, or removing the dangerous-goods workflow — then decide which of those you’d approve in production.

Tours tonight
Planned km
Freight cost €
Fleet utilisation
Same-day planned
Exceptions
Network · Aarhus DC → DK / SE / DE
    Change requests — writes itself
      Interface monitor · EDI / API
        Configuration — what this role owns
        Business rules
        Planning parameters
        16:00
        3
        Master data
        Workflows
        Templates · group vs local
        The role, mapped

        Everything you just touched is in the job description

        The posting’s own words, and where you met each of them in the cockpit above.

        Configuration ownership

        “…workflows, business rules, planning parameters, master data, and templates.”

        The entire right-hand panel. Each control is one of those five objects, and each carries a consequence you could see within a second of flipping it.

        Change requests & enhancements

        “…handle change requests, enhancements, and provide operational support.”

        Every change you made was logged as a CR and walked through draft → tested → deployed. Config without that trail is how a TMS becomes unmaintainable.

        Group template vs. local rules

        “…balancing standard processes with local requirements” in “multi-country business applications.”

        The DE and SE variants. The craft is knowing which local exceptions are law (keep them) and which are habit (retire them into the group template).

        Vendor management

        “…serves as a primary contact for Soloplan.”

        Being the vendor’s counterpart means arriving with a reproduced case, config ruled out, and a ticket the vendor can act on — a discipline I bring from years of sitting between operations and logistics-system vendors.

        Interfaces & data structures

        “Experience with SQL, EDI/API integrations, or transport-related data structures is an advantage.”

        The interface monitor above speaks IFTMIN and IFTSTA for a reason. Orders in, statuses out, invoices matched against tariff master data — that flow is the bloodstream of any TMS.

        Operational support

        “…in collaboration with the IT Service Owner, Service Desk, and IT Operations.”

        The exceptions counter is the support queue. When you removed the ADR workflow, orders didn’t error — they silently stopped moving. Knowing that difference is the job.

        Straight answer

        “Do you know CarLo?” — Not yet. Here’s why that’s the smaller half.

        I have configured and implemented logistics systems — the workflows, business rules, planning parameters and master data underneath them — and I’ve lived with my own configuration running in production. I have not worked in CarLo, and I’d rather say so on page one than in week two.

        What this role is buying is mostly product-independent: the judgment to tell a configuration fix from a product defect, the discipline to push every change through a tested CR instead of a Friday hotfix, and the diplomacy to hold one group template together across countries that each believe they are the exception. That is what this page demonstrates — built without a single CarLo screen to copy from, from understanding what a TMS has to do.

        The CarLo-specific layer — its screens, its object model, its quirks — is what Soloplan’s documentation, a TEST environment and a vendor hotline are for. Product knowledge is a fast download for someone who already speaks TMS; configuration judgment is not.

        If you hand me the keys

        The first 30 days, concretely

        Read the configuration

        Inventory workflows, rules, planning parameters and templates as they actually are in CarLo — not as the wiki remembers them. Output: a config map with owners.

        Map the variants

        Group template vs. every country deviation, each tagged “law”, “contract” or “habit”. The third pile is where simplification lives.

        Take over the CR queue

        Triage open change requests, set one intake path, and get the test-before-deploy loop running so the change log looks like the one above.

        Meet Soloplan properly

        Standing vendor cadence, a clean escalation path, and the first defect-vs-config calls made together — so the partnership starts on evidence, not tickets.