ALC - Dispatch

AI is more than just hype—but current deployments of it cover the entire spectrum from life-changing to wildly unnecessary. On the one hand, two of the 2024 Nobel prize winners (the prizes for Physics and Chemistry) went to researchers who were leveraging AI to tackle complex problems in protein folding and artificial neural networks. On the other hand, you have McDonalds, who had to cancel their deployment of AI-assisted drive-thru ordering last year because the system was riddled with errors. In one instance, it wouldn’t stop adding chicken nuggets to a patron’s order and ultimately tried to saddle them with an order of more than 200 nuggets.

Campbell, CA — January 23, 2025 — DispatchTrack, the global leader in last-mile delivery solutions, is both SOC2 and HIPAA certified, meeting the highest security compliance standards for enterprise grade software. While the company has long been SOC2 certified, its new HIPAA certification goes a step further, assuring businesses that provide medications and medical supplies their deliveries comply with HIPAA privacy rules as required by law.

Campbell, CA — January 23, 2025 — DispatchTrack, the global leader in last mile delivery software, has created an integration with Podium that provides a unified solution combining DispatchTrack’s best-in-class delivery management tools with Podium’s AI-based customer engagement capabilities to delight customers from point of purchase to final delivery.

Campbell, CA – January 23, 2025 – For food distributors, deliveries that are fast, fresh, and accurate are mandatory. Meeting those standards for customers ranging from roadside food trucks to supermarkets is complicated by the daily hurdles of last-minute orders, special requests, traffic, and backhauls. Bailey Buick, Marketing Manager for Merit Foods, reported they tamed the chaos by moving the company from its manual routing roots to the advanced tech offered by DispatchTrack. The move not only solved many of the company’s distribution challenges, but Merit fully embraced its cutting edge AI-powered features to revolutionize internal processes, making Merit DispatchTrack’s Hero Customer for January.

Food recalls in 2024 were triple what they were in 2022. That number is eye-popping to begin with, but it’s even more startling when you realize that the average cost to the manufacturer for a food recall is upwards of $10 million. And that’s just in direct costs—recalls also have a negative impact on brand perception and can affect sales in the short and long term.

Your truck fleet is so much more than a collection of assets. It represents one of the most complex parts of your business, and your ability to ensure connectivity and visibility into how your fleet operates is a major success factor when it comes to logistics. That’s a huge part of the reason that more and more fleet managers are turning to modern technology to help overcome challenges. Specifically, they’re turning to cloud-based truck fleet software at double the rate of traditional on-prem deployments. 

Customer delivery expectations have never been higher—especially as economic headwinds make consumers and businesses alike more particular about where they spend their money. These skyrocketing expectations certainly aren’t new, but much the technology at your disposal for dealing with them is new, and getting better every year. So it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that many businesses are seeking to level up the delivery experience they offer to their customers, and technology is playing a big role in making that happen.

Are we on a path to see fully agentic AI taking over most human tasks and effectively transforming society (and the global supply chain along with it) before 2030? Or are we in the midst of something that’s more of an evolution than a revolution, with the latest in artificial intelligence slowly making everyone’s jobs easier and powering incremental improvements to the way the world of logistics works?

Is dispatch software just about scheduling and monitoring drivers in your fleet—or is there more to it? It depends who you ask. On the one hand, dispatch software can be as simple as a solution that saves you the effort of manually dispatching drivers by handling the process electronically. On the other hand, it can be an important cornerstone to your larger delivery and fulfillment efforts, connecting routing, scheduling, dispatching, visibility, customer experience, and more under one roof so that you can level up your fleet management capabilities.

Last year, more than 80% of retail executives said that reducing total cost per order was their top last mile priority. 3Pls and carriers showed similar priorities, and for the same (obvious) reason: last mile costs are notoriously high, and notoriously hard to control.