The Delivery Orchestration Platform Buyer’s Guide

When leading retailers and distributors learn how quickly the delivery orchestration software market is growing, they tend to have one of two reactions.

Either they’ve seen the trend towards delivery orchestration gestating and they’re already thinking about how it applies to their own logistics ops—or they’re wondering what happened to good old fashioned route optimization. 

We’re here to tell you that the logistics game has changed, and delivery orchestration is now a crucial component to effective operations. In this post, we’ll go over the importance of delivery orchestration, how to tell if you need to upgrade your delivery software, and what to look for in delivery orchestration solutions. 

Of course, if you’re reading this, you may already know that you need to upgrade your logistics software capabilities. If you’re in that boat, contact our team today for a discussion tailored to your business challenges.

Why should you take our word for it? Because over the last 16+ years, our solution has delivered real results for our customers:

• We helped Morris Furniture—which operates 13 Ashley Furniture locations—decrease unplanned returns by 37% and boost their NPS by nearly 30 points. 
• We enabled Gunton Corp DBA Pella Windows to achieve 85% on-time rates within a 30-minute window while decreasing time spent routing by 50%.
• We helped Pulse Final Mile (a 3PL for Samsung) boost their NPS from 60 to 85. 

That’s the power of going with a category leader in delivery orchestration software. 

What Is Delivery Orchestration, and Why Does It Matter to Retailers and Distributors?

What do we actually mean when we talk about delivery orchestration? How is it different from what distributors have been doing for decades?

We do a deeper dive into that topic here, but the short version is that delivery orchestration is a connected, proactive, and efficient approach to managing delivery and logistics. It takes a process that’s often fragmented and reactive and turns it into 

With a delivery orchestration approach, you’re not just routing stops—you’re managing the entire lifecycle of an order from scheduling and routing to customer experience, execution, and documentation. Each of these pieces is interconnected, and when you treat them that way you can gain new efficiencies and improve your visibility into downstream impacts of supply chain decisions. 

The result is that you’re able to take real control of your logistics and delivery operations, ultimately leading to lower costs, greater visibility, and improved customer satisfaction.  

How to Tell If You Need to Upgrade Your Delivery Orchestration Capabilities

Do You Have the Right Visibility? 

Visibility can feel like a nebulous concept, but there’s a very clear logistics yardstick you can use: how quickly can you get the information you need? 

Data goes out of date quickly when we’re talking about deliveries, so if you don’t have real-time visibility into order, route, and delivery statuses, you don’t have visibility at all. 

This concept goes deeper than the level of individual deliveries:

• Can you quickly see which trucks and drivers and contractors are available for which jobs when you’re planning? Can you quickly and easily see which ones are right for the job (e.g. for jobs that have special skill or equipment requirements associated with them).
• Can you see how much each delivery is costing you during the planning stage? Does that change dynamically as you adjust your plans> What about after the fact? 
• Do you have visibility into customer experience and delivery documentation? When a customer support person picks up the phone to resolve a customer issue, how much time do they have to spend hunting for context? 
• Can you manage the handoff between the first and middle miles and the last mile seamlessly? When an item has been received and is ready to schedule, how quickly are you able to get it routed onto a truck?

The answers to these questions can be telling. If any of them gave you pause, you might not have strategic visibility into your delivery ops. 

Do You Have the Right Customer Experience?

The game has changed significantly on the customer experience front in the past few years. Whether you’re delivering to an end consumer or a busy construction site, you need to be able to offer an elevated experience across the entire delivery journey. 

Here are the elements that make a great customer delivery experience:

• Consistent on-time-in-full delivery performance 
• Proactive communications around delivery schedule and updates
• Instant answers to customer questions like “where’s my order?”
• Seamless resolution of issues and exceptions—both before the delivery and while on-site
• Live delivery tracking from the comfort of the customer’s own device
• Drivers and technicians getting the job done quickly, courteously, and accurately
• Clear delivery documentation after the fact

Essentially, the customer needs to feel like you’re going to keep your delivery promise and that communication will be a two-way street if something comes up. 

Does your existing customer experience enable you to make that happen? Just as importantly: does it enable you to do that at scale in a reliable way? 

Do You Have Operational Efficiency?

