Okay, you’ve got a delivery or service order, you’ve got a fleet of trucks, and you’ve got a roster of drivers and technicians. How do you get the right driver for the job to reach the right customer at the right time?
But dispatching software means different things to different people, and the options out there for businesses come in all different shapes and sizes—from solutions that are focused on sending individual technicians out to respond to customer calls to more complex logistics processes that come with serious delivery demands.
All of the dispatching software options on the market present an alternative to doing things the old-fashioned way—i.e. dispatching drivers and technicians via phone call and tracking the results on paper. But not all of them address the challenge of digitization in the same way.
In this post, we’ll go over some of the essentials of dispatching software so you can better understand how it fits into the distinct needs of your delivery and fulfillment ecosystem.
At a high level, dispatching software can encompass anything that takes orders and assigns them to drivers or technicians. But most solutions go well beyond that, offering capabilities that cover the last mile to a greater or lesser extent. Here are some of the features that you might encounter as you look into dispatching software:
This isn’t necessarily a comprehensive list of everything that might fall under the umbrella of dispatching software, but it should give a decent sense of what these solutions look like and what sorts of organizations might need to utilize them.
Given the wide range of functionality that dispatching systems can cover, it’s reasonable to wonder how exactly it fits in the typical last mile technology ecosystem. Is it better to have separate modules for different areas of the last mile (e.g. for route optimization versus proof of delivery), or does it make sense to centralize them within one platform that connects to your ERP and POS solutions?
Different businesses will give you different answers, but our perspective is that a single solution that tackles the entire last mile journey—from order received to routing and dispatching to customer communication and beyond—is the optimal choice if you want to decrease delivery costs and increase customer satisfaction.
Here’s why:
A single platform can act as a single source of truth. Rather than fussing with connections and integrations to make sure you have the right info at the right time, you can centralize your data so the most up-to-date information is instantly available cross-functionally.
The entire last mile journey is interconnected: Your plans need to translate into daily routes. Your customer communications need to reflect the ETAs and time windows that are produced in your routing engine. Your customer receipts can and should show the proof of delivery captured by your driver mobile app. When you can keep all those processes under the same roof, the synergies start to add up quickly.
The last mile touches a huge number of roles and functions—all of which need to have a clear view of what each other function is doing. Having a single platform for the entire journey helps you ensure that sales has insight into delivery operations, customer service can see what’s happening on individual routes, and accounting can bill for precisely what happened on each delivery run.
If you’re in the market for dispatching software, there are few things you should seek out in order to make sure you’re getting the maximum value out of it.
Ultimately, we’ve taken a pretty expansive view of dispatching software in this article. But there’s a good reason for that: delivery businesses thrive on connected processes, and silos are the enemy of connectivity. When you can avoid silos by finding a last mile dispatching platform that covers the entire journey, you can boost efficiency, decrease delivery costs, and keep your customers happy with consistent on-time deliveries. That’s why the right dispatching software can be so valuable.