5 Concrete Steps to Supercharge Productivity in Your Logistics Ops

Why has construction productivity remained flat in recent years? It’s an open question, with a variety of potential answers that will all have some truth to them: There’s a strong argument that material procurement is a factor. No doubt economic uncertainty is as well. But we’d go out of our way to add logistics to that list.

This isn’t to throw logistics under the bus (or even to insinuate  that the need for enhanced logistics productivity is limited to the building materials sector—you can see it retail, distribution, etc.). But it is meant to suggest that for businesses who want to improve productivity, focusing on logistics has the potential to pay huge dividends. 

This can be easier said than done, but it doesn’t have to involve a huge amount of guesswork. Here are five proven steps to improve logistics productivity across the board. 

1. Connect Your Logistics

One of the easiest pitfalls to wind up within the world of delivery and logistics management comes down to losing sight of the connections between the different legs of the journey: first mile, middle mile, and last mile logistics. 

Too often, businesses that have the tools and processes in place to optimize each of these functions fail to ensure close connections between them. The result is that there are unforeseen delays, disruptions, and slowdowns at the points of transfer from one process to the other. 

In other words, the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing (and neither does the third hand, if we extend the metaphor). 

When you’re able to coordinate closely between these functions, it’s a different story entirely. Your last mile delivery teams can spot upstream delays before they’ve made promises to the customer or reserved delivery capacity, so they can keep using their fleet efficiently. Conversely when things are going right, each team has enough visibility to ensure a quick, efficient handoff. 

Customer orders spend less time sitting in warehouses waiting to be scheduled, and disruptions that do crop up are mitigated more easily. 

2. Streamline IT 

Manual data entry and switching between disconnected solutions are two huge sources of lost productivity. Not only does it force your team to spend more time than necessary on nearly any given task, it also increases the odds of errors. 

That’s why getting your IT stack right can be such a huge boon to logistics productivity. It empowers your team to focus their time on what matters, instead of painstaking admin work. 

The first step here is to make sure that every process that can be digitized is covered by your technology stack: routing, dispatching, route manifests, delivery documentation, customer engagement, delivery tracking, pallet scanning, etc. This puts you in a position to gain much greater visibility into what’s actually happening across your logistics network. 

From there, centralizing delivery management functions within a single solution can be extremely powerful. Processes like route optimization, dispatching, delivery execution, and customer engagement (just to take a few examples) are fundamentally connected—when your software treats them that way, you can ensure compliance and find new efficiencies in the connections between different processes.

The end result is that it’s easier for your teams to administer the entire delivery and logistics chain from end to end, and productivity rises accordingly.     

3. Leverage AI 

Okay, we’ve talked about the technological needs that underpin productivity in logistics, some of which can be slightly abstract. Digitizing and centralizing related functions into a single solution absolutely does help with logistics productivity, but it’s not incredibly splashy. 

Now we’re going to get into some flashier high-impact ways to supercharge productivity—starting with the AI. 

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on AI in logistics, and it can be tough to separate the reality from the hype, but as it stands right now there are a few ways you can leverage AI in logistics to directly impact productivity:

• AI in customer engagement: By leveraging an AI-powered agent within your two-way communications with customers, you can automatically and instantaneously answer simple customer questions like “what time is my order scheduled for?” Customer support teams at delivery organizations can spend huge amounts of time answering repetitive questions like these, and by taking them out of the process (and looping them only when a question comes through that the AI can’t answer) you free up huge amounts of time that can be spent more productively. 
• AI in driver enablement: Getting the most out of your capacity is a game of inches—so anything you can do to make it possible to complete just one extra stop each route can have a big productivity boost. That’s where AI-powered location intelligence comes in. The best practice here is to seamlessly add an AI-generated voice note into the driver’s existing workflow before each stop. This can include briefings on building access, parking availability, and customer requirements—all designed to give the context your drivers need to get in and out of the delivery site quickly and easily. 
• AI for route optimization: We’ll cover route optimization in more depth below, but from an AI perspective route optimization is a powerful area for productivity increases. By leveraging existing delivery data from all of your previous runs (plus historical data on things like traffic and weather patterns), you can significantly improve the accuracy of your delivery ETAs. This empowers your drivers to execute on route plans more consistently, which bridges the gap between planned and actual deliveries.  

Going forward, there will be more and more opportunities to leverage AI to boost productivity, so it’s the businesses who are already implementing it who will have the advantage. 

4. Optimize Your Routes

We talked above about how AI-powered routing can boost ETA accuracy and improve productivity in the bargain, but that’s not the only way that route optimization can help. 

More specifically, it’s not the only way that an intelligent route optimization solution can help. With the right routing software, you achieve three things:

• Huge increases in route density and efficiency
• Greater ETA accuracy
• Significant reductions in time spent planning routes

For the purposes of our discussion around productivity, it’s that last bullet point that we want to drill down on. 

Planning routes by hand can be extremely time consuming and laborious—especially if your routes are more complicated than simply drawing a lasso around a map. Even planning routes with a route planner that doesn’t handle your use case easily (let’s say it doesn’t support equipment and capacity matching, can’t factor in differences in driver and technician skills, can’t handle reload stops, etc.) can eat up a huge amount of time from your team.

The right route optimization solution—i.e. a solution that can seamlessly handle all the routing complexity you can throw at it—can radically speed the process up, easily by 50-75% or more. This translates directly into productivity gains for your team and more time for strategic tasks that can add significant value for your logistics operations. 

5. Standardize and Iterate 

Obviously, these are just the first steps in your quest towards improved logistics productivity. Once you’ve tried a few of these tactics, you’ll want to measure the results in terms of productivity and do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. 

To make that possible, you’ll need exactly the kind of digitization that we discussed above, as well as standardized logistics processes across the board that enable you to make apples-to-apples comparisons. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll be able to report on the productivity KPIs that are most important to you and iterate from there. 

Conclusion: Boosting Productivity with the Right Logistics Technology

These steps are tried and tested when it comes to boosting productivity—but is the best practice just to white knuckle them and hope for the best? On the contrary, the most successful logistics businesses are the ones that have strong technology partners they can rely on to create the digital foundation for smoother logistics ops. 

Interested in learning more about how logistics technology can make this happen? Reach out to one of our experts today—we’d love to do a deeper dive into it.