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Last mile deliveries are rarely as simple as you want them to be. In a perfect world, a delivery driver would load up their truck at the beginning of the day, visit every delivery site in an efficient sequence, and come back at the end of the day with an empty truck and a wake of satisfied customers. This would simplify life, and it would be easy enough to optimize.
But anyone who works in logistics can tell you that it doesn’t usually shake out that way. You might need to incorporate backhauls into your delivery runs to process return orders. Your trucks or vans might need to come back to base to reload in the middle of the day. A customer in a huge rush might want to just come by the warehouse in their own van and pick up a pallet of goods. You might need a one-shot at the end of the day that involves a truck making a pickup stop at a warehouse first.
By the time you’re done grappling with all of these added complications that can crop up in delivery planning and execution, you’re so far away from a simple route plan that you can barely see it at all.
If the part or all of the scenario above resonates with you, then the first question you have for any new route optimization solution should be: can you optimize pickups and dropoffs?
If store stops, will call orders, reload routes, or any other activities that don’t fit into the classic “lasso” route model, you’re going to have to deal with added complexities and challenges to achieve optimal routes.
Customer pickups are usually an afterthought in last mile planning—but they can go sideways quickly. If you can’t give the customer a time window that reflects the availability of their order and the associates who are going to fulfill it, they’ll show up whenever they feel like it and wind up loitering in your parking lot, fuming.
Scale that up, and you’re looking at a traffic jam at your store or warehouse and a host of overworked associates trying desperately to get the right orders to the right people. And that’s before we even start talking about documentation—since you’ll need proof of pickups for these as well.
Simply put, without the right system in place to optimize customer pickups, you wind up with slow, inefficient fulfillment and a complete lack of visibility.
In one sense, sending your trucks to stop at the store or warehouse is just another stop on a route—but if you treat it that way, you may run into issues. Sequencing becomes a lot more important in these cases (the truck needs to have enough room for additional items at the very least), and you need to empower your drivers to load the right items with the right documentation.
This is something you can jerry-rig with most routing solutions—but when you do that you risk potential disruptions.
Like we saw above, customer pickup logistics can be chaotic by default—but if you treat it like the rest of your last mile process, it’s possible to optimize it in a way that saves you time and money.
Here are some of the benefits that come with that:
Essentially, the same benefits also apply to the broader pickup and dropoff optimization that we’ve been talking about. When you’re able to map out your route plans in such a way that they account for store stops, reloads, and the like, the entire last mile process becomes more standardized.
It’s the same if you’re routing an entire series of pickups—whether that’s for donation management, returns management, or any other aspect of your business. With this approach, you can enhance your level of visibility, and you can achieve more control and consistency across the board by leveraging smarter proof of pickup/dropoff, real-time tracking, and digital documentation.
The question is: how do you make sure you’re actually getting all of those benefits out of a route optimization solution?
When it comes to optimizing pickups and dropoffs in the last mile, lightweight routing apps generally aren’t going to cut it. At the same time, a TMS is too heavy duty for most modern delivery businesses. Threading the technological needle can feel like a challenge.
Luckily, there are last mile optimization platforms that can support these use cases easily enough. Here are a few things to look for in last mile logistics software that help you ensure you’re getting a solution that can meet your challenges:
DispatchTrack’s solution is purpose-built to help businesses optimize pickups and dropoffs across the entire last mile logistics process. We’ve helped businesses across a diverse array of industries to streamline routing and scheduling—no matter how complex their use cases. If you want to learn more about how we can help businesses like yours reduce delivery costs and improve performance, reach out to our team today.
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