Logistics visibility sounds simple enough. Per the folks at Penske, it’s simple: “the ability to track and monitor the status and location of parts, components and products as they move along through the supply chain from origin to destination.” But anyone who works in the world of logistics can tell you that lurking beneath that friendly definition is a world of complexity and potential pitfalls.
If you’re running a last mile delivery operation with a relatively lean team, this is the guide for you. We’ll go over 5 key steps to ensuring that you’re able to ensure total logistics visibility without over-complicated technology deployments or an army of IT staff.
Let’s get arguably the hardest step out of the few first: right-sizing your technology deployments. Simply put, this means that whatever technology you’re implementing for logistics management needs to be suited to how your team is going to use it.
The temptation for growing businesses trying to gain visibility might be to adopt a TMS. But for lean IT teams, technology has evolved to the point where this usually isn’t necessary.
This might be a surprising sentiment, TMS implementations can often be heavy and complicated—and once they’re deployed your team has to grapple with their complexities on a daily basis. And because these systems are so unwieldy, you often wind up with gaps in your capabilities; either your TMS doesn’t have a module for, say, last mile route planning, or it's not flexible enough to work for your use case.
Luckily, lighter weight technology solutions are out there, and they’re more easily accessible than ever—thanks in large part to the rise of SaaS. For lean teams, we recommend skipping the TMS and adopting a powerful but flexible connected logistics tool that can help you optimize and track deliveries without requiring you to consult a binder full of instructions every time you need to make a change.
For more on why you might not need a full-blown TMS—and why other options might actually be much better for leaner teams—check out this recent article: Connected Logistics Methodology: No TMS Required.
Once you’ve got the right technology implemented, it’s time to start finding ways to give time back to your team. One of the most powerful ways you can do this within the world of logistics right now is with AI.
Here are a few of the ways that AI can save time and effort for your team right now:
These AI-powered enhancements streamline workflows across the board, and they take a lot of the pressure off your teams—both internally and out in the field. The result is that it's much easier to focus your team’s attention on more high-value activity.
There will be more to latch onto in this area soon. AI is already making its presence felt in logistics, but AI-powered tools for managing supply chain data and smoothing out dispatching operations are also on the horizon.
<< Learn more about DispatchTrack’s recent AI enhancements here >>
Another way to make sure everyone has the time they need to focus on what matters—rather than spending every day putting out fires and trying to claw back some semblance of order—is to make sure you have close alignment between logistics planning and execution.
As it happens, this is another area where a TMS might not be your best bet. Instead, what you need is a solution that offers intuitive, flexible route optimization that’s directly integrated with driver management workflows via a driver mobile app. When you can connect these two things, you create a positive feedback loop that ensures your plans are built to execute, and you’re executing on those plans.
The alternative is a world where you have plans that look efficient on paper, but your actual daily logistics operations are a mess. In this scenario, you lack real-time delivery visibility both because of this disconnect and because there’s simply too much going wrong for you to effectively manage by exception.
Visibility requires more than just gathering data—it requires you to gather the right data and have it in the right place at the right time. That means making sure your logistics software solution integrates easily and seamlessly with your ERP and any other solutions that it touches.
This is something that obviously needs to go right during the implementation process, but when you’re evaluating software solutions you should be able to get a good sense of whether the vendor has a track record of successful integration with related solutions. Once you’re in the thick of the implementation and change management processes, don’t rest until these integrations are working the way you want them.
One of the key pitfalls when it comes to ensuring logistics visibility is finding yourself in a situation where key roles can’t interact with your logistics systems the way they need to.
This can take a handful of different forms:
In each of these instances, there’s a danger that someone won’t be able to work within your logistics process easily or won’t be able to access the information they need. Considering how quickly information goes out of date in the world of shipping, this is antithetical to true visibility.
Ask yourself: Who’s going to be using our logistics software? What data will users need to get out of it? Where will that data come from? How does that look on the day of delivery?
Once you have answers to those questions, you can make sure your technology stack is up to the task.
If there’s one clear takeaway from this article, it should be this: choosing the right software is a huge part of ensuring efficient logistics management—and total logistics visibility—without a huge team.
For anyone who’s curious to learn more about what deploying the right software might look like in practice, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team today for a consultation.