There’s plenty of advice on the internet about how to purchase delivery management software, from software review sites that offer reviews and tips to opinion pieces in publications like CIO magazine on how delivery management software is evolving. The wealth of information available to you has never been greater—but, at the same time, it can be challenging to sift through all of the data to find the data that’s most relevant to your decision-making process.
If you’re exploring the possibility of upgrading your delivery management software, we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll go over the essential features to look for in delivery management software and give a rundown of ways to tell if it’s time to upgrade.
We’ll also cover DispatchTrack’s delivery management software capabilities, so you can get a sense of how that option could impact your last mile delivery operations.
If you’re reading this article, you probably have a pretty clear idea already of what your delivery management software needs to offer. Capterra lists a handful of features in its comparisons of different software solutions, and these can be a useful baseline:
Here are some other features that aren’t included that group that can add additional value when you’re implementing this kind of software:
The goal of this isn’t to risk feature overload or to present an impossible list of requirements. The goal is to suggest what’s possible. Delivery management software solutions will vary a lot in what they offer, and it’s important to keep in mind that there isn’t one simple checklist to figuring out what your organization needs.
Rather than thinking about features, you can turn the question on its head and work backwards from what capabilities would be most impactful for your organization. Ask yourself, what do your delivery processes look like now? Where do you think your processes have room for improvement? What do you think those improvements would look like, and what processes and functionality would you need to have in order to back them up? What are your actual goals for your delivery organization?
Let’s say, for instance, that one of your goals is to reduce the number of unplanned returns and cancellations on any given delivery run. In order to make that happen, you need to find a way to turn up potential conflicts or other issues before you route your deliveries—or, at the very least, before you load the orders onto the truck.
Notifications in the narrow sense might not be that helpful here. Sure, a well-timed text on the day of delivery can alert a customer to the fact that their order will be there within the hour, but if they’ve forgotten all about their couch or their pallet of lumber or their case of fizzy water and are nowhere near the delivery site, that notification won’t be too much help.
Instead, you probably want to send a schedule confirmation a few days before the actual delivery. This shouldn’t be too difficult—but you might also want to segment and customize different messages for different delivery or service types, or for different products. This goes beyond simple alerts to give you a lot more control over the last mile delivery experience—and it can go a long way towards helping you ensure that your trucks only go out with goods that are actually going to get delivered.
The above is just one example of how the right delivery management software can impact your delivery operations. There are plenty of others along the same vein. Let’s say you want to improve customer experience and speed up time-to-revenue by improving your billing process. You might opt for software that can instantly send out time-stamped, geostamped photographic proof of delivery in a delivery receipt. You might also want something that can generate delivery invoices automatically based on the delivery details captured during deliveries.
The list of possible options goes on—which can make it somewhat daunting to figure out whether you need to upgrade your existing software or not. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to suss that out:
Depending on your answers to these questions, it might be time to get in the market for a new solution. All of these should suggest potential areas for cost-savings, scalability, and increased customer satisfaction—all of which can pay off in the short and long term.
DispatchTrack’s delivery management software offers a wide range of capabilities for modern delivery organizations—whether they’re food distributors trying to make sure their customers get their produce on time, big and bulky retailers scheduling deliveries to customers’ homes, or anything in between.
Here’s what our platform offers:
Of course, features are nice, but the value of a delivery management platform like DispatchTrack really comes in covering the entire last mile delivery journey from end to end. That’s one of the areas where we differentiate ourselves from the competition—we support you from order in to the delivery site and beyond, covering all relevant roles and functions in the process.
If this sounds like it could have an impact for your last mile deliveries, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d be happy to discuss further.