Middle Mile Logistics Visibility: What It Is and Why It Matters

When we talk about visibility in logistics, the last mile usually takes up most of the oxygen in the room. That’s not without reason—the last mile is the most expensive leg of the fulfillment journey, in many ways it's the most difficult to optimize, and it requires careful tracking to keep things running smoothly.

But what happens when you turn around and leverage that same level of visibility in the middle mile? Boosting logistics in this leg of the journey can go a long way towards improving supply chain operations—including the last mile. Fundamentally, the first, middle, and last mile are all connected parts of a single whole, and gaining visibility into each segment of it helps bolster those segments and improve connectivity and coordination. 

In this post, we’ll get into the exact logistics of how that happens. We’ll dig into what the middle mile is and how you can gain added visibility into it. 

What Is Middle Mile Logistics?

Before we get too far into the weeds, let’s define our terms. The middle mile is generally considered to cover the transfer from a larger regional warehouse (where goods are stored after your first mile transportation process has gotten them from their place of manufacture or production) to local distribution centers and hubs from which last mile deliveries can be carried out. 

It’s easy to see how the middle mile can sit awkwardly between dependencies. You can’t route a middle mile truckload until the first mile has been successfully completed, and you can’t start on the last mile until the middle mile is accounted for. 

When this process is a black box—in other words, when you can’t easily see what’s happening with your middle mile logistics—you can’t schedule orders for final mile delivery with any real confidence. This slows down your inventory turnover and makes your planning and execution less efficient. 

Unfortunately, a complete lack of visibility is often the default for the middle mile. More specifically, even if there is effective tracking of middle mile deliveries, that data often doesn’t make its way to the other functional areas, meaning the middle mile too often exists in a silo.

The best way to administer the first, middle, and last miles is to treat them as a single, connected process with multiple different phases—but a lack of middle mile visibility makes this impossible to achieve. 

How Does the Middle Mile Impact Last Mile Costs and Customer Experience?

It’s not difficult to see how inefficiency and poor visibility in the middle mile can increase costs. Like we mentioned above, slower middle mile planning and execution results in slower inventory turnover, meaning you have to pay for more square feet of warehouse than necessary. 

By the same token, if the transfer from the middle mile to last mile suffers from a lack of visibility, you won’t be able to move inventory as quickly or make the most efficient use of your resources. The result is that efficiency is hard to come by and logistics costs add up across the board. 

When it comes to customer experience, the adverse effects might be slightly less obvious. But if you lack visibility into the middle mile, you increase your risk of a couple of different scenarios that directly impact the customer:

• You’ve scheduled a delivery for a specific date, and because of delays in the middle mile process you won't be able to fulfill the order on time. Unfortunately, you aren’t able to spot the delay until the day of delivery when the order isn’t at the distribution center, so your customer gets an extremely last-minute notification that their order won’t be arriving that day at all. 
• Conversely, you may be waiting to schedule the delivery order until you’re sure it's at the distribution center and ready to schedule. For something with a long lead time (say, custom-built furniture), this might mean that your customers are in the dark about delivery lead times until only a few days before the delivery. 

In both of these cases, your customers wind up anxious, or annoyed, or both. When it comes time to make another purchase, they’ll likely remember that anxiety and annoyance and strongly consider placing an order with a competitor. 

Luckily, true middle mile visibility can stave off both of those scenarios with ease. Not only that, but it can help you avoid the costly and inefficient scenarios that we sketched out above. Simply put, it enables you to treat the entire fulfillment process as a continuous whole that can be optimized for cost and performance.

Best Practices for Middle Mile Logistics Visibility 

When you have middle mile logistics visibility, you can coordinate between the last mile and the middle mile more effectively, stave off delays more easily, and generally reduce logistics costs. But how do you achieve that level of visibility and the connectivity that comes with it?

Here are a few best practices:

• Centralize your data within a single solution: This doesn’t mean that you should try to manage the first, middle, and last miles of the supply chain with a single solution—it’s possible, but not necessarily the best way to go about it. But if your last mile depends on your middle mile (which, fundamentally, it does), you should make sure that up-to-the-minute data about middle mile delivery runs is available and easy to find within your last mile solution. 
• Equip drivers to document transfers: And how do you make that data centralization possible? By making sure drivers in the middle mile are able to quickly and easily capture their statuses and locations via mobile app so that that data is available across functions, you improve the quality of your tracking and visibility significantly. This way, from your last mile solution, you can clearly see which transfers have already been made successfully and plan your deliveries accordingly. 
• Track middle mile shipments in real time: Leveraging a driver mobile app in this way also enables you to track middle mile deliveries with the same precision as last mile deliveries, including generating accurate ETAs—all of which makes coordination easier and more streamlined. This enables you to manage exceptions and even improve the customer delivery experience in the same way that you do for last mile deliveries. 
• Connect with the first mile as well: We’ve been focusing heavily on the middle mile in this post, but we’ve mentioned a few times that the first mile and middle mile are fundamentally part of the same fulfillment journey. To make that into a practical planning reality, it helps to ensure that whatever system is managing first mile logistics is also connected with the systems that are supporting middle mile and last mile logistics. 

Conclusion: First Mile, Middle Mile, Last Mile

Getting logistics processes right from the first mile to the last mile is no mean feat—which is why visibility is absolutely paramount. The more thoroughly you can build cross-functional visibility into your logistics, the more effectively you can streamline your first, middle, and last mile logistics into one connected, efficient process. 

Putting all of these pieces together requires the right processes, which have to be bolstered by the right technology. If you’re not sure your current technology stack is up to task, grab some time with one of our experts today to walk through what achieving real logistics visibility could look like.