Dispatching drivers and technicians by hand is woefully inefficient. Not only does manual dispatching mean that your team spends inordinate amounts of time printing and handing out route manifest to drivers, it also means that during the actual deliveries you’re likely to be flying blind with no way of knowing how a given route is progressing.
Updated 12/09/2025
Last mile software solutions don’t seem like they should be hard to define as a category—but when it comes to finding reliable rankings or reviews from any of the usual suspects (Capterra, G2, and the like), it turns out that you have to choose between fleet management or delivery routing solutions. Even in Gartner’s Last Mile Delivery Technology category, a huge number of the listings are just route planners.
New AI developments are coming down the pike so rapidly that numbers can and do go out of date quite quickly. But two basic facts seem to be pretty clear for the moment: more and more businesses across industries are adopting AI capabilities, and many of those same businesses are “bleeding capital” on AI investments that don’t pay off.
To paraphrase a recent excerpt of a new report on AI in logistics that appeared recently in Talking Logistics, “the future of AI in logistics is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”
In a recent webinar, one of DispatchTrack’s customers (Bryce Shively of IDI Distributors) described how a “personal vendetta against paperwork” drove him to digitize his proof of delivery. It’s easy to see why—paper proof of delivery slips are unreliable: they take up space, they jam up the printer, and they’re prone to getting lost. He estimated that he saved thousands of slips of paper every month by updating to electronic proof of delivery.
You’re looking for a route optimizer—and you don’t want one of the free, lightweight solutions that come up when you first Google the topic. After all, you’re running a decent number of trucks, and your routing needs are more complicated than plotting points on a map and dropping off parcels.
Satish Natarajan is CEO and Co-Founder of DispatchTrack, a global leader in last mile delivery technology and customer experience. This article originally appeared for the Forbes Technology Council here.
Achieving one more delivery per day may not sound like much—but if your drivers are making a dozen stops per day on average, then adding even a single successful delivery to the tally represents an increase of nearly 10%. That represents improved fleet utilization, faster time to delivery, happier customers, and, yes, lower costs.
When it comes to getting your last mile logistics processes to run smoothly, it’s hard to overstate the importance of a solid route planner app. Here, we’re not talking about the apps that you might use to plan a road trip, or navigation apps that live in delivery drivers’ pockets—we’re talking about delivery route planning software that can handle the complexities of logistics management without breaking a sweat.
Effective last mile logistics depends on two things coming together: planning and execution. Unfortunately, just because the planning process is sophisticated and powered by the latest technology, that’s no guarantee that the execution is going to follow seamlessly. It takes a combination of effective route planning and scheduling plus effective driver mobile apps to ensure that things go off without a hitch on the day of delivery.