Delivery is a part of life—more so now than at any other point in recent memory. For most people, the processes that make effective, on-time deliveries possible more or less fade into the background. But for anyone involved in the logistics process it’s a different story entirely.
From the varied teams that are actually doing the heavy lifting, last mile deliveries—whether we’re talking about a parcel being dropped off on the customer’s doorstep or a pallet of energy drinks that has to be dropped off a c-store before midnight—can be hard to get a handle on. When you look closely, you find that the last mile touches so many roles, functions, and processes up and down the supply chain that optimizing your last mile logistics begins to seem insurmountable.
Luckily, we’re here to help. In this post, we’ll give an overview of the entire last mile journey, paying particular attention to the roles and functions that are touched by each stage. We’ll cover the way that different technologies can help with each stage of the process—and we’ll give some insights into the ways that the world of the last mile is evolving in 2024.
Let’s get started!
If you’re thinking of last mile delivery as something that starts when the delivery driver starts their route for the end and ends at the customer’s doorstep, then you may need to widen your definition. In point of fact, last mile logistics optimization starts before the first pallet has been loaded onto the truck and doesn’t finish until long after the order has been delivered and documented.
With the whole journey in mind, you can start to see just how much falls under the last mile logistics umbrella. Why is this so important? Because it helps delivery businesses to better understand how they can tackle the challenges of last mile deliveries head on.
Success here requires the right tools for the job. And when the job is complex, the tools often will be as well. In that case, the tools in question are SaaS logistics platforms designed to cover the last mile delivery journey from end to end.
But how do these kinds of technology solutions empower businesses to improve their last mile performance, make their customers happier, and ultimately boost profitability?
Here are a few key ways:
To make all of this possible, it’s helpful for your solution to provide features and functionality covering each stage of the journey. This means seeking out a platform that includes:
This might sound like a lot, but once you get started optimizing last mile deliveries it’s easy to see how these all feed into each other. Your customer communications draw from the ETAs generated by your route optimization. Your proof of delivery feeds into your real-time delivery visibility, Robust reporting gives you a grand overview of the entire process from end to end.
The last mile logistics world is always evolving. The things that we talked about above are foundational, but the particulars can shift over time, especially as technology adapts to the changing needs of the marketplace.
In 2024, we expect to see AI and machine learning have a bigger impact on the last mile than ever before. Many of the AI applications that you might see in the news can seem like curiosities at this point—but the use of AI in logistics can be much more targeted. More and more businesses will use their delivery data to generate predictive insights that can help them plan more effectively, and these emerging technologies will play a role there.
By the same token, we’ll see even greater adoption of cloud-based platforms among mid-sized delivery businesses. Because these solutions don’t require huge internal efforts to maintain and operate, they effectively level the playing field—helping delivery organizations boost their capabilities regardless of size. As economic uncertainty continues to be a fact of life, this will go a long way towards helping businesses future-proof their last mile logistics and enable them to focus on what matters: getting the right goods to the right place at the right time.
The more last mile logistics evolves, the more important it becomes to maintain that laser focus on great delivery outcomes. When you have a cloud solution that covers the entire journey from beginning to end, that’s suddenly much easier to do in the long term and at scale.