One of the most common complaints that we hear in delivery management and orchestration is that logistics teams don’t know how much their deliveries are costing them per stop, per route, and per mile. At a moment where fuel costs are top of mind for everyone who has even a single truck, this lack of cost visibility simply isn’t sustainable. 

Of course, there are plenty of businesses where those numbers would be eye-watering if they were easily accessible. Why? Because operational efficiency in delivery isn’t the default. 

Most businesses are driving more miles per stop than they need to be. They’re spending more time on the phone than necessary, dealing with more unplanned returns and damage than they should be, and spending hours poring over paperwork and other processes that could be automated.

Here are some relevant industry benchmarks for these areas:

• Industry average operating cost per mile is $0.75
  • This can go down to $0.50 with a category-leading delivery orchestration solution. 
• Industry average cost of redelivery is around $25 (cost of redelivery + discounts)
  • The right software solution can decrease the total number of redeliveries by 30% or greater from the industry baseline. 
• Industry average on-time rate is between 80 and 90%.
  • DispatchTrack customer achieve 98% on-time delivery rates
• Industry average for deliveries per route per day is around 10
  • Businesses with manual routing often find that number hard to achieve, whereas delivery orchestration platforms enable you to fit even more on each route. 

If you’re below the mark on any of these, smarter delivery orchestration can have a huge impact.

Checklist: What to Look for in a Delivery Orchestration Platform

Let’s say you’ve gone through the questions above, and you’ve determined that you could be delighting your customers, improving visibility, and controlling logistics costs with better delivery orchestration. 

What’s the next step? 

Searching for the right technology vendor. 

Everyone’s operational needs are different, and the challenges that your business faces in maintaining delivery efficiency and visibility are going to be specific to your business case. 

That said, this checklist is a great place to start:

• Deep delivery orchestration experience: Nothing against startups, but you’re not solving a technology problem—you’re solving a delivery problem, and you need someone steeped in the business logics and processes that actually define the complexity of your business case.
• Logistics native AI capabilities: The deep logistics experience we mentioned above comes into play again when vendors can use real-life data to train AI- and machine learning-powered functionality that elevates your team’s work. 
• A strong change management track record: This is a big investment, so you want to make sure you’re partnering with someone who can get you up and running quickly and (relatively) painlessly. 
• Clear plans for fighting delivery uncertainty: Simply put, your provider should be able to point to clear functionality that decreases the greatest hidden cost in delivery management: uncertainty. 
• Seamless integration capabilities across your ecosystem: It’s all well and good to say that a system is comprehensive or all-in-one, but the reality is that your software will have to be integrated into your larger tech stack—and some solutions have a meaningful advantage on that. 
• Real-world results: You want to partner with a delivery orchestration platform that can point to referenceable customers who have seen reduced costs, improved visibility, happier customers, greater compliance, and reduced manual effort. 

In terms of specific features, here are a few of the things you should look for:

• AI-powered route optimization with predictive delivery time calculations
• Customer self-scheduling scheduling and instant answers to WISMO questions
• Expert-level chat support around the clock with multi-agent AI
• Gain real-time delivery intelligence from the first mile to the last—including visibility into both owned fleets and 3PLs
• Predictive models for business intelligence
• Proof of delivery with photo blur and item detection
• Driver AI that offers contextual intelligence for each stop on the driver’s route
• Service compliance and execution capabilities to improve delivery and service performance—including real-time validation and intervention

Conclusion: Get in Touch with DispatchTrack—The Category Leader in Delivery Orchestration

One of the easiest ways to visualize the impact of the right delivery orchestration platform—and to tell the difference between a run-of-the-mill solution and truly differentiated one—is to see one in action. 

DispatchTrack’s software solution is designed to empower smarter, more predictable, and more profitable deliveries. We make that happen with end-to-end orchestration capabilities that empower smarter planning, routing, dispatching, tracking, customer experience, delivery execution/documentation, and reporting—powered by logistics-native AI solutions trained on 16+ years of real-world data. 

That’s why we’re the category leader in delivery orchestration software. 

Our customers see improved efficiency, higher CSAT scores, and greater visibility across the board. Reach out to our team today to see for yourself how DispatchTrack can turn your logistics from a reactive cost center to a fully-orchestrated driver for growth. Book a demo now. 

Interested in learning more about our AI-powered customer experience? Read the white paper.