If you’re a building materials logistics lead, you know how much depends on the quality of your scheduling. When you’re scheduling and routing mostly by hand and over the phone, every day can feel like a logic puzzle—and matching up the right drivers and assets to the right orders based on your customers’ needs and their existing work schedules is a lot more taxing than your average sudoku.
Not only do your schedules have to tick all of the boxes for your customers, they also have to be feasible. There’s no value in having a schedule that your drivers can’t execute on. It’s a lot to juggle, and the complexity of it all makes coordinating building materials delivery a huge pain point for many companies.
But as building supplies logistics technology evolves, more and more distributors are finding a way around this age-old problem.
Why Is Coordinating Building Materials Delivery Such a Challenge?
Any logistics process that requires a phone call simply isn’t going to scale. Any given team member can only take them one at a time, and getting the information required to actually match up your availability with the availability of the customer might require you to dig through paperwork, put the customer on hold, and possibly call them back.
At that point, there’s a risk that they don’t answer—which means your plans are stuck in limbo while you make another attempt to reach your point of contact. It’s a recipe for slow, reactive planning. Not only does this put your teams in a position where they can’t put together schedules quickly or easily, it also means that the schedules themselves are doomed to be inefficient. In all likelihood, your driver and technicians will wind up criss-crossing their territories to hit time windows that weren’t set up to minimize miles or maximize utilizations.
To put it simply, coordinating building materials delivery is such a challenge because most operators lack the tools to streamline the process. Without automated, digitized capabilities for coordinating, routing, and scheduling, you’re effectively leaving money on the table.
How Can Building Suppliers Delivery Operators Streamline Coordination?
To streamline the process of coordinating with customers, the first thing you need to do is digitize across the board. Anywhere that you’re still relying on manual processes is a potential area for improvement. Why? Because digital processes fundamentally provide better visibility, transparency, and connectivity—all of which are critical for streamlining and optimizing your processes.
What does this look like in practice? First, you’ll need to get your driver, vehicle, and customer data into a centralized system of some kind. Ideally, this would be a last mile delivery solution like DispatchTrack. From there, you can start leveraging your solution as a unified hub for managing deliveries from end to end. You can digitally dispatch drivers, collect electronic proof of delivery via mobile device, and track deliveries in real time from the comfort of your computer.
Crucially, you can also communicate with customers via text and email. This is a crucial step in getting your teams off the phone and leveling up your scheduling and coordination.
Digitization also puts you in a position to automate—which is where the value really starts to accrue. Not only can you automate the process of confirming deliveries with customers via text and email, you can also automate the routing and scheduling process.
This requires a powerful routing and scheduling platform, but the results can be transformative. You input your capacity parameters, customer prioritization, driver/technician requirements and availability, differences in service time for different delivery types, etc. and the platform generates efficient, capacity-aware schedules in minutes. From there, your team can improve those routes and schedules as needed to fit in with your exact operational needs and your customers’ requirements.
One of the keys here is to leverage a system that can generate precise, accurate delivery and service ETAs. When you’re making a promise to your customer about when you’ll get to the job site, you want to empower your drivers to keep that promise every time. This means finding a solution that can accurately predict differences in drive time and service time based on different factors.
Put this all together, and you’re looking at a streamlined, efficient process that makes life easier for your dispatchers, your drivers, and—most importantly—your customers.
Benefits of Improved Delivery Coordination
The next question once you’ve digitized and automated as much of the process as possible is: how does this translate into measurable benefits?
Here are just a few of the ways:
- Happier customers: If coordination is annoying for your team, it’s just as annoying for your customers. The more you can do to speed the process up and take the onus off of the customer, the more you can improve the overall customer experience you offer. This encourages repeat business and strengthens your brand—while at the same time reducing costly missed and failed deliveries (which can result from late arrivals and poor coordination).
- Reduced fuel costs and driver labor: When your schedules and routes are more efficient, your drivers don’t have to spend as long on the road per stop. They drive fewer miles per stop as well. The result is direct cost savings on a per-stop level, not to mention the fact that you can get more out of your existing delivery capacity.
- Significantly reduced phone time: It’s not just that coordinating orders via phone requires a huge number of (costly) person-hours—it’s also taking your team away from more strategic tasks where they could add more value. By taking the phone-heavy process off of your dispatchers’ desks, you can give them time to focus on more strategic tasks. For instance, this could free up staff to actively manage delivery exceptions in real time to preserve deliveries that may be at risk.
- Improved driver performance: When your routes and schedules are actually built to execute, drivers spend less of their days running late or scrambling to meet impossible expectations. This puts more drivers in a position to succeed, which has the double benefit of improving your successful delivery metrics while boosting driver morale and making driver retention that much easier.
Conclusion: The Right Tools for the Job Are Crucial for Coordinating Building Materials Delivery
If there’s one key takeaway from this article, it’s that you can’t streamline jobsite coordination without the right routing and scheduling tools. Here, having a logistics technology platform that can tackle the last mile from end to end is crucial.
A solution like DispatchTrack, which can optimize routes and schedules while automating customer communication and delivery tracking, can help construction supplies delivery operators reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. By digitizing and automating as much of the logistics journey as possible, intelligent last mile logistics software saves time, boosts efficiency, improves delivery documentation, and ultimately helps keep the customer happy even when last mile changes crop up.
When it comes to investing in technology for your logistics operations, this is one of the surest ways to power ROI.