As long-time building supplies industry veteran Alex Gillespie said in Forbes recently: “We don’t like the way things are, we are frustrated by the tools that we have, and we hate change, so we are caught in a conundrum.” That conundrum isn’t new—in logistics the same complex last mile requirements have been erasing building supplies distributors’ margins for years—but it’s really coming to a head at the moment.
Change is coming whether distributors like it or not, in the form of unpredictable tariffs, fuel spikes, and heightened customer expectations. That means the option to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done isn’t really viable.
Something’s gotta give.
As distributors navigate the current climate, there are new tools, new materials, and new technologies that can help you change the status quo and drive towards stronger margins and happier customers. In this post, we’ll be focusing on the technology aspect and asking an important question: when you’re trying to keep costs manageable across a large number of branches, what’s the best approach?
If you take anything away from this article, it should be the importance of setting yourself to implement a delivery orchestration framework built on scalable, intelligent logistics technology.
Here’s exactly what that looks like in practice:
1. Invest in Visibility
One of the things that makes optimization difficult in so many operations is a lack of supply chain and logistics visibility. This can occur at every level of an operation: asset availability, inventory availability, driver skills and schedules, customer and job site schedules, delivery costs, delivery documentation—if any of these pieces of information are missing, you’re effectively flying blind.
The result here manifests itself in a similar way most of the time: businesses find themselves investing in additional trucks and specialized assets that they don’t need, or outsourcing deliveries to third parties that could easily have been done in house.
When you have true visibility, you can make sure you’re getting the most out of your fleet in a cost-effective way. The trouble is that it’s not always clear what investing in “visibility” means when you put it into practice.
The key here is to adopt a technology layer of control and intelligence that sits between your ERP, WMS, and other systems to enable you to manage deliveries with complete transparency. Make sure whatever technology you invest in also provides real-time insights as delivery and service runs get underway.
2. Don’t Route. Orchestrate.
Once you’ve got your delivery control center up and running, you’re ready to move beyond simply routing and scheduling to achieve true delivery orchestration.
This might sound like a buzzword, but thinking about your deliveries in terms of orchestration is actually an important piece of the puzzle.
Individual deliveries are a matter of logistics: you slot delivery time requests and truck availabilities into a routing system and it spits out a plausible schedule.
Orchestration is what happens when you take that as a starting point to craft delivery experiences across all of your branches that actually meet customer needs in a consistent way. That means not just routing efficiently, but:
- Coordinating schedules with job sites
- Maximizing the usage of your specialized assets
- Communicating early and often with customers
- Empowering drivers to get their jobs done effectively and document their deliveries
- Managing delivery exceptions in real time across your network.
And it means doing all of that at scale.
It’s impossible to make that happen without the kind of visibility we sketched out above. But it’s equally impossible to orchestrate deliveries without connected capabilities for routing, scheduling, proof of delivery, delivery tracking, driver management, and customer communication.
This puts a lot of pressure on your choice of software, but if you adopt the right solution you can take control of your logistics operations—and the costs that come with—more effectively than ever before.
3. Standardize Your Customer Experience
Okay, but how do you make sure you’re choosing the right delivery orchestration software? One of the most important differentiators is how easy a given solution makes it to standardize delivery experience across branches.
Not just to standardize it, but to elevate it to white glove-caliber by default.
Here’s what this looks like in detail:
- The scheduling process from the customer’s perspective is easy, streamlined, and identical from branch to branch. Scheduling notifications are automated and enable easy, self-serve coordination.
- Customers are sent delivery alerts and notifications at a pre-defined cadence before, during, and after the delivery. Each of these messages is branded with your corporate identity and written in your brand voice—whether the message is about a delivery from your Boston branch or your Tulsa outpost.
- Once the delivery is underway, customers can track deliveries from their own devices. A busy contractor might not check their phone as many times to look at the location of a truck as a consumer would—but, then again, they might. You want to be sure that they have the option.
- If anything comes up, customers can reach out to you directly and get a clear answer. That goes for anything from a routine traffic-related delay to a sudden reschedule request to request for delivery documentation after the fact.
Again, it doesn’t matter whether the delivery or service is being scheduled from your branch in Ronkonkoma or Peoria—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s your own fleet or a third party: customers get the same level of service across the board.
Crucially, you also have to back up the level of visibility that you’re providing to customers by delivering on time consistently. Here, machine learning powered route optimization integrated into your larger logistics capabilities can help.
4. Leverage AI to Save Time and Money
One thing that might have stood out about the customer experience we described above is that it can be quite a heavy lift at scale. You obviously can’t manage all that manually (especially not if you want to orchestrate a consistent experience across geographies), but even automation has its limits.
This is where AI comes in.
By leveraging AI tools for customer engagement, you can provide your customers with instant answers to simple questions like “where’s my order?” With a more sophisticated AI tool, you can even remove manual effort from the scheduling, rescheduling, and survey collection processes. Not only does this save time for your team, it improves the customer experience by speeding up responses and decreasing friction.
Outside of customer communications, leading building supplies distributors are also leveraging AI to verify proof of delivery accuracy at the job site, collect delivery and service site readiness information, improve data analytics and insights, and even empower drivers to do their jobs more effectively.
The result is that you’re able to put guardrails on your margins even in situations where uncertainty is the usual status quo.
5. Empower Drivers Across the Board
We mentioned very briefly above that distributors are using AI to empower delivery drivers to do their jobs more effectively. We’re not talking about driverless trucks (it will be a while before that technology makes its way into building supplies distribution—at least where the last mile is concerned). Rather, we’re talking about utilizing AI to add context and provide visibility as drivers are headed to the job site.
In practice, this might look like an AI-generated voice note that synthesizes order and location data—plus any notes from the customer or the dispatcher—and gives the driver a stop-level briefing. This can help ensure that the driver knows what they’re delivering, where and how they should deliver it, how to access the delivery site, etc.
Combine this with a mobile app that empowers that to easily capture digital proof of delivery—and even provides step-by-step walkthroughs for documenting services and installations—and you’ve got a recipe for drivers working more efficiently.
Again, this is something that you can scale across branches to ensure that you’re providing a consistent experience across your network. Taken with the other best practices in this article, it represents an actionable paradigm for orchestrating more efficient, more cost-effective, and more consistent deliveries—with the result of protecting margins and improving customer experience.