7 Ways to Boost Logistics Productivity with a Dispatch Delivery App

When you picture a dispatcher hard at work, what comes to mind? Is it someone behind a desk strewn with slips of paper, picking up a landline phone to call a driver and find out where a customer’s order is? Or do you picture someone who’s able to do their job with just a few clicks and then step back and take a more strategic role in helping to improve your logistics processes?

We’re guessing that for a lot of delivery organizations out there, the knee-jerk answer is still the first one. But with the advent of smarter dispatch delivery technology, there’s really no reason for it not to be option number 2.

Simply put, the tools are out there to make dispatchers’ lives (to say nothing of the lives of drivers, customer support teams, IT staff, and, above all, customers) significantly easier, which in turn means increased productivity across the logistics journey. 

In the era of AI, this impact is even more pronounced—if you know what to look for in delivery dispatch apps. 

The Power of the Right Dispatch Delivery App

When you implement the right dispatch delivery app, you set yourself for more streamlined, automated, and intelligent logistics operations. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can take greater control of your delivery operations, and by enhancing your capabilities around key planning, tracking, and execution workflows you can significantly boost productivity. 

Here’s how:

1. Eliminate manual data entry

The first and most crucial part of digitization starts with automating the movement of operational data across teams and functions—and even within the same teams and functions. With the right dispatch delivery app, you can automatically import orders, capture delivery details, and document your deliveries in a standardized way. 

By ensuring close integration with your other logistics solutions, you can also ensure that day from, say, first and middle mile transfers is always available to teams that need to coordinate with those workflows. 

The result is less time spent manually inputting data—or laboriously hunting it down—and more time on work that adds strategic value for your logistics ops. 

2. Digitize documentation

One of the other key tactics for eliminating manual effort comes down to delivery documentation: specifically, proof of delivery. 

Your dispatch delivery app should give you the power to instantly capture digital proof of delivery and proof of service at job sites across your delivery network. Not only that, but the proof of delivery should include pictures, signatures, notes, timestamps, and geostamps—all automatically associated with the correct order and uploaded to your centralized dispatch delivery app. 

This does more than just cut down on paperwork (which can be a huge hurdle to productive operations), it also cuts down on confusion and messy data. That added clarity can be parlayed into added efficiency. 

3. Speed up planning and routing

Depending on your organization, you may be in a position where optimizing delivery routes and schedules is a huge time suck. This is especially true in the cases of distributors who make a mix of recurring and new stops every week, but it can also be a pain point for anyone who grapples with complex routing requirements around equipment matching or navigating multiple delivery and service types. 

When you have too many parameters to work with, you’re stuck choosing between inefficient routes and inefficient route planning—and often you wind up with both. 

With a dispatch delivery app that offers AI-powered route optimization, all of the laborious routing effort can be cut down to a few minutes. When you can generate optimal routes in just a few clicks, you can significantly reduce time spent routing while making your routes and schedules much more flexible and responsive. 

4. Streamline dispatching and routing

Dispatching and routing really don’t need to happen in separate, discrete steps. Once a route is finalized, your system should be able to automatically dispatch those routes to drivers via their mobile apps. 

The right dispatch delivery app will offer exactly this kind of functionality, and the result is enhanced productivity for your dispatchers, which you can then leverage to add value in more strategic tasks. 

5. Automate customer engagement

One of the most time consuming parts of delivery management has historically been connecting with customers. If you’re calling customers on the phone to provide them with updates, you’re looking at a process that simply doesn’t scale—to keep an enterprise-sized delivery operation going you would need multiple entire call centers. 

Sending emails and texts one at a time doesn’t scale either. But, luckily, there is another way: you can automate the sending of delivery notifications to customers based on pre-defined triggers, so your customer support team doesn’t have to spend all day on the phone. 

The most cutting edge software can also offer AI-powered capabilities for automatically responding to some inbound customer inquiries. This helps reduce phone time even further and gives significant time back to your team. 

6. Track deliveries in real time

The ability to create efficient plans that you can actually execute on is a huge key to productivity in logistics operations—but anyone who deals with delivery management can tell you that even the best laid plans often go awry. When that happens, your technology will be one of the determining factors in whether you lose a huge amount of productivity dealing trying to get things back on track—or whether you can take delivery exceptions in your stride. 

Here, the best dispatch delivery app will give you both total visibility into each and every delivery run (ideally by mostly automating driver status updates, so that your teams out in the field can focus on providing great service to customers and not fussing with their technology) and well as the tools to actually leverage that visibility. 

This means making real-time delivery data easy to find and consume, so that your team can spot exceptions (e.g. deliveries running late, deliveries only partially completed, or unplanned returns) and act on them quickly. 

Generally speaking, the faster you can spot an exception, the more quickly and easily you can resolve it. The result is that your team spends less time doing damage control and more time delight customers. As a bonus, you can also avoid some of the potential damage that comes when items unexpectedly have to be taken back to the warehouse after a delivery run (e.g. because the customer wasn’t at the delivery site to receive their order). 

7. Connect the first, middle, and last miles 

The handoffs between the first, middle, and last miles often exist in a kind of operational gray area. It can be difficult for teams that work on last mile fulfillment to spot potential delays upstream, and even when things are going smoothly you can wind up with slow, inefficient handoffs and redundant processes across the different legs of the journey. 

The best dispatch delivery app will help you avoid those slow handoffs by ensuring total visibility and connectivity across the first mile, middle mile, and last mile of the supply chain. This is largely a matter of integrating different technology solutions seamlessly and ensuring interoperability between them. By boosting visibility and connectivity in this way, you can make sure your team is in a position to make the entire logistics process run more smoothly and productively. 

Conclusion: Boosting Productivity with a Dispatch Delivery App

A dispatch delivery app can be a powerful tool for logistics operators when it comes to increasing productivity. With the right capabilities in place, your team can spend less time on planning, paperwork, damage control, and customer communications—and more time on strategic work that will ultimately help your business thrive. 

To make that a reality, you just need to find the right solution, i.e. the one that will prioritize connectivity, visibility, and automation across the dispatch and delivery process. If you’d like to learn more about what that might look like in practice, get in touch with us today. Our experts would love to walk you through it.