Modern fulfillment networks need to include more than just delivery. Customers across industries—from consumers purchasing furniture to general contractors ordering building supplies—want flexibility in how they get their orders, and sometimes they’re willing to do the driving themselves to simplify and speed up the process.
This is a huge opportunity for improved CX and decreased cost that many retailers and distributors miss out on. The two biggest line items on any delivery P&L are going to be fuel costs (now more than ever) and driver pay, and when you give customers the option to pick up their own orders you strike those two line items off completely.
At the same time, customers appreciate the flexibility you’re offering, and your customer satisfaction and retention scores both improve. It’s a win-win. So why don’t more delivery organizations offer this option as a standard element of their fulfillment process?
The answer is complexity and uncertainty. Even though you’re taking the driver and the route out of the equation, getting pickup logistics right requires a comparable amount of coordination to last mile delivery management. It requires you to optimize around capacity rules, communicate with customers, document pickups, and bake visibility into the process.
Without a firm handle on each element of the process, you wind up with traffic jams in your parking lots, overworked store associates, and exasperated customers. Poorly optimized pickups produce a level of chaos that can quickly eat into your margins.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, we’ll go over the advantages of optimizing pickup logistics with the same approach that you utilize to optimize deliveries, give a rundown of how that works in practice, and sketch out how this process fits into the larger delivery orchestration picture.
If you’re already sold on the idea of optimizing pickup logistics, reach out to our sales team today. We’d love to walk you through DispatchTrack’s pickup logistics optimization capabilities.
How Optimized Pickup Logistics Saves Time and Money
Like it says in the title, the most efficient delivery is the one you don’t have to make. When you can save yourself the trouble of routing deliveries onto trucks and dispatching them to customer locations—where you’ll definitely go through fuel even if the delivery goes off without a hitch—you save a huge amount of money right off the bat. Not to mention the time it would have taken to build the delivery route.
When you dig deeper, there are other sources of time and cost savings as well:
- Inventory velocity can increase if pickup options enable you to decrease fulfillment lead times.
- Redelivery costs (which can often effectively double the initial delivery cost) are also removed from the equation.
- If pickups are a meaningful percentage of orders, you can avoid capital expenses like adding new trucks to your fleet.
- The same applies to your entire delivery network: you won’t need to utilize 3PLs as much and may even be able to find new efficiencies in how your distribution centers operate, for instance.
What these cost saving levers don’t capture is the added flexibility you gain across your network when you have more fulfillment options.
Likewise, they don’t tell the full customer experience story. In addition to getting orders to customers at a lower cost, you’re also making life easier for them by giving them added freedom—assuming you can make good on your promise of a smooth, efficient pickup process.
4 Steps to Optimizing Pickup Logistics with DispatchTrack
In order to get the gains that we’ve been discussing above, you need to offer a seamless experience for both customers and store/warehouse associates. Pickups are complicated enough that this is non-trivial, but with the right solution, it only takes a few steps to get the process optimized.
Here’s how we make that happen at DispatchTrack:
- Pickup schedules are determined by your pre-established capacity rules. When an order comes in, the customer can self-schedule based on dynamically generated options based on availability and the number of orders that can be filled at a certain location per hour.
- Customers are enrolled in the same communication cadence that they would get with a delivery: they get messages letting them know it’s time to schedule, reminders when the pickup is ready, and alerts when the item is ready for pickup.
- Behind the scenes, store/distribution center associates are sent alerts on a mobile app when it’s time to stage particular orders and when the customer is at the pickup site. They can leverage the same app to capture proof of pickup via signature and/or photo.
- Across the entire process, managers have real-time visibility into which orders have been picked up, which are scheduled, and which are pending. If there are any no-shows, they can spot them immediately and reach out to remind the customer or reschedule.
With these puzzle pieces in place, DispatchTrack ensures that the pickup process goes smoothly and that transparency is provided to all stakeholders. Pickup exceptions can be nearly as costly as delivery exceptions, so we minimize those by ensuring visibility from end to end.
The result? No traffic jams at your store or warehouse. No overworked associates or exasperated customers. No fuel cost to get orders fulfilled.
How Does Pickup Logistics Fit into Delivery Orchestration?
The true power of pickup logistics optimization doesn’t arise from a handful of saved trips. It shows up when you take a step back and look at your entire fulfillment network as a whole.
With pickup logistics as an option, you have that much more flexibility in how you go about getting the right goods to the right customer at the right time. That flexibility only amplifies the power of delivery orchestration more broadly—putting you in a position to take control of costs and stop margin bleed.
With the right software provider, you can manage delivery orchestration, pickups, and even warehousing within a single solution—ensuring visibility and predictability across each touchpoint.
That’s exactly what we offer at DispatchTrack. Get in touch today to learn more..
