Picture a normal day of delivery orders. How many exceptions do you typically have over the course of that day? If you can’t answer that question easily, we can say with some confidence that you don’t have real visibility into your delivery and transportation network—but the really telling information won’t be how many exceptions there are, but what happens when they crop up.
When you have true strategic visibility, exceptions get resolved more quickly and in a more cost effective way. Instead of having your trucks come back to the distribution center at the end of the day full of undelivered items, you can turn up potentially problematic deliveries before the trucks leave the DC in the first place, and you can stay agile while routes are underway to minimize unplanned returns and the inevitable wastage and damage that comes with it.
Without visibility, costly damage and wastage—to say nothing of the damage to your customer satisfaction scores—are more or less inevitable. In this way, you can tie visibility (which is something that often seems nebulous or ill-defined) directly back to costs and revenue. But the question is, how do you measure visibility, and what steps can you take to increase it across your delivery network?
That’s exactly the question we’re here to answer in this post.
What Does Logistics Visibility Look Like, and How Do You Measure It?
Visibility isn’t about quantity of information, it’s about velocity of information. And nowhere is that more true than in the world of delivery and logistics, where data can go out of date in a heartbeat. That means that the key to measuring your logistics visibility is to think of it in terms of time:
- If a delivery is running late, how soon does your team find out about it?
- If a sales person or customer service rep needs to answer a customer’s question while a delivery is in progress, how quickly can they find that out?
- When you’re measuring your cost per delivery, cost per route, or planned vs actual performance, how much time do you spend getting the information you need?
- How long does it take to run a report on your delivery performance and share it with stakeholders across your logistics operations?
- How long does it take to get a complete audit trail for a delivery?
When you have true logistics visibility, the timelines for most of these are nearly instant. With the right technology and the right connected systems, you can ensure alert-driven visibility across the board. That means that the right stakeholders are proactively notified of the right data at the right time, and a complete record of delivery details is at your fingertips when you need it.
This does more than just give you information that you can wring value out of in retrospect—it gives you control over your deliveries and your delivery network.
How does that translate into ROI? We do a deeper dive into that question here, but the upshot is that by controlling your delivery network you can more effectively take control of costs. You can decrease delivery disruptions, increase route efficiency and performance, and take a data-driven approach to your supply chain. The result is serious cost savings and happier customers.
First and Middle Last Mile Visibility
Before we dig into the steps you can take to actually achieve the level of visibility we’re talking about, let’s take a step back and think about the broader implications for your transportation network. Specifically, let’s dive into the ways that this impacts—and is impacted by—the first and middle mile of the supply chain.
Too often, the first, middle, and last miles are treated as separated processes and siloed off, rather than treated as parts of a connected whole.
When this happens, it can be difficult to coordinate last mile deliveries around first and middle mile delays. If a customer is waiting for a delivery that was scheduled weeks ago, and their delivery day comes and goes without a peep because the middle mile transfer was delayed and so their order was never at the distribution center, that’s a recipe for low CSAT scores.
Luckily, the right last mile delivery technology will make it easy to incorporate first and middle mile transfers into a complete logistics picture. When items are scanned on and off of trucks upstream in the supply chain, your teams can immediately see the state of play across your network. From there, when items are in transit you can assign them ETAs and track them in real time just like you would a last mile delivery.
You can even leverage route optimization capabilities to ensure efficiency across the first and middle mile. The result is that coordination is easier and more streamlined through the entire process.
5 Steps to Boost Visibility Across Your Delivery Network
If your goal is to achieve real strategic visibility in your logistics operations, it can feel like a daunting task. But there are concrete steps you can take to make visibility a reality across your delivery network:
- Get connected with drivers: This is the most important step you can take for getting real-time delivery visibility. Equip your drivers with mobile apps that ensure instant connectivity with office-based teams while enabling scanning, tracking, and proof of delivery capture.
- Connect planning, tracking, and execution under one roof: Silos are the enemy when it comes to visibility, which is why your ability to plan routes, execute deliveries, track last mile activity need to flow seamlessly into one another. Making that happen with multiple separate solutions can be a huge challenge. But if you have a tool that brings all three of those elements together you can set yourself up to get to the right data as fast as possible.
- Optimize your deliveries from end to end: When you’re managing your logistics operations, you don’t want to be looking for a needle in the haystack. You want to be in a position to spot things that are going wrong quickly, which is only possible if they’re the exception—not the rule. This requires intelligent route optimization to ensure ETA accuracy across the board, as well as strong customer engagement tools that keep your customers and your delivery teams on the same page. This might not sound like it contributes directly to visibility, but an optimized last mile enables you to truly manage by exception.
- Track the first and middle miles just like the last mile: We alluded to this above but it’s still a key step. As items are scanned onto and off of trucks and transfers are routed between warehouses, hubs, and distribution centers, you should be capturing an audit trail automatically. In this way, you can seamlessly connect these processes and increase efficiency.
- Automate alerts as much as possible: The way to ensure the fastest response to something like a delivery exception is to automatically alert the right person as soon as the relevant trigger occurs. So, if an order slips out of its delivery window based on the latest ETA, customer support gets a ping instantly and they can track that order and decide whether to call the customer and offer to reschedule. This is just one example of what can be a powerful tool for ensuring that everyone is on the same page and aware of everything that needs their attention.
Conclusion: Visibility in the Era of AI
As technology gets more sophisticated, visibility is only going to get more important. The most effective way to ensure success in an era where AI is increasingly being used to stretch teams and speed up workflows is to already have clarity and control over your delivery network.
If you’ve got a strong visibility foundation, you can leverage new technology like AI efficiently and effectively. This streamlines the path to more profitable deliveries, reduced costs, and happier customers. The trick is to make sure you’re working with the right technology partners.