The Best Delivery Scheduling Software for Reducing Logistics Costs

More and more businesses are focusing on last mile delivery management as a key way to add value for their customers. The importance of getting the right product to the right delivery site at the right time certainly isn’t a new concept—but the technology available to players of all shapes and sizes in the logistics space has evolved significantly in recent years. There’s nothing stopping mid-sized companies from leveraging the world-leading tools for scheduling their deliveries and executing on their last mile plans.

By implementing the best delivery scheduling software, building supplies distributors, food wholesalers, big and bulky retailers, and other businesses with serious last mile logistics needs can speed up their delivery planning, improve their on-time delivery performance, increase delivery visibility, and keep their customers happy.

The trick is to make sure you’re implementing the right software solution—i.e. the one that will actually move on the needle on your costs and help improve your last mile deliveries. 

Index:

• What Is Delivery Scheduling Software?
• What Should a Delivery Scheduling System Offer?
• Pitfalls in Choosing the Right Delivery Management Software
• How DispatchTrack Helps Improve Delivery Management

What Is Delivery Scheduling Software?

Delivery scheduling software means different things to different people, but for our purposes we’re referring to any software that organizations can use to schedule delivery and service calls across their last mile operations. 

But it’s a little more complicated than that. In order to generate schedules that work, you also need to generate delivery/service routes—otherwise there’s no real way to make sure your drivers and technicians are able to meet those schedules. This is a whole extra layer that your technology needs to be able to field. 

Even once you’ve expanded delivery scheduling to include route optimization, it’s important to note that these deliveries and field service calls don’t happen in a vacuum. Delivery scheduling and route optimization are just two parts of a larger last mile ecosystem that includes notifying customers about their appointments, tracking deliveries, and capturing proof of delivery. 

That’s why we at DispatchTrack tend to think of delivery scheduling programs as something that should ideally cover the entire last mile delivery journey. This means integrating closely with PoS and WMS systems to ensure that orders can be routed quickly even for next-day and same-day requests. It also means connecting your customer experience and delivery tracking to your routing and scheduling by housing them within the same solution if possible. 

When you’re able to find the right software and make this happen, you can start to reap huge benefits in terms of how cost effective your delivery and service operations are and how consistently you meet (or exceed!) customer expectations.   

What Should a Delivery Scheduling System Offer?

In order to gain the kind of benefits that we’ve been describing, what does your delivery management software solution actually need to provide? What features should you be looking out for, and how will they translate into concrete benefits for your last mile delivery operations. 

Here are a few for starters:

• AI-powered route optimization: Many distributors are understandably wary of trendy technologies that may not have a proven track record. But AI increasingly has a robust track record to speak of, especially when it comes to route optimization. The high number of variables that impact delivery routes make it a perform use case for machine learning, and the right solution can help virtually eliminate late deliveries while increasing route efficiency. 
• Customer experience integration: When your stops for a particular day are scheduled, you should be able to alert all the customers on the route of their schedules with the press of a button. As your drivers and technicians continue on their routes, they should be able to send additional updates automatically from a mobile app. This helps ensure visibility and decrease the potential information silos that can crop up when your different capabilities don’t talk to one another.  Here, AI can be a huge help in the form of an automated chat agent that handle front line customer inquiries. This can reduce inbound call volumes by more than 70% while speeding up customer issue resolution. 
• Real-time delivery tracking: Efficient schedules are all well and good, but how do you know that everything is going to plan? If the answer is “you don’t,” then you’re going to run into execution issues. Luckily, integrating your delivery scheduling capabilities with a driver mobile app for the teams out in the field can jumpstart your last mile delivery visibility. 
• Robust proof of delivery: Proof of delivery is crucial for bringing the last mile together, ensuring clear documentation and audit trails, and ultimately getting businesses paid by their clients more quickly. Especially in a business where half a pallet might get returned from nearly every delivery, it’s crucial to have information on what was delivered where, when right at your fingertips. 

When you’re able to put these capabilities together within a single delivery scheduling system, you can do a lot more than just racking up features. You can create an ecosystem where each process feeds seamlessly into the next, resulting in more efficient planning and more cost-effective and consistent execution. 

For larger businesses, you should also look for a solution that plays nicely with the rest of your software ecosystem. If you can leverage a solution that connects seamlessly with your ERP, WMS, and other solutions, you can attack the entire last mile logistics journey from end to end. 

Pitfalls in Choosing the Right Delivery Management Software

While there are real benefits to be had from finding the right software, there are some pitfalls to watch out for. The last thing you want when managing a complex  delivery operation is to implement a software solution that doesn’t actually work for your delivery scheduling needs. Or worse, to select a provider and find that you can’t even successfully integrate the new solution. 

To make sure you find the right provider for your delivery scheduling software, look for these green flags:

• A track record of successful software implementations across a wide variety of different businesses 
• Attentive customer service and support
• Comprehensive integrations between the software solution and PoS, ERP, WMS, and other systems that you rely on to get the right pallets to the right clients. 
• Frequent software updates and improvements—for this it’s helpful to look out for SaaS software providers; systems built on SaaS technology are more likely to get frequent updates and to increase and improve their capabilities or time.

How DispatchTrack Helps Improve Delivery Management

At DispatchTrack, we pride ourselves in helping large distributors like Ferguson and BMD to tackle their delivery scheduling needs. Our SaaS delivery scheduling software is built to tackle the entire last mile from end to end. We help digitize and standardize your logistics processes from end to end. 

We offer:

• AI-powered route optimization and scheduling
• Comprehensive customer experience tools including AI-powered customer agents
• Total last mile visibility
• Robust digital proof of delivery for a complete delivery audit trail
• Pickup and return management 
• Integrated pallet scanning 
• Driver management via a smart, AI-powered mobile app
• Robust integrations with industry-leading software tools

With these capabilities, DispatchTrack has helped distributors to improve their route efficiency, increase the visibility that they offer to customers, and even speed up their loading and unloading at pickup and delivery sites. Ferguson was able to roll out our software to 1,100 locations in just three months. Pella achieved an 85% on-time rate within a half-hour window. 

The result is that DispatchTrack clients save money and improve customer experience, all while ensuring smarter, more adaptive, and more responsive last mile deliveries. 

Talk to one of our delivery experts today to learn how we can help.