Connecting the First, Middle, and Last Mile to Boost Productivity

When you’re laser-focused on keeping customers happy and keeping last mile costs in check, it can be easy to lose sight of what’s happening upstream in the supply chain. Which means that there’s always the chance that your customer is going to get a late shipment of parts because you were working with a new vendor for transportation in the first mile and your 30 day lead time was largely eaten up by 15 days of compliance and administrivia.

This is just an example, but it’s far from a lofty hypothetical. In point of fact, 73% of procurement leaders see manual data exchange as a major challenge and bottleneck in keeping the supply chain moving smoothly—which just speaks to how easily and how often upstream processes in your logistics operations can slip through the cracks of digitization and cause issues elsewhere. It’s how your supply chain winds up “stuck before it starts.”

Integration, connectivity, and visibility are the keys to dealing with these kinds of challenges. And we doubt you’d easily find anyone who is against any of those three concepts in theory—but when it comes time to put theory into practice, it can be tough to justify investments in what feel like abstract concepts. 

But we’re here to tell you that the impact of prioritizing visibility in logistics is anything but abstract. In fact, it can be a powerful first step towards boosting productivity in your logistics operations as a whole. 

Here’s why that is, and how to make it work for your business in practice.  

What Are the Most Powerful Ways to Boost Logistics Productivity?

Before we dig into the power of visibility, let’s talk a little bit about the ways that logistics leaders can boost productivity right now. Every organization is different, and you’ll be in the best position to diagnose productivity issues within your own four walls—but there are a few common areas where we often see room for improvement:

• Decreasing time spent on the phone: This is especially crucial for last mile logistics operations where keeping the customer in the loop is key to success. You can’t scrimp on doling out info to your clients, but you can automate a huge number of the individual touchpoints and even leverage AI to answer simple customer inquiries. 
• Reducing manual paperwork: There’s a reason one of our clients (Brice Shively of IDI Distributors) described himself as having a “personal vendetta against paperwork.” It’s because dealing with paper dispatches, paper proof of delivery slips, and paper route manifests are a recipe for lost documentation and mountains of unsortable printer paper. The more you can digitize these items, the more time you can save for your team. 
• Shortening planning times: One of the most time consuming parts of the logistics process for many businesses is last mile route planning and optimization. Because of its inherent complexity, planning last mile delivery routes is slow and painful with legacy software solutions and even worse by hand. By implementing faster, smarter, and more scalable routing capabilities, you can simultaneously decrease the time your team spends on this task and improve route density and performance. 
• Empowering drivers: At the end of the day, the most important factor in overall logistics productivity comes down to whether your drivers are able to successfully get the right goods to the right customers at the right time. To make that happen, you need to make sure they have everything they need from the comfort of their own device: digital route manifests, instant communication with dispatchers and customers, turn-by-turn directions, and even AI-powered stop-level location briefings. 
• Eliminating manual data exchange: Like we saw right at the top, manual data exchange slows down every stage of the supply chain process—especially when it comes to the handoffs between the first, middle, and last mile logistics processes. Manual data sharing is the enemy of visibility, and by turning that on its head and ensuring easy access to the right data, you can speed up planning, execution, and decision-making.    

Connecting the First, Middle, and Last Miles

If there’s a connecting thread among all of the ways to boost logistics productivity, it’s the power of connecting disparate processes and gaining visibility across functions. One of the most powerful examples of this is connecting the first mile, middle mile, and last mile of the supply chain. 

By default, most businesses treat these functions as separate and manage them in separate silos, in spite of the fact that they all fundamentally comprise a single, continuous whole. The result is exactly the kind of slow, often manual data sharing that we’ve been decrying. But when you’re able to flip that paradigm on its head and connect these disparate parts of the supply chain, you can put yourself in a position to turn visibility into productivity across the board.  

What does that look like in practice? It starts with technology. 

Specifically, it starts with technology that’s designed to make it intuitive to get the information you need at the exact moment that you need it. For a delivery management solution, this would mean leveraging software that centralizes delivery data in an at-a-glance dashboard that can make it obvious what’s happening across your entire delivery network. 

From there, you can integrate data from the first and middle miles so that the information you need to prevent slowdowns and turn up potential disruptions can be accessed just as quickly and intuitively. 

This might involve giving first and middle mile drivers the ability to document deliveries in a way that directly sends data back to the delivery management system—or the use of APIs to automate data transfers so that each function can see what’s happening across the supply chain. But once it’s in place, you can more accurately schedule deliveries and spot potential delays, which feeds into smarter and more efficient management of every phase of the fulfillment process. 

What Does Real Logistics Visibility Look Like?

When you’ve got the first mile, middle mile, and last mile connected in the way that we’ve been describing, you’ll have achieved something at least closely resembling real logistics visibility. 

The question then becomes, how exactly does that translate into the kinds of logistics productivity improvements that we sketched out above?

Here’s a quick rundown of how that happens:

• When planning your delivery routes, you can instantly see which items are ready to schedule and which won’t be ready until a future delivery run. This level of clarity makes it easy to rapidly optimize routes that you can actually achieve.  
• By leveraging your existing route tracking capabilities across the first and middle mile, you can also make sure that you have updated ETAs not just for last mile deliveries but for transfers upstream in the supply chain as well. This shortens lead time at every stage. 
• By integrating this level of tracking and visibility into your customer communications, you can provide more accurate, up-to-date information (and more realistic delivery schedules). The result is that you spend less time and effort on exception management. 
• Simply put, when your teams have the data they need at their fingertips, they can spend less time hunting for information and more time on productive tasks. This improves productivity across the board for anyone who depends on data from other teams or functions. 

These can be powerful productivity boosts—as long as you lay a strong visibility foundation. Making that happen comes down to leveraging the right technology in the right way. In other words, deploying delivery management software and other logistics solutions that put you in a position to ensure end-to-end visibility. 

Conclusion: The Future of Logistics Visibility

We haven’t talked much about emerging technology like AI in this piece, but that’s got to be top of mind for anything thinking about a new technology deployment. Some of these areas are changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up, and it can be tough to guess what the future's going to hold for logistics technology.  

The good news is this: visibility never goes obsolete. As you potentially add more AI-based capabilities to your supply chain overall, you’ll never be disappointed that you prioritized data visibility across the board—and you’ll never be disappointed that you partnered with a technology vendor who could make that happen. That’s exactly who you’ll want to have around as the technology landscape changes and you seek to improve your operations.