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.
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.
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.
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.
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.