There’s no getting around the fact that shipping is expensive. It’s not just fuel cost and driver pay that make it difficult to keep shipping costs down, it’s everything from the complexity of managing so many moving parts to the sheer volume of manual effort that can go into things like communicating with end customers, tracking shipments, and documenting deliveries. Optimization is increasingly non-negotiable.
What does real delivery visibility look like? It’s not just tracking a truck on a map via GPS. And it’s not just gathering data and storing it in the depths of a handful of disparate systems.
Dispatching is the sort of thing that might seem simple from the outside—just get the right goods onto the right trucks and send them to the right customers. But anyone who works in logistics can tell you complicated things get, especially when you’re managing deliveries at scale. Thankfully, there’s been a profusion of dispatch technology options in the last few years.
Nearly 2/3rds of logistics businesses have limited visibility into their supply chains, which means that when it comes time to make a critical decision—or even a small one—about how to manage delivery logistics, nearly 2/3rds of organizations are stuck relying on guesswork. When you don’t have the data at your fingertips to make informed decisions, you spend a lot of time essentially rolling the dice.
Productivity. Efficiency. Customer satisfaction. For success in modern delivery management, you really need all three—which means that getting your routing and scheduling capabilities into the absolute best possible shape is non-negotiable. No matter how well you execute on them, there’s no way to turn inefficient route schedules into efficient last mile delivery runs. Simply put, the right routing and scheduling software is a must.
Logistics visibility has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent years, but it’s also one that can be difficult to define. Oftentimes, it feels like visibility is synonymous with GPS tracking and the ability to see a truck or van moving on a map. But as anyone who’s ever waited an hour and a half past the original ETA for a food delivery order can tell you, just being able to see that something is running massively late with no explanation doesn’t actually offer that much value.
Search for software for delivery companies and you’ll find a lot of businesses touting their delivery software and a handful of listicles ranking the different options. This is undoubtedly helpful for businesses trying to find ways to optimize their deliveries—but there’s only so much research you can do into potential solutions if you don’t have a strong sense of what separates the “good enough” delivery software platforms from the cream of the crop.
Delivery customers want that personal touch—but they also want everything to go off without a hitch. Any time they have to pick up the phone and call your team, that’s a loss with the potential to impact your NPS score and tamp down repeat business. For years, surveys have consistently shown the importance of reliable and connected customer delivery experience, and it’s only going to become more important going forward.
Even distributors who make the same deliveries to the same customers every week know that no two delivery runs are really the same—order volumes change, new customers enter the mix, and your transportation network grows and evolves. When your delivery plans don’t evolve to keep up with those changes week in and week out, your route efficiency starts to erode, and it gets harder and harder to turn a profit and keep your customers happy.
