What Is Last Mile Tracking and Visibility?

Last mile tracking spells the difference between successful delivery operations and unsuccessful ones. It's key to minimizing failed or missed deliveries, lowering operating costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. Simply put, it’s one of the fundamental bedrocks of efficient last mile logistics. 

This has only gotten more true in the last few years. Consumers want more from businesses than ever, including full shipment visibility. This is why transparency into the last mile is now a key brand differentiator for delivery businesses—if you leave both customers and delivery teams blind on the day of delivery, you may be setting yourself up for issues. 

One recent survey even showed that 9 in 10 consumers wanted the ability to track their orders throughout the delivery process. What does this mean for your business? It means that adopting a highly integrated technological solution providing real-time tracking is no longer optional.

Index:

• What Is Last Mile Tracking and Visibility?
• How Businesses and Consumers Benefit From Increased Last Mile Visibility
• How Last Mile Tracking Translates into ROI
• Why Invest in Last Mile Tracking and Visibility?

What Is Last Mile Tracking and Visibility?

What is last mile tracking and visibility? At its heart, final mile carrier tracking enables dispatchers and fleet managers to make data-driven decisions when unexpected or unplanned events occur.

Gaining full visibility across the supply chain—especially in the final mile—is important. Visibility allows fleet operators and managers to identify pain points in their workflows and solve them. 

But visibility isn’t just a matter of gathering data—it’s about having the right data in the right place at the right time, which isn’t something that happens by accident. 

Fleet managers and dispatchers who can track drivers and vehicles in real-time can make changes or adjustments based on customers' requests, drivers' locations, and current assignments—all of which is impossible without tracking capabilities. Last mile visibility also helps businesses create more personalized delivery services to satisfy the increasingly stringent demands of consumers.

The only question is: how do you make it a reality?

How Businesses and Consumers Benefit From Increased Last Mile Visibility

Improved last mile visibility—via the use of a robust delivery management solution—has benefits for both end customers and businesses.

For one thing, a delivery management solution offering real-time tracking and last mile analytics will drastically improve visibility on fleet operations. This enables stakeholders to see:

• When a particular journey started
• Where a given order is
• Estimated time of arrival (ETA)
• Promised time window and whether the driver is on pace to meet it. 

The right solution also improves visibility across your organization by integrating disparate solutions such as warehouse management systems, third-party logistics (3PL) software, order management systems, inventory management software, GPS tools, and more. Integrating disparate IT infrastructure in this way helps businesses achieve high levels of system interoperability, offering everyone within the organization a holistic, end-to-end view on delivery operations.

Your delivery management solution should also come with a visibility dashboard that can provide a single source of truth for logistics operations. This dashboard can help managers and customer support teams to accurately benchmark delivery-related key performance indicators (KPIs) and spot exceptions, trends, and inconsistencies in delivery operations quickly.

And let's not leave out the value to customers. Improved shipment visibility offers your customers live insights regarding delivery progress and provides them real-time notifications on ETAs and order progress. Offering customers visibility on the last mile boosts customer satisfaction and reduces calls to your customer service team asking for updates on the delivery—which can save serious time and money.

How Last Mile Tracking Translates into ROI

From increasing customer satisfaction to cutting down operational costs, last mile tracking and visibility are changing the game for last mile delivery. Here are some of the key benefits of improving visibility into the last mile from an ROI perspective:

Accurate ETA Predictions

Advanced final mile tracking tools run on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), empowering fleet managers and dispatchers to set accurate ETAs for each and every delivery. With the same capabilities, they can also spot potential delays once the order is already underway. This way, managers and dispatchers can take corrective actions quickly, re-optimize routes if needed, and inform customers of new ETAs.

Proactive Exception Management

When you know the status of every route and order in real time, you can actively monitor whether any stops are in danger of slipping out of the promised delivery window. At that point, not only can you update ETAs in customer-facing portals (really, they should be updated automatically), you can also reach out to customers to make sure the new delivery time actually works for them. It’s hard to overstate how important this is when it comes to delivering high-quality customer experiences. 

In this way, offering customers real-time tracking abilities boosts customer satisfaction and elevates the delivery service experience.

Streamlined KPI Benchmarking 

Real-time visibility into drivers and vehicles allows enterprises to track KPIs like on-time deliveries, route efficiency, delivery failures, first-attempt success rates, route delays, driver productivity, and so much more. This, in turn, can be leveraged to make your entire operation run more smoothly. 

Reduced Manual Effort For Drivers

Ensuring real-time, end-to-end visibility requires automating work procedures. This in turn allows drivers to ditch manual processes and interventions including getting hard copy dispatches and taking frequent calls from dispatchers who want to track delivery progress. Ditching manual processes lets each driver focus on the task at hand so they can maximize their daily capacity.

Connected Logistics Operations

What is last mile tracking if you can't connect it to other areas of your logistics operations? Visibility can't exist in a vacuum. Rather, it can and should be infused into diverse solutions and workflows so that teams across the entire logistics chain can coordinate more easily and work together more effectively. 

Let's say a member of the sales team gets a call from a customer asking where their order is. With true last mile tracking, the sales rep can simply pull out their mobile app and check on the status of the customer’s order, the location of the truck, the current ETA. If they see that the delivery might be late, they can take steps to smooth things over. 

This is just one example—when you have true visibility across your operation, the possibilities for improved coordination are endless. When you have a solution that easily integrates with the rest of your technology stack and provides for different teams, roles, and users, you can reduce silos and cut out manual effort across the board.

Why Invest in Last Mile Tracking and Visibility?

Investing in modern technology is key to improving your fleet's last mile visibility. Aside from the benefits above, the right last mile logistics solution helps businesses to:

• Improve customer delivery experience from end to end
• Respond to customer inquiries more quickly and easily
• Track and optimize cost per delivery more easily
• Integrate last mile logistics with other logistics functions
• Improve coordination across teams and roles
• Streamline delivery planning and execution.

Poor visibility makes it difficult for fleet managers to act quickly to prevent costly delays and other issues, and it can prevent you from making data-driven decisions. But improving last mile tracking and visibility can reduce friction, increase customer satisfaction, boost operational efficiency, and improve management of unexpected events. All of this is a recipe for bolstering revenue and reducing costs.