Your Delivery Software Should Offer First and Middle Mile Visibility

For a lot of businesses, the challenges of the upcoming holiday season are already upon us—and as a recent opinion piece in Supply & Demand Chain Executive noted, businesses that “invest in clear, real-time supply chain visibility will not only survive the rush — they’ll turn it into a strategic advantage.” It’s hard to argue with that sentiment, but it can also be challenging to see exactly how to put it into practice.

After all, visibility is one of those concepts that can be a little slippery in the world of logistics. Everyone is striving for it, but when pressed for exactly what they mean you can wind up with something that’s not nearly concrete enough to optimize for. 

That said, it is easier than ever to invest in tangible visibility improvements in your supply chain and logistics operations. Modern technology has made it easier than ever to make sure you’re gathering the right data and making it available to the right people at the right time. Crucially, it’s even getting easier to do that across different functional areas. 

Considering what a strategic advantage real visibility can be, the relative ease of achieving it should be reason enough to invest in smarter delivery management software.

How to Tackle a Changing Landscape in Logistics

Supply chains have always been complicated, and if they’ve gotten more complex in the past few years that increase is easily matched by the increase in our awareness of that complexity. The concept of last mile logistics is something that the average person on the street is likely not just to know about, but to have opinions on—something that would have been hard to imagine in the past. 

As all this complexity has been laid bare, the delivery market has gotten harder to navigate. Global trade is less stable than ever, inflation is still a concern in most regions (affecting both demand levels and material sourcing), and there’s still a persistent driver shortage. At the same time, customer expectations are at an all-time high. 

Under these conditions, there’s no skirting around the need to optimize and boost efficiency wherever you can. This means tighter handoffs between different functions, more efficient routes, smarter driver management, and improved delivery experience management across the board. Your ability to protect small margins while getting the most out of your fleet (to say nothing of keeping your customers happy and loyal), is absolutely crucial. 

But you can’t optimize what you can’t measure, so to get the ball rolling on logistics efficiency you’re going to have to start by ensuring that you have total clarity and visibility into your transportation process. 

The Importance of Logistics Visibility—and How to Achieve It

Visibility isn’t just a buzzword in logistics. Different people’s precise definitions may differ, but it’s fundamentally something that you can measure in how long it takes to get the information you need, when you need it. 

This isn’t a trivial point. Information in logistics goes out of date quickly, and if you can’t find a truck’s location or the status of a delivery immediately, then that data becomes more or less useless. Zooming out, you can’t make operational decisions about your transportation network as a whole without consistent, standardized data that’s easy to work with. If the data’s not there or can’t be accessed without manual data entry from one system into another, the process of optimization can easily stop in its tracks. 

Conversely, when data moves seamlessly between functions and the right person can find what they need in a hurry, you can make smarter decisions in record time. 

How do you make that happen in practice? It starts with your technology stack. For starters, you need to make sure you’re housing the right amount of functionality within any given functional solution. 

For instance, your delivery management software should give you the capabilities not just to plan and track orders, but to optimize routes and communicate with customers. These processes are so intimately connected, that separating them out into multiple modules can be a recipe for silos. 

This is also where you’ll want to make sure you’re digitizing all of your documentation across the board. Proof of delivery and proof of transfer, route manifests, bills of lading, you name it—they should all be standardized, digitized, and automatically populated into the right solution(s) for easy access. 

From there, connections between software solutions start to become crucial. Again, manual data entry is the enemy—you want to leverage either APIs or close software integrations to make sure the most up-to-date data is reflected across all of your logistics and logistics-adjacent systems. 

Shining a Light into the Gray Areas Between First, Middle, and Last Mile

One of the reasons that strong integration capabilities are so crucial is that the handoffs between the first, middle, and last miles of the logistics journey are huge areas of inefficiency for many businesses. 

Too often, an order will languish unscheduled even though the items for that order have already made it to the relevant distribution center—only the delivery management system doesn’t know that because no one has manually moved that data over. The opposite is just as likely to happen (you schedule an order without realizing that the first or middle mile transfer has been delayed), and can be just as problematic. 

By connecting the first, middle, and last miles and ensuring visibility and transparency between them, you can avoid these fates—which means you can also avoid irritating your customers with slow delivery turnarounds or promises that your delivery teams can’t keep. But, more than that, you can find new efficiencies and start to tackle logistics costs from a holistic perspective. 

When you have live ETAs for your first and middle mile transfers, you can schedule orders with greater confidence, which means that you can reduce delivery lead times and even shrink your inventory footprint. You can turn up delays earlier in the process, which means you have a greater chance to smooth things over and keep your plans from going off the rails. 

All of this puts you in a position not just to optimize the last mile, middle mile, and first mile individually, but to optimize them as parts of a cohesive logistics whole. 

Conclusion: How DispatchTrack Can Help

If some of the above sounds daunting, we have good news: partnering with the right technology vendor can go a long way towards making this kind of visibility the default. 

At DispatchTrack, we offer a connected logistics platform that provides total, AI-driven visibility across each log of the logistics journey—from the first mile to the last mile and beyond. This visibility is embedded within a delivery management platform that helps delivery businesses optimize routing, tracking, customer experience, driver management, and more. 

Our platform has helped businesses achieve greater visibility, lower logistics costs, and improved customer satisfaction. We offer cutting-edge AI tools to enhance customer experience and reduce costs even further, and we slot seamlessly into your existing technology stack to ensure close integrations and total transparency. 

Interested in learning more about how we do that? Reach out today and one of our experts will walk you through the ins and outs.