Whether you’re managing all of your truck dispatching manually and looking to digitize your operations, or you’ve already got truck dispatching software and you see room for improvement, it can be daunting to wade through all of the options available to you. Google will happily AI-generate an answer to your queries about trucking dispatch software, but it can be hard to find reliable info that reflects real expertise about how best to optimize your trucking operations.
There’s no doubt that the right technology can go a long way—the trick is to make sure you’ve defined your goals, your areas for improvement, and the scope of the projects you’ll need to undertake to make that happen. In this way, choosing the right dispatch software for trucking is also a matter of understanding what’s possible.
It's also a matter of prioritizing the right things, which means ensuring right off the bat that you have a laser-focus on your customers. The technology options out there can help you streamline logistics and improve visibility, but whatever option you go with should put you in a position to improve the service you provide to customers (ideally while also optimizing delivery costs).
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One of the reasons it can be difficult to get to the bottom of the truck dispatch software situation is that dispatching means different things to different people. While, fundamentally, we’re all talking about dispatching orders or stops to drivers and technicians, different providers are focused on solving different problems.
Per Descartes (their parent company)’s website: “Since 1985, McLeod Software has provided powerful transportation management and trucking software solutions to the trucking industry. These solutions, developed entirely by our company, are comprehensive and support integration with a broad array of complimentary logistics products.”
McLeod has been around for a while now, but its focus is more on the TMS/freight dispatch software side of the equation. Their core offerings (LoadMaster, PowerBroker, LoadMaster LTL, and DocumentPower) focus on truckloads and freight matching, without a dedicated module for last mile delivery execution.
Truckbase is focused more or less exclusively on asset-based carriers, helping them with dispatching, tracking, and invoicing. In their own words, they try to help custokmers “[e]liminate data entry and grow with a TMS built for growing asset-based carriers.” Depending on exactly what your business’s goals are, this can certaintly be valuable.
At DispatchTrack, we approach dispatching as an integral element of last mile deliveries. That’s why we’ve built a cloud-based last mile delivery platform that streamlines and optimizes every element of the process. Unlike TMS platforms that offer some dispatching capabilities, we’re laser-focused on helping businesses get the right goods to the right customer at the right time. We help more than 2,500 customers around the globe to promise what they can actually deliver, deliver at the right time, and delight their customers. How? By streamlining dispatching and route optimization into a single unified process.
From there, our platform handles the entire last mile journey from end to end: customer engagement, delivery tracking, proof of delivery, driver management, and reporting. In this way, we bridge the gap between planning and execution.
With all of these options to choose from, it’s important to keep the goal in mind. Yes, cost-reduction is important, as are digitization, operational efficiency, and other big ticket items.
But at the end of the day it all comes down to the customer. How are your technology decisions impacting the people whose business you rely on, and how can you make their experience smoother and less frustrating across the board?
Here’s how the best truck dispatch software does that:
The best part is that many of these factors can help optimize costs in addition to boosting customer satisfaction. You can think of things like improved visibility and better on-time performance in terms of the ROI they’ll provide in the form of improved customer loyalty, better Google reviews, and smoother last mile operations from start to finish.
The best dispatching software does more than just keep customers in the loop and ensure timely deliveries (though, again, we can hardly overstate how important those two elements are to successful logistics ops). They also help optimize costs and improve productivity.
How exactly do they make that happen? It starts with reducing the amount of manual effort it takes to administer the last mile of the supply chain. The best dispatching software will speed up the route planning process via sophisticated, AI-powered algorithms, resulting in both a reduction in manual routing labor and an increase in flexibility (since you can easily reconfigure a route when something changes).
By the same token, your dispatching software should centralize your data in such a way that you can get to the data you need at the exact moment that you need it—which in turn speeds up your exception management and decreases the costs associated with delivery disruptions.
This is before we talk about the efficiency gains from smarter route optimization (which can help you reduce the costs associated with fuel and driver hours by more than 10% per delivery) or from automating your customer communications (which can result in a reduction in phone time and its associated labor costs of more than 70%).
Simply put, when you’ve got the best truck dispatch software, you can achieve more efficient logistics management and decrease delivery costs across the board.
Truck dispatching software needs to dispatch trucks—obviously—but if that’s all it did you would want your money back. This raises an important question about what your dispatching solution should actually include, i.e. what functionality it needs to be a useful driver of successful deliveries rather than a functional silo that slows down larger processes.
Different companies will have different needs depending on their tech stacks, but broadly speaking there are a handful of things you should look for:
Even the best TMS for dispatchers isn’t going to enable you to turn logistics plans into happy customers. For that, you need to focus your dispatching efforts on the last mile. If you’re looking for the best trucking software for your business, choose one that will offer you the ability to tackle the entire last mile journey from end to end.
That’s exactly what DispatchTrack offers. Here’s how we help our customers keep their customers happy—all while controlling logistics costs across the board:
Over 13+ years, we’ve empowered more than 2,500 businesses around the globe with the software they need to ensure smarter dispatching, faster planning, and improved execution. We know our customers are laser-focused on ensuring great delivery experiences, and we’re committed to giving them the capabilities they need for smarter dispatching and routing.
When it comes to finding the best trucking dispatch software, it’s important to align your software with your operational priorities.
If you see the last mile as an area where your operations could be more efficient—and where you could more consistently delight your customers—get in touch with the last mile experts at DispatchTrack today. We’ll show you all the ways you can streamline and automate dispatching and related processes to achieve smarter deliveries and happier customers.