Fleet Dashboards Should Provide 360° Visibility—Even for 3rd Parties

There are few things more powerful than a brand. When a prospective customer needs a new widget and the first thing they do is type the name of your company into Google, you’ve achieved something that the vast majority of businesses around the globe struggle with. Even if you’re not in that situation—if you’re in a cutthroat industry where everyone is competing on price and service levels—you rely on the strength of your brand to power your business.

So how do you ensure the strength of your brand across the entire delivery and fulfillment process? It can be a thorny problem—especially for businesses that do some or all of their deliveries via third parties, contractors, or even Uber and similar platforms. You need to make sure you have total visibility into each and every delivery, but too often it can feel like you’re flying blind. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to delivery management, especially for more complex business cases, but prioritizing logistics visibility is non-negotiable in the current delivery environment. Ultimately, the holy grail is for your last mile logistics operations to roll up seamlessly into one fleet dashboard where you can see all the information you need at a glance. 

But getting to that point is easier said than done. 

Your Fleet Dashboard Is Command Central for Connected Logistics

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: visibility isn’t about collecting information, it’s about making sure that information is available to the right people at the right time without them having to hunt it down. This is especially crucial for delivery operations, where the half life of a status update is potentially as short as a few minutes, and exceptions need to be spotted and managed as quickly as possible. 

That’s where your fleet dashboard comes in. It should act as a one stop shop for top level delivery information across each and every route—including the ones that are being managed by third parties. 

This way, you can gain a complete view of everything that’s happening across your entire network, down to live ETAs, driver locations, and order statuses. 

What does this enable you to do? Here are few things:

• Spot potential late deliveries and other exceptions before they impact the customer
• Reach out to customers proactively if their delivery schedules change
• Respond quickly and easily to customer calls and texts—even if they’re about deliveries that are being carried out by 3PLs or contracted as one-offs
• Proactively reach out to drivers and technicians who may be running into technical issues in the field or need help troubleshooting something
• Easily get a top-level impression of what percentage of your routes and deliveries are running smoothly at any given moment

One of the key things here is that your fleet dashboard can give you peace of mind that the majority of your deliveries are going along swimmingly. When you know that 90% of your deliveries are going right, you can focus on the 10% that aren’t without experiencing any creeping paranoia about the rest of your last mile operations. 

Simply put, this all saves you time, money, and headaches. You can avoid more unplanned returns and cancellations, you can increase your first attempt delivery success rate, and you can decrease the number of redelivery attempts in the average route. Field teams are more productive, while customer support, dispatchers, and managers spend less time hunting for data and more time directly addressing customer issues. 

The best part? At the end of the day you have a clear, digital record of everything that happened on your delivery runs. 

Top Challenges in Connected Logistics Visibility—and How to Overcome Them

If fleet visibility is so important, why doesn’t everyone have an at-a-glance fleet dashboard that gives a connected window into daily delivery execution? Or, more to the point, why do so many solutions seem to offer solid-seeming fleet dashboards without really delivering the kinds of the benefits we’ve been talking about?

The simple truth is that there are challenges to achieving total fleet visibility. But you can overcome them with the right solutions and best practices, all on the way to achieving connected logistics in the last mile and beyond. 

Here are a few of the top hurdles that businesses have to deal with in this area, and some best practices for overcoming them:

Getting all of your delivery data under one roof

It’s a tale as old as time: you’ve got a spike in demand, you need to expand your delivery capacity by hiring some contractors to handle some of the volume, and those deliveries immediately become a black box. 

Customers call you asking for updates on their orders, and you have to hang up and call them back after you’ve tried your best to get a status update from the person actually carrying out the delivery. It takes forever to get the information you need, and visibility goes out the window. 

Ultimately, getting over this hurdle is about finding a platform that prioritizes connectivity—something that can easily gather data from your contractors’ systems and present it side-by-side with the rest of your deliveries. Having API connections to platforms like Uber, OneRail, and others. 

Making sure delays are the exception—rather than the rule

We mentioned this above, but it bears reiterating: you want enough visibility to see that 90% (ideally more than 90%) of your deliveries are going right, so you can focus on the 10% that aren’t. But that’s obviously easier said than done. Last mile deliveries are notoriously complicated and prone to disruptions, and just because you’ve increased the level of connectivity to a point where you can track deliveries from end-to-end, doesn’t necessarily mean you have visibility into something that’s running smoothly. 

The best practice here is to remember that your fleet dashboard is just one component of your logistics technology—it’s most valuable when it sits in the center of a larger last mile delivery solution that empowers you to optimize routes, dispatch routes to drivers, communicate with customers, and execute seamlessly on your delivery plans. 

Bonus points if the platform is easy to use and easy to implement—that’ll make it much more likely that your third party logistics providers will be willing to use it as well.

Centering customer delivery experience from end-to-end

Your fleet dashboard is a crucial tool for tracking deliveries and keeping control of your logistics processes—but it’s also a customer experience tool. Whatever visibility you’re able to gain, you should be able to leverage it into a better, more connected experience for your customers. 

There are a few ways to make sure you’re able to do this. For one thing, you should be able to turn around and provide real-time delivery visibility to your customers as well, via a branded tracking portal. On top of that, your fleet dashboard should easily connect you to a two-way communications portal where you can chat with customers in real-time. 

Why Now Is the Time to Prioritize Fleet Visibility

As deliveries get more complex and the challenges facing delivery organizations become more intractable, real visibility is getting harder and harder to come by. That’s why prioritizing it is more important than ever before. 

It starts with a smarter fleet dashboard, but that’s not the end of the story. For modern delivery businesses, leveraging the right last mile logistics technology is crucial to success. To learn more about what that could look like, reach out to our team today.