Integrate First Mile Tracking into Last Mile Logistics

For businesses that are focused on providing a great delivery experience to customers, the first mile can sometimes feel like an incredibly distant concern. Someone else is probably managing it, and getting the right goods to the right place at the right in the last mile is difficult enough on its own that your teams don’t have extra bandwidth to worry about it. But here’s a secret: one of the keys to perfect final mile delivery is integrating it efficiently with the first mile and middle mile.

It might sound counterintuitive at first glance, but more and more distributors and logistics operators are looking at the entire logistics process—including the first mile, middle mile, and last mile—as a cohesive whole. Not only that, but they’re taking steps to gain logistics visibility and optimize accordingly. 

The result? Lower logistics costs across the board, improved coordination between roles and functions in your organization, and (surprisingly) improved customer experience.  

One of the first steps to making that happen is to take steps to integrate first mile tracking into your delivery management process. 

What Is First Mile Tracking?

First mile tracking is the process of visualizing status updates and delivery data as the first mile of the supply chain unfolds. Different businesses will have differences in how their networks are put together, but broadly speaking the first mile will cover transportation from the manufacturing plant or production site to warehouses and depots across your transport network (where the middle mile transport process will take over in getting goods from warehouses to distribution centers and hubs).

Often, tracking the first mile is a low-tech affair. Most businesses don’t have real time visibility into this part of the supply chain. Trucks aren’t necessarily being tracked in real time and assigned up-to-date ETAs for arriving at the warehouse, and it can be difficult to get a handle on your goods in transit. 

But that’s not how it has to be. By treating the first mile more like the last mile and implementing robust first mile tracking, you can gain greater insight into your logistics network and find more and better ways to optimize. 

What does that look like in practice? We’ll do a deeper dive two sections down the post, but suffice it to say that the trick is to prioritize real-time data integration. That means ensuring that status updates are captured live by first mile drivers and their routes are tracked and monitored the same way that last mile routes are. Right off the bat, this puts you in a position to gain a much better understanding not just of the first mile but of how it impacts logistics operations overall. 

How Do the First, Middle, and Last Miles Connect?

The point above about the impact of the first mile on overall logistics ops was a crucial one. Why? Because it’s too easy to overlook the inherent interconnections between the different stages of the fulfillment process. 

And yet, the ways in which these processes are connected aren’t a mystery. It’s a pretty obvious relay race—in which items are passed like a baton from truck to truck from the production plan to the warehouse to the fulfillment center and finally to the customer—but one in which the complexity increases at every stage. A first mile shipment might be broken up into multiple middle mile transfers, which in turn become a huge number of individual last mile routes. 

Because things get more complicated at every stage, the further upstream you’re able to start optimizing, the better. A single last mile delay might only impact a customer or two. A first mile delay impacts all the last mile deliveries associated with it. 

If you can spot delays early in the first mile—or prevent them entirely—you can keep your middle and last mile deliveries on track much more easily. This requires cross-functional visibility and coordination, but the potential payoff is huge: reduced logistics costs across the board, faster fulfillment cycles, and happier customers.

Best Practices for Integrating First Mile Tracking into Your Logistics Process

The goal is to treat the first, middle, and last miles into a cohesive logistics workflow that can be analyzed and optimized holistically. Sure, you’ll still have dedicated capabilities for managing the complexities of the last mile, but those capabilities will be closely connected to and integrated with your first mile operations. 

Here are a some best practices for integrating first mile tracking into your larger logistics operations in order to make that enhanced coordination a reality:

• Equip first mile drivers with scanning capabilities that feed information directly back to your delivery management solution: This way, your delivery management solution has native data to work with when estimating item availability. 
• Leverage route optimization capabilities to update ETAs in real time: The process of estimating delivery times for first mile routes (which are usually not going to involve multiple pickups and dropoffs) is less complex than doing the same for the last mile. So why not use that to your advantage by updating first mile delivery ETAs in real time?
• Incorporate first mile status updates into your delivery tracking dashboard: This is something that most businesses do as a matter of course for the last mile—but the ability to gain at-a-glance visibility into first mile shipments can be a powerful tool for improved coordination. 
• Make sure first mile tracking is available across functions: However you wind up establishing your exact technology stack and processes, the goal here is to make sure that anyone who could benefit from visibility into the first mile has it when they need it—without having to hunt it down across disparate solutions. 
• Establish a single source of truth: For many businesses, this will happen within a delivery management solution. But whatever it is, make sure you’ve set yourself up to get timely, accurate, and relevant data that enables you to deal with both logistics ops as a whole and the nitty-gritty of each individual leg of the journey. 

Conclusion: First Mile Tracking Is Just the First Step

Implementing robust first mile tracking into your supply chain is a huge first step towards increased efficiency. Getting the visibility to make that happen is no mean feat, and there are huge competitive advantages to be gained in the logistics sector by improving the connections between the first, middle, and last miles of the fulfillment process. 

Once you’ve got those connections in place, you can get to work on optimizing your logistics operations from the perspective of a unified, standardized, and interconnected process. This means going beyond visibility to achieve new levels of optimization and agility across your supply chain. 

Making this happen can put you in a position to manage costs more effectively than ever and boost performance across the board. You can speed up fulfillment and get your customers their orders that much more quickly—all without leveraging extra resources. The trick is just to find technology that will actually power standardized, connected, and intelligent logistics. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to make that happen, reach out to our team today. We’d love to walk you through it.