How many logistics businesses have real delivery visibility? Well, it depends a lot on what you mean by visibility. Most businesses can track their trucks easily enough—even if it’s just GPS coordinates on the map. But the flip side is that a huge proportion of businesses can’t immediately spot a potential delivery disruption or plan and execute with certainty across the last mile.
The gap between what seems like visibility (e.g. knowing where your drivers are at any given moment) and real, impactful visibility (consistently knowing everything you need to know about your logistics operations without having to hunt for information) is difficult to close. And it’s difficult to close in part because it’s difficult to diagnose exactly what the crucial differences are.
When it comes to adopting a connected logistics methodology, one way to set yourself up for the kind of visibility that actually drives value is to prioritize alert-driven visibility throughout your logistics operations.
In this post, we’ll dive into precisely what that means, how to achieve it, and why it should be a real priority for logistics organizations.
Let’s say you’re tracking a delivery route as the driver moves from stop to stop. It’s still early in the morning, you’re finishing your first cup of coffee, and you log in to your last mile solution to make sure everything is getting off to a good start.
You open your dashboard, and you see mostly friendly-looking green numbers. You scroll down to see individual truckloads and everything seems in order, and then you notice it: a bright red exception: “could not complete order.”
Now you instantly have a host of questions: How long ago was this? Has anyone notified the customer? What was in the order? Where is the driver now? Some of these answers are at your fingertips, but others you have to hunt for, and by the time you’ve figured out exactly what happened and called the customer to figure out a resolution, your coffee’s gone cold.
With no visibility to speak of, this situation would have been a lot worse. You wouldn’t have even known about the issue until the customer called to berate you, by which point it would have been too late to salvage the situation.
Still, there’s room for improvement. If you picture the same scene with alert-driven visibility baked into your logistics management workflows, the exception management process runs more smoothly:
Instead of being in the dark until you open your software, you get a push notification as soon as the delivery is marked “unable to complete.” The notification has the order history and relevant details baked into it, so you know that you’re on top of the situation as it’s unfolding. You can quickly take whatever steps you need to and be confident that nothing else is catching fire while you’re focused on this.
That’s alert-driven visibility in a nutshell. You can apply the concept to other areas of logistics beyond exception management—you can configure alerts for middle mile transfers, or for customer messages that your AI-powered chat agent can’t deal with, you name it—but the basic premise remains the same. Instead of a pull model where you and your teams are constantly scanning for issues, it’s a push model where the information that you need arrives on your device at the right moment.
We’ve given a small example of why this might be desirable, but let’s dig into some of the other benefits that this has for logistics operators:
All of these impacts are powerful on their own, but taken together they can add up to significant cost savings, improved visibility, and happier customers.
Okay, let’s say you’re sold on the idea of alert-driven visibility in logistics management. How do you actually make it a reality? Here are a few steps to take:
The first question you have to ask yourself is what requires an alert and what doesn’t? Work backwards from how you’d like each of your teams to carry out their SLAs, and then define your notification parameters in such a way as to maximize the odds that they’ll get the information they need, when they need it.
Not only does this help provide your team with the right data at the right time, it also helps ensure that everyone in the organization is on the same page about roles and responsibilities.
We’re assuming that you’re leveraging or plan to leverage a last mile logistics management solution that addresses routing, dispatching, driver management, customer experience, etc. Housing all of these functions within a single solution is a great way to connect your teams and ensure continuity across different roles.
But in order to ensure that you get the maximum value out of your technology, you have to ensure that it’s seamlessly integrated with your ERP, WMS, and any other solutions you may be using. Here, strong technology integration helps ensure that you have the data you need, when you need—so that you can set up alerts accordingly.
One of the scenarios where alert-driven visibility can go wrong crops up when your teams are so inundated with alerts that they can’t give any of them the attention that they deserve. We’ve all been in situations where it seems like everything is going haywire, and the least thing you need when that happens is more alerts.
To make sure the alerts that you’ve configured are actually useful, you want to make sure that your logistics processes are set up to run smoothly the majority of the time. Here, AI can actually be a big help. This number will keep growing, but right now there are 3 major ways you can use AI to decrease the number of disruptions your team has to deal with:
Alert-driven visibility is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to achieving smarter connected logistics. It’s a crucial building block, but it’s not the end of the story.
Improving your logistics performance and streamlining visibility requires you to leverage the right technology to ensure connected, standardized processes. If you can achieve that, you can reduce costs and improve visibility across the board.