Creating a clear narrative out of current economic conditions is no mean feat. Ongoing labor shortages are nothing new, but uncertainty about tariffs and global trade in general make this one of the least predictable moments in recent memory—at least where cost management is concerned. These kinds of factors don’t just impact your delivery costs directly—they also impact the conditions in which you’re delivering: depending on what you deliver, demand from customers might fluctuate significantly.
All of which raises the question: what would it take to enable last mile delivery organizations to more effectively weather economic storms and handle uncertainty around delivery costs? Obviously there’s no panacea when it comes to the exigencies of logistics planning, but are there software solutions or tools that could make life easier for logistics operators in this regard?
Like we alluded to above, fluctuations in cost and other disruptions that touch the logistics sphere don’t just impact costs within your four walls—instead, they can have ripple effects across the economy. When gas prices rise, consumers and businesses alike have to find ways to economize in other areas, which can result in lower demand. Sometimes, this means that you’re paying drivers the same rate each day to complete fewer deliveries, because the demand simply isn’t there.
Conversely, rising fuel costs can completely change the calculus when it comes to your cost-per-stop or cost-per-case. If you’re, say, a beverage distributor making some recurring stops at on-premise drinking establishments each week, which stops are actually profitable can change as your costs change. Spending $30 to deliver a $40 keg of beer can scale—but spending $50 to deliver a $40 keg of beer absolutely can’t. Distributors need a way to visualize those delivery costs as they’re planning and prioritize profitable stops, even when that’s a moving target.
Of course, we’re not suggesting that every time diesel tops 5 dollars a gallon your smaller customers should get the boot. But as you roll out your routes each day, you do need to be mindful of fluctuating delivery costs and find a way to stay on the right side of the ledger wherever possible. Without the visibility to understand your delivery costs across functions at a glance—and without the planning flexibility to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances—that’s incredibly difficult to do.
So how, in fact, do you build that level of flexibility and adaptability into your deliveries?
When you can’t easily understand the impacts of economic changes and adapt to them, it’s much harder to weather economic uncertainty.
Conversely, when strategic visibility and flexibility are cornerstones of your planning and execution processes, you can fight economic volatility and keep offering unparalleled service to your customers in a cost-effective way.
How, exactly, do you make that happen? Here are a few ways that adopting delivery tracking software like DispatchTrack's can make your operations smarter and more resilient:
The right solution gives you the ability to connect planners in the back office with drivers and other personnel out in the field. It also gives you the ability to get real-time delivery data as your deliveries are unfolding as well as robust reporting and KPIs after the fact. Beyond that, it should offer you total data connectivity with other logistics-related solutions—resulting in a single source of truth that enables complete data visibility. This should extend to delivery costs, such that even at the planning stage of your deliveries you can get accurate cost predictions for each case, stop, and route.
When your delivery tracking system is too slow or too complex to enable you to create new territory plans or delivery routes in less than a matter of weeks, then it’s difficult to stay flexible and adaptable in responding to changing conditions. Conversely, something that enables you to generate actionable plans in a matter of minutes and adjust them on the fly if things change gives you the agility you need to make sure your plans actually match up with reality. If all of a sudden one product is more expensive than it was last week and your previous cost analyses don’t add up, you can quickly generate a more efficient plan that accounts for the change.
Part of the value of visibility is that you can turn it around and offer it to your customers. If you're able to track deliveries in real time from a single dashboard, you can easily give customers a window into their deliveries by offering a customer-facing delivery tracking portal with live updates on their deliveries.
At the same time, when you can easily see your delivery routes unfolding at a glance, you can manage by exception and reduce miscues and disruptions before they blossom into full-blown issues. The result is that customers feel informed and empowered, and they can be confident that your team is on top of whatever might happen in the delivery process.
elivery logistics software can offer exactly the kind of visibility and flexibility that we described above. But how do you make sure you’re adopting a solution that will actually make all that possible?
Here are a few things that DispatchTrack's system offers that are must-haves if you want to get the most out :
There’s no denying that the current economy poses challenges for delivery organizations—and those challenges aren’t going away any time soon. That’s why it’s an ideal moment to adopt a delivery tracking system that can help you boost visibility, speed up planning, and ultimately help you fight economic uncertainty.
If you're interested in learning how a delivery tracking system could fit into your technology ecosystem, reach out to one of the experts at DispatchTrack today to learn more.