What Does High-Impact Dispatch Technology Look Like?

Dispatching is the sort of thing that might seem simple from the outside—just get the right goods onto the right trucks and send them to the right customers. But anyone who works in logistics can tell you complicated things get, especially when you’re managing deliveries at scale. Thankfully, there’s been a profusion of dispatch technology options in the last few years.

But how do you figure out which technology is right for your logistics operations? How do you sort through the variety of different solution types, vendors, and platforms that are currently on the market with an eye towards boosting efficiency and customer experience?

It can be a thorny problem. In many cases the technology market is fragmented into specialized solutions, but they tout a similar set of features on the outside. Logistics operators are getting transformative benefits from some of these, but which ones, and for which use cases?

In this post, we’ll address precisely those questions. We’ll cover the ways that dispatch technology is evolving and what that means for delivery businesses. We’ll also go over the ways that the right software can boost logistics efficiency and how to deploy technology in a way that will result in positive ROI. 

The Evolution of Dispatch Technology 

Dispatch technology has gotten more lightweight and easy to deploy in recent years, which puts delivery businesses in a position to adopt powerful technology without a huge outlay of cash or significant internal disruptions. 

Part of this is down to SaaS software simplifying the lives of IT teams across industries. But another part of the equation is that AI is making it easier for businesses with lean teams to get more out of their resources. To be sure, AI agents aren’t a panacea—they have to be scoped carefully and do best when they’re employed by users who understand their limits—but they can take over some repetitive tasks in the larger logistics management process.

The thing to keep in mind here is that AI has become such a phenomenon that it can be difficult to tell real AI from the many use cases that actually aren’t using AI at all. And, by the same token, it can be hard to separate use cases where AI can have a practical, low-risk impact from the riskier ones. 

Of course, this is all on top of a much larger trend of increasing connectivity and agility for dispatch and delivery technology—and the result has been the smaller players have the power to compete with their much larger rivals on the technology front. 

5 Crucial Ways That Dispatching Software Boost Efficiency

Effective software deployments are the ones that are closely aligned with—and strongly supporting—a well-defined operational goal. For a lot of delivery businesses, improving operational efficiency is one of the most compelling goals on the table. At the same time, there are other goals that the right software can help with: elevating customer experience, boosting visibility and control, etc. 

In this section we’ll focus specifically on efficiency, but a lot of what we’re talking about can be extrapolated to other priorities. 

1. Increased fleet capacity utilization: This is a huge part of the reason to get dispatch technology in the first place. Scheduling, routing, and dispatching delivery orders by hand (or with legacy software) is simply not a recipe for success if your goal is to get the most out of your assets. By contrast, modern dispatching technology can give you the ability to instantly visualize your capacity and your parameters and turn your entire slate of orders into efficient and precise routes that are built for seamless execution. This results in reduced miles driven per stop and fewer assets sitting unused. 
2. Improved first time delivery rates: One of the keys to getting value out of your dispatch software is to combine routing and dispatching with customer experience—all under one roof. When you can make that happen, you can boost customer engagement and significantly increase the likelihood that customers are at the delivery site when the truck arrives. Combine this with accurate routes that result in consistent on-time deliveries, and you’ve got a recipe for a huge reduction in failed deliveries and customer-not-at-homes. 
3. Faster back-office processes: We alluded to this above, but it bears repeating: processes like route planning, dispatching, and communicating with customers are painfully slow when you do them by hand. That means that entire teams are taken up with the repetitive manual work that these processes entail. The best dispatch software will automate a huge amount of that work right off the bat, and as AI tools become more sophisticated and reliable you’ll be able to achieve new efficiency gains there as well. 
4. Decreased waste: When your delivery performance is more consistent, you have fewer unplanned returns, which results in less wastage, fewer wasted miles, and more efficient use of both backhaul capacity and warehouse/distribution center space. It’s a knock-on effect of many of the efficiency increases that we’ve already discussed, but it can go a long way towards enhancing those efficiency gains even further. 
5. Data-driven insights: The best technology will give you powerful, actionable data that can be easily translated into insights. Decision-makers across roles and functions can get easy answers to questions and turn that into iterative processes that result in increased efficiency over time.  

How to Deploy Dispatch Technology

These benefits aren’t hypothetical: they’re real, measurable impacts that logistics organizations around the world have seen from deploying the right dispatch technology in the right way. But what does that look like in practice?

It starts with selecting the right software vendor. You want someone with a strong track record of successful deployment, years and years of data to draw on, and a clear vision for change management, training, and integration. 

The platform is crucial as well: It should be someone who’s offering a comprehensive solution that goes beyond dispatching to help tackle routing, tracking, driver management, and customer engagement. By housing all of these in the same solution, you get the sorts of force multipliers and additive increases in efficiency that we sketched out above.

That said, the solution shouldn’t be self-contained—far from it. Once you’ve selected the right technology, the next step is implementation and (crucially) integration. Your dispatch technology needs to be connected to your larger logistics technology ecosystem, which means automated data sharing with WMS, ERP, PoS, telematics and other systems. 

Here, it’s important to think about the needs and requirements of different roles and functions. Your route planners and dispatchers may need very specific information from first mile and middle mile operations, and it’s crucial to put them in a position to succeed by making sure it’s easy for them to access that information within the solution that they’re already using.

At a high level, you should have visibility into the entire logistics journey from the outset, which you can then translate into greater clarity and control. This will go a long way towards ensuring that you actually get the efficiency gains we’ve been talking about. 

Conclusion: Power up Your Dispatching Capabilities

At the end of the day, it’s not about finding the most cutting-edge dispatch technology in the world, it’s about finding software that you can deploy successfully with an eye towards efficiency. And if it’s got cutting-edge AI-powered capabilities that actually add value, that’s a huge win as well. 

If you can make that happen, you can rapidly achieve ROI and turn dispatching into a competitive advantage. Step one is to find the right software—and if you reach out to our team, we’d love to help you with that.