One of the things that we hear most frequently from building supplies distributors is that they spend all day on the phone trying to coordinate delivery schedules. It’s not a shocking complaint—after all, you’ve got to find a way to match up your equipment and driver availability with a job site schedule that may be in a state of constant flux, and you’ve got to keep some question of efficiency in the back of your mind while you do so. It’s a recipe for confusion and high costs.
But does it really have to be that way? Are building supplies distributors doomed to run up high phone bills and scramble each day to get the right goods to the right job sites at the right time? Not necessarily.
At DispatchTrack, we specialize in streamlining last mile logistics management for building suppliers. This includes faster, smarter, and easier routing and scheduling, in addition to visibility/tracking, chain of custody, customer experience, and driver management over the full lifecycle of every single order.
In this post, we’ll dive into how building materials delivery organizations can coordinate with customers more easily—and save money in the process. Let’s dive in!
How Much Time Do Building Supplies Distributors Spend on Customer Coordination?
Or, perhaps a better question would be, how much time are your teams spending right now coordinating with customers to try and get deliveries to the right place at the right time? If you’re not leveraging the right tools and technologies, we’re guessing that it’s too much. For a larger operation, even spending a few minutes on the phone per stop can quickly become unscalable and unworkable.
Here’s why that’s an issue whose impact goes way beyond the time it takes your team to dial the phone:
- Optimization over the phone is nearly impossible. When you’re working with a customer in real time to figure out a workable schedule, you aren’t able to make sure you’re presenting options that are actually profitable from a delivery perspective. At best you can check if they’re feasible.
- There’s no visibility or documentation. What happens if someone—on either end of the conversation—writes the information down wrong? The customer is likely to blame your team either way. And if someone else needs to jump into the delivery process, either to help reschedule or to manage an exception, there’s no way for them to see previous exchanges. There’s the potential to waste a lot of everyone’s time as they get up to speed.
- Your team can’t seamlessly dispatch drivers or loop them into changes in schedule. That means that once your dispatcher or manager puts the phone down, there’s a whole host of manual follow-on work that they have to deal with. They’ll need to note down the details (either on paper or in whatever system you’re using), then get ready to fill out a manual dispatch slip with the order details. If the driver’s already on the road that’s another phone call.
This isn’t the entire story, but it should give a sense of what the problem actually is. It’s not just that scheduling is time consuming. Time is money, sure, but the time wasted sits on top of a lack of optimization, visibility, and customer engagement that can prove difficult to overcome.
How Does Improved Customer Coordination Translate into Business Impact?
That last section might have a slightly doom and gloom feel, but like we said: there’s good news. Modern delivery routing and scheduling software can digitize this process from end to end and get your teams off the phone.
How does a software solution like DispatchTrack make that happen? It starts by ensuring total, end-to-end visibility into your entire logistics network. From a practical perspective for your dispatcher, that means being able to open up a portal with the day’s orders and instantly visualize availability across your fleet and any third parties.
In DispatchTrack’s platform, this can take the form of a route map or a calendar-based view—dispatchers can create schedules and routes directly from the calendar interface.
Here, you’re able to get customers’ scheduling requirements either alongside their orders or separate via text, email, or scheduling portal. Here, the routing algorithm can do a huge amount of the work instantaneously, giving your team at least a “good enough” schedule and route that can be perfected in a few minutes by a route planner.
From there, you can instantly dispatch drivers, track their deliveries, and communicate with customers so they have real-time information about their deliveries.
The business impact here is huge:
- Your teams save significant time and effort, which empowers you to get more done with a lean team and focus your resources where they really make an impact. And it means that delivery exceptions really are the exception, and can be managed proactively.
- Customers get a more seamless experience (they don’t want to spend all their time on the phone either), and because of your optimized routing they also get their orders on time much more consistently.
- Drivers are empowered to do their jobs more effectively—and they’re given more efficient routes—which means that they can drive fewer miles and spend less time per stop. This directly impacts two of the biggest cost drivers in last mile logistics: fuel and driver pay.
- Because every part of the process is digitized, visibility is the default. That means that stakeholders across the board can get clarity into the details of every delivery run, and you can leverage data-driven insights to improve performance over time.
Best Practices for Smarter Scheduling in Building Supplies Distribution
You might be thinking that that’s all well and good in theory, but what does it look like in practice?
We won’t make a secret of the fact that leveraging a last mile logistics software solution like DispatchTrack is critical. You need robust routing and scheduling capabilities—to say nothing of dispatching, tracking, and customer experience—and you can’t realistically achieve visibility and efficiency in those areas by hand.
Here are a few other best practices for getting the most out of your scheduling and routing:
- Leverage AI to ensure accurate delivery ETAs that account for service time, drive time differences between different drivers and vehicles, historical traffic, and more.
- Utilize software that offers both a calendar and a map view for scheduling and routing so your team has the best of both worlds.
- Inject your brand into your customer communications across the board so you can translate delivery success into brand loyalty.
- Empower your drivers to stick to delivery schedules by offering them a mobile application that enables quick pallet scanning, easy capture of proof of delivery, and SKU-level forms for guidance and compliance purposes.
Simply put, the right software will make it easy for you to put these into practice—resulting in reduced costs, streamlined customer experience, and better visibility across the board.
Conclusion: Turn Scheduling into a Competitive Advantage
Coordinating with customer schedules doesn’t have to be a huge headache. In fact, it can be a real competitive advantage for building supplies distributors who optimize it. With a solution like DispatchTrack that digitizes and optimizes the scheduling and routing process from end to end, you can save money and time while offering a better overall experience to customers.
Interested in learning more about what that looks like in practice? Reach out to our team today—we’d love to walk you through it.
