What to Look for in ePOD Software to Reduce Logistics Costs

Electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) is one of the unsung heroes of last mile logistics. As the industry faces new challenges—and new technological advancements attempt to meet those challenge—simply being able to capture proof of delivery electronically might not send people over the moon. But in point of fact, it’s one of the quickest ways to reduce costs and improve your logistics performance.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the key features that your ePOD software should offer in order to ensure that you’re able to get all of the benefits that it can bring. Any ePOD is a step up over collecting proof of delivery manually, but not all ePOD options are created equal. To ensure that you’re getting the most out of this crucial step in the delivery process, there are a handful of capabilities that it’s important to seek out. 

How Does ePOD Software Help Reduce Costs?

Proof of delivery is the foundation of your delivery documentation. It’s crucial to getting paid by your customers and clients, keeping track of your delivery performance, and managing delivery exceptions. 

When it only exists in the form of paper delivery slips, proof of delivery can be hard to manage. Finding the slip you need when you need it can be a total crapshoot, drivers are prone to forgetting or losing them, and you spend a fortune printing them out in the first place. 

ePOD, by contrast, makes life easier and reduces costs in a handful of concrete ways:

• Faster time to revenue 
• Reduced manual paperwork
• Fewer lost or misplaced proof of delivery slips
• More accurate delivery documentation
• More complete delivery audit trails
• Faster resolution of customer issues and claims
• Streamlined driver payment
• Faster access to delivery data across roles and functions

When you make electronic delivery documentation the default, each of these benefits can have a pronounced impact on your overall delivery and logistics costs. 

To make sure you’re getting the most out of your ePOD, there are a few specific capabilities you should make sure your vendor is offering. 

Mandatory Pictures

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—but in the world of delivery documentation that’s probably a huge understatement. A customer might admit that they signed a slip of paper but still claim that your delivery team damaged their floor; or a busy jobsite manager might say that a pallet of lumber was never actually delivered. If there’s photographic proof that your delivery team delivered the items that were promised to the right place in the right condition, those complaints tend to vanish pretty quickly. 

Most ePOD apps will give drivers the option of taking pictures (and even short videos)—but ideally you can find one that allows you to make pictures mandatory. By making photographic proof of delivery the standard, you can go a long way towards fighting off false liability claims and providing improved delivery documentation to your customers. 

The combined effect here is to get you paid more quickly and easily. Bonus points if you can automatically include photographic proof of delivery in the customer’s receipt. 

Integration and Visibility

One of the biggest problems with paper proof of delivery slips is that they get lost easily. Even when they don’t, they can get filed away in places where it’s difficult to find them when you need them. 

Considering how quickly information can go out of date in the world of shipping, it’s hard to overstate how important it is for your electronic proof of delivery to be easy to access whenever you need it. 

The best practice here is to make sure your ePOD software instantly uploads proof of delivery photos, signatures, and notes for each delivery to your centralized delivery dashboard. This means that dispatchers and managers can easily get up to speed on exactly what’s happening as delivery runs are unfolding. At the same time, this data should be stored in such a way that anyone looking at the order data after the delivery has been completed can easily see it. 

The end result here is that you wind up with a complete delivery audit trail that you can refer back to as needed. 

Driver Empowerment

Proof of delivery isn’t the only thing that an ePOD app or more general driver mobile application will offer. After all, once you’ve gone to the trouble of getting your field team to adopt a mobile app, it may as well give them all of the capabilities they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. 

That way, you’re documenting a delivery process that actually works. 

Here, the best practice is to ensure that your drive mobile app offers turn-by-turn directions to stops, direct communications with dispatchers as needed, and automated delivery status updates as they move through the route. 

AI can have an impact in this part of the process as well. Learn how DispatchTrack Driver AI capabilities empower drivers contextual intelligence via voice note for the final 50 feet.

Configurable Workflows

Sometimes your delivery documentation needs are simple: your team has gotten a couch over the threshold, and a picture of the couch in situ is all you need for your records and for the customer’s delivery receipt. 

Sometimes, things are a little more complicated: your team is installing a new dishwasher and needs to document both that the correct product wound up in the correct place, but also that they correctly installed an airgap under the sink and hauled away the old appliance.

For cases like these—or similar cases in, say, HVAC installation or anything that requires multi-step installation—it’s helpful to have forms that can prompt drivers to take pictures of each step in the process. This way, you have proof not just of the delivery but of the successful integration. 

ePOD in the Last Mile

Last mile logistics is a notoriously complicated and time-consuming part of the supply chain. More than that, it can be incredibly expensive—easily eating up more than 40% of many businesses' total supply chain costs. That’s why finding ways to optimize and reduce costs is so crucial.

That’s exactly where the right ePOD app comes in. The right application will be one component of your larger last mile logistics capabilities—it will integrate with routing and scheduling, customer communications, and delivery tracking—and in that way it will help you create a more cohesive, visible, and connected last mile journey across the board. 

Ultimately, the right driver mobile app helps you bridge the gap between delivery planning and execution, and it ensures that your drivers capture all of the good work that they’re doing over the course of their routes. The only trick is to find the right ePOD software to download. 

To do that, we recommend seeking out last mile logistics software that can handle your needs from end to end—including empowering drivers to capture electronic proof of delivery from their devices. If you can make that happen, you can reduce delivery costs, decrease spurious customer complaints, and empower your drivers to do the best possible job across the entire delivery journey.