There’s a laundry list of things that could go wrong in last mile logistics: customers don’t get their orders on time, you can’t fulfill orders with your existing capacity, trucks are criss-crossing each other in transit, no one can tell you how much your deliveries cost… the list can go on and on.
But for each of the challenges we just listed—and for plenty of others—there’s a straightforward answer: implement an efficient route planner.
Sounds too good to be true, right? After all, no single technology is a cure all for logistics challenges. But while that’s broadly true, the right route optimization solution can go a long way towards making your delivery process more effective and cost efficient.
When we say that an efficient route planner is the key to solving last mile logistics challenges, we should make it clear that we don’t mean just any old routing tool. There’s a wide gulf between the different options available to you on the market, and there are plenty of routing software solutions that are suited to handling complex last mile logistics needs.
So how can you tell that you’re looking at a route planner that’s actually efficient and can improve your operations? Here are a few things to look out for:
When you’ve got a route planner that meets all of the criteria that we sketched out above, you’re suddenly in a position to streamline your routing process and start getting more out of your delivery capacity.
Here are some of the most impactful benefits you can achieve with an efficient route planner:
This benefit is simple but powerful, so we won’t spend too much belaboring the point:
Efficient routes mean fewer miles traveled and less time on the road. This directly results in lower fuel consumption per stop, and reduced driver hours per delivery.
In other words, it directly addresses two of the most significant last mile delivery costs. A best-in-class route optimization solution can help you decrease both of those numbers (miles and driven and driver hours) by more than 10%.
Like we noted above, an efficient route planner will leverage AI to improve accuracy, resulting in ETAs that are incredibly precise and reliable. This is a boon for your operational efficiency (we’ll get into that below), but it’s also a huge win for your CSAT scores.
Contrast this with manual route planning (which gave us the era of the 12-hour delivery window) or legacy routing solutions (which can’t account for all of the factors that go into accurate delivery schedules), both of which make it nearly impossible to consistently ensure on-time performance.
Studies show again and again that on-time delivery performance is important to customers. Not only does delivering on time improve customer retention, it also decreases the likelihood that the customer isn’t available to receive the delivery. Acquiring new customers and making redelivery attempts are both extremely costly at the best of times—and the right route optimization software helps reduce both significantly.
The more complex your use case, the more important this is going to be. For some businesses, time spent routing isn’t a huge item on the time sheet—it might be as simple as drawing a few loops out from your distribution centers and calling it a day.
But for businesses that need to coordinate their routes with customer time tables, or need to optimize the use of particular skilled drivers or technicians, or who have to manage different equipment types for different products and delivery types, the time it takes to create a route can add up quickly.
Luckily, the right route optimization solution can cut that time down by more than half—often a lot more than half—by codifying your routing team’s domain knowledge and leveraging powerful optimization algorithms to streamline the process. The result is that your team can spend those hours on something more impactful, and you save on labor costs as a result.
As an added bonus, faster routing means shorter routing lead times—so you can fulfill customer order more quickly.
Like we mentioned above, one of the most common signs that you need to improve your route optimization game is the feeling that you should be able to deliver on all of your orders with your existing capacity, but you still find yourself looking for contractors or 3PLs to handle the orders that your team can get to.
Usually, your gut feeling is right, and you do have assets you need to handle the volume of orders you’re getting—you’re just not utilizing those assets in the most efficient way. Why? Because it can be difficult to figure out manually (or with a lightweight solution) how to right-size the order loads for different vehicles and drivers.
An efficient route planner takes the guesswork out of this process and optimizes truckloads to ensure that you’re using your capacity in the most efficient way—saving costs and streamlining your last mile logistics.
Route optimization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. On the contrary, it’s a process that’s intimately tied up with the entirety of your last mile logistics. When it’s going well, it forms a strong bedrock not just of individual delivery runs, but of improved customer experience, better driver management, exception management, and even streamlined delivery documentation.
If you take a step back and look at the entire logistics process as a whole, it’s not hard to see how much easier it is to keep your plans on track when your route optimization is working. Rather than constantly working to turn chaos into order, you can count on most parts of the fulfillment process working, and focus the rest of your attention on the parts that aren’t.
An efficient route planner can be the difference between inefficient, chaotic last mile deliveries and logistics operations that run like a well-oiled machine. If you’re trying to get from the former to the latter—or if you’re simply trying to reduce costs and improve delivery performance—reach out to DispatchTrack to learn how our route optimization engine helps businesses like yours to tackle the last mile head on.