What Should Your Dispatch and Scheduling Software Actually Do?

In a way, scheduling and dispatching orders is the most basic part of the whole delivery process—but anyone who works in logistics knows that it’s much more complicated than that. You’ve got a whole mix of different orders that have to be matched up to your delivery capacity in a way that works for your customers, your drivers, and your bottom line. In an era of increased cost pressures and volatility, there’s a lot riding on this “simple” task.

Without an obvious path towards greater efficiency, many businesses find themselves purchasing additional delivery vehicles and hiring additional drivers to meet the higher delivery order volumes. This move isn’t always wise. In many cases, businesses only need to make their dispatching more efficient instead of investing in more resources. This is where the right dispatch solution comes in.

Dispatch schedule software allows fleets to improve resource allocation and management, speed up deliveries, boost performance, cut down fuel cost, and achieve higher customer satisfaction scores. In this post, we will tackle how, exactly, it does that. 

The Importance of Dispatch Software

Dispatch and scheduling software helps users select the optimal truck or driver for particular orders, schedule and sequence those orders, and ultimately dispatch the resulting routes to drivers. This category can cover everything from simple applications to solutions connecting the whole supply chain.

The right fleet dispatch software is a must-have these days given the demands of consumers and businesses alike for speedy, reliable, and transparent delivery services. 

And the benefits of dispatch software go beyond increasing customer satisfaction—it can also help you to save on costs. Not only does it cut out manual effort that has historically taken up a lot of valuable time, it also streamlines the communication process between dispatchers, drivers, and customers. 

Making dispatching more efficient via the use of software enables companies to save both time and money while meeting consumers' needs for different delivery options. In an ideal world, this kind of solution can even power quicker delivery options without incurring a big increase in expenses. 

What to Look for in Dispatch and Scheduling Software

Efficient route planning, assignment scheduling, and vehicle dispatch planning are possible with the right technological solutions—as long as you find software that offers the right features.

Here are the must-have features that can help ensure that your dispatch software will enable you to meet customers' demand for great delivery services while achieving cost-effectiveness.

1. Automated customer engagement

To truly tackle rising last mile costs, you have to reduce the number of customer calls to their customer service teams. Not only does a decrease in where’s-my-order and other calls immediately translate to reduced call center costs, it also signals happier customers. 

The best way of achieving this goal? You can start by providing customers with real-time time information about delivery schedules.

Try to choose software that can actually keep customers informed about ETAs, delivery windows, potential delivery exceptions, etc. Ideally, your customers would be able to track orders themselves at a high level of detail, including truck location and stop number. 

This is an area where it’s increasingly common to incorporate AI-powered chat agents to handle some aspects of customer experience. Leveraging AI to answer simple customers' inquiries about order status or details can help save your team from answering these repetitive questions all day, while at the same time speeding up the rate at which customers get their questions answered. Done in the right way, it's a win-win.

2. AI-powered route optimization

Scheduling and routing are technically two different functions, but in point of fact it’s your ability to optimize routes that determines whether your delivery schedules will work for you. 

Getting this right is no mean feat—especially if you’re trying to manage it without the right tools. Route optimization algorithms consider multiple constraints in finding the fastest and most cost-effective routes for large numbers of orders—all much more efficiently than a human planner could manage. 

It’s important to find a tool that can create routes with ETAs that your drivers can actually meet—it’s no good dispatching drivers the most efficient routes if they’re constantly running into disruptions because they’re perpetually late. 

Here, AI is one of the best ways to ensure efficient routes with accurate ETAs. AI-powered routing capabilities can turn huge caches of operational data into significant improvements in accuracy—resulting in 98% accurate ETAs or better. The impact of this can be huge.  

3. Automated dispatching

Conditions can change rapidly on the day of delivery, which is why dispatch schedule software that can support automated real-time dispatching is a crucial tool. The right delivery route software should allow dispatchers to automatically dispatch orders to drivers and update those drivers via push notifications whenever changes are being made. 

This should all happen in the same step as finalizing your routes, in order to save time and streamline the delivery management process. 

4. Integration across your logistics operations

Dispatch software cannot exist in a vacuum. That’s why you have to choose a dispatching solution that can be integrated with other supply chain and dispatch delivery management systems with relative ease. The alternative is to risk data silos and shadow IT cropping up and making your delivery operations less transparent. 

When thinking about integration, it’s important to remember that the last mile is just one piece in the larger logistics management puzzle. It’s fundamentally connected to the first mile and middle mile, and your dispatch and scheduling software needs to reflect that by ensuring connectivity and visibility across these different functions. 

6. Real-time coordination and communication

An intelligent dispatching solution should work as part of an integrated ecosystem, allowing every team to work in sync. The right software will pave the way for every role, function, and team to know what’s happening across the delivery network at all times. This goes for drivers and customers as well as sales, customer support, and anyone else who could conceivably interact with the delivery process.

For that reason, it’s helpful to opt for a freight scheduling software that comes with a driver mobile app and in-app communication and GPS tracking. This allows every stakeholder to coordinate and communicate easily, all while offering customers more personalized delivery experiences.

Your dispatch software should have a dashboard displaying crucial information such as order statuses, completed deliveries, and more. Ideally, your dashboard should offer different views so dispatchers can drill down to the details they need with relative ease and without having to hop from one software solution to another. 

7. Real-time data and alerts

Consumers now demand that companies provide them with automatic alerts, as well as the ability to track their packages on their own. Likewise, dispatchers need real-time visibility on driver statuses, orders, and more.

That’s why it pays to have a dispatch solution that is synced with other systems and capable of providing back-end employees and customers alike with accurate, real-time delivery-related data and alerts.

Conclusion

Efficient dispatching plays a crucial role in today's competitive marketplace. Dispatch and scheduling software can help digitize, connect, automate, and optimize the entire delivery process—making it easier for you to handle increasing order volumes, meet higher customer demands, and improve your cost efficiency around last mile deliveries.

If you’re looking at your own delivery operations and seeing gaps in the areas we’ve been discussing, it’s probably a sign that it’s time to upgrade your technology stack with intelligence dispatch and scheduling software. With the right solution, you can save time, optimize costs, and delight your customers.