ALC - Dispatch

Expanding beyond the last mile with smarter warehouse scanning and pre-delivery site assessments.

Campbell, CA — February 27, 2025 – For Foothill Appliance office manager Sarah Barnes, keeping customers informed, scheduled and happy was time consuming and difficult. It required manually making phone calls at closing time each day to confirm the next day’s appointments and move delivery windows.

Routing vs. scheduling—which one is more important for building material distributors? In a perfect world, those processes would be one and the same. To get the most out of your capacity and ensure that you arrive on time at the job site, you need the kind of modern route optimization capabilities that empower 98% ETA accuracy and improved capacity usage.

Visibility for Food Distributors in 2025

Visibility into your delivery operations as a food distributor might sound simple, but in reality it’s anything but. Gaining clarity into what’s ready to be delivered, what’s been routed, what’s actually been loaded onto trucks, and what’s been delivered—to say nothing of visibility into product that’s already in motion—is a delicate, high-stakes balancing act.

Listeria. Salmonella. Lead. These are things you really don’t want in your kielbasa or your peanut butter, but with food recalls reaching a five year high last year distributors need to start thinking of these things as facts of life. The question isn’t if, but when—which means food and beverage distributors across the country really need to take a look at their organizations and ask how quickly and easily they’ll be able to enact their recall plan when the need arises.

To say that “the construction industry faces a shifting landscape” might be one of the understatements of the year. A few years ago it was covid and all the uncertainty that came with it. Then it was huge swings in the cost of raw material—particularly lumber. Supply chain disruptions. Geopolitics. The list keeps on going, and with the new tariffs that are being rolled out and seismic shifts in the way the infrastructure projects are going to be prioritized, the crystal ball for construction and building materials has never been murkier.

In 2023, last mile delivery accounted for 53% of total logistics costs. Not only is that number fairly staggering, it also represents an increase of 12 percentage points for 41% in 2018, and it has only gotten higher in 2024 and 2025. The cost pressures on last mile logistics operators aren’t even beginning to relent.

When Victor’s crew left your dock at 7:30, the day looked good. They had fresh coffee and a sheaf of delivery orders still faintly warm from the laser printer. The sun was shining and all was right. They delivered Ms. Sampson’s new maple dining table without incident. At the Wilkins house, the new credenza had to go up a flight of stairs, but they didn’t even bang the wall. On the way to drop off some new chairs, they made the turn onto Route 22 and bam—an overturned tractor trailer had scattered frozen hamburger all over the highway. The lanes behind them instantly closed up and they knew they were stuck. Unfortunately, dispatch didn’t know anything about the accident, and the office was swamped with customers looking for answers. So the crew waited. And so did their customers.

Does your dock look like a Chinese fire drill every morning with loaders scrambling to put packages on trucks, dispatchers sprinting to finish routes, and drivers mainlining coffee while they wait for delivery sheets?