ALC - Dispatch

Whether you use NPS or not, you can’t deny the importance of customer experience for modern delivery businesses. We all know that customers place a huge premium on the service they receive, and their expectations are stringent—but what can companies actually do to ensure a great experience for each and every delivery?

As a recent piece in TechCrunch put it, “It’s not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change.” It’s hard to look around today without marveling at the way that technology is changing the world around us—at the same time, most logistics professionals are wondering how, exactly, these changes are going to impact the world of delivery and transportation.

Manual route planning is time-consuming, and it can be challenging enough for human planners to work with a few delivery vehicles and low order volumes. Add in complex routes, differing driver skill levels, and varying time window requests and manual planning can turn into chaos. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to rapidly and accurately calculate routes and meet promised delivery times without an efficient delivery route planner.

Food distributors know that getting a head of lettuce to the supermarket is complex.

Gone are the days when fleet management challenges could be dealt with by hand. Simply put, the operational challenges of running a fleet require the right tools; for many businesses, the right fleet dispatch software—something that can simplify routing and driver assignments—will be a key part of that toolkit.

To remain competitive—and survive—optimizing your delivery operations is no longer optional. With the right practices and technology, you can dramatically improve your truck routes, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Businesses that optimize their delivery routes can decrease time spent routing by 50% or more. They can grow their sales by 10%+ and achieve 98% ETA accuracy or better. But how do they do it? And how can you duplicate their success?

Last mile delivery is such a crucial part of the fulfillment that in the last few years it’s become more and more pervasive in common parlance. Your average consumer knows—or thinks they know—a lot more about the final leg of the delivery process than ever before, and the result is that expectations are higher than ever across.

If you’re a building supplies distributor, your world is changing rapidly. Two big trends—digitization and consolidation—are sweeping through the building supplies industry and sweeping away conventional practices. One of the areas under the most pressure is last mile delivery: getting the stuff you’ve sold onto a build site.

For last-mile delivery operators the difference between thriving and not even surviving can come down to a single decision: choosing the right route planner app. But which one is that? The market is flooded with more choices than the cereal aisle in Sam’s Club.

Raise your hand if the answer to the question posed in the title was “I don’t know” or some variation on “we’re not.” For most delivery businesses, routing shuttles from distribution centers to hubs, cross-docks, or transfer points isn’t a huge focus for last mile optimization. In fact, it’s not traditionally thought of as part of the last mile at all. The result is that this process often isn’t very efficient and isn’t closely coordinated with last mile operations.