5 Keys to Real-Time Delivery Management

We’re not shy about mentioning the fact that the last mile accounts for more than half of total logistics costs in most operations. But sometimes it’s not the entire last mile that’s a challenge—sometimes it’s just the last 50 feet. Or sometimes the challenges don’t crop up until your team is already at the delivery site and ready to unload. Some delivery management challenges—like optimizing schedules to maximize your capacity utilization or scaling up your customer communications so they don’t require an entire call center—are predictable from a mile away. But some are going to crop up in the moment, and finding a way to solve those is just as crucial as dealing with the ones that you saw coming in advance. 

Of course, managing deliveries in real time is a serious challenge. It requires your delivery operations to be highly connected and visible, and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to achieve efficient real-time delivery management. 

The key is to ensure that you have the right tools, the right processes, and the right data in place so you tackle any issues that arise on the day of delivery. 

How Real-Time Delivery Management Impacts Logistics Costs

Delivery exceptions and disruptions are simply a fact of life. Even if you have a 99% delivery success rate, at a large enterprise that’s still dozens of deliveries per day that don’t go according to plan and require some TLC from your team to make right. 

That’s why real-time delivery management is so crucial to keeping customers happy. And it’s also why managing deliveries effectively in real time has such a significant impact on delivery and logistics costs. 

As a quick example: Let’s say you have a driver whose first stop of the day took significantly longer than expected. If you just let it ride and do nothing (or if you don’t even know that it’s happened), there’s a good chance that many or most of the other stops along the route won’t go according to plan. Customers won’t know when to expect the driver, so they won’t be at the delivery site to accept deliveries—and you’ll be stuck with a host of unplanned returns when a huge number of orders come back to the warehouse. 

This obviously has a big impact on costs: for any given order, you have to make an expensive redelivery attempt that doubles your mileage, you need to use up warehouse space, and you risk additional opportunities for damage. (And this is before we talk about damage to your reputation.)

If you can spot the fact that those deliveries are going to be late in real time, the entire game changes. You’ll still deal with some failed deliveries in all likelihood, but you may be able to salvage a large percentage of them, which puts you in a position to keep logistics costs manageable.

More importantly, it enables you to keep your customers happy even when things aren’t going according to plan. 

What Are the Keys to Real-Time Delivery Management?

Real-time delivery management can be a huge cost saver in logistics—but how do you actually achieve it? In other words, what are the tools, processes, and technologies you need to have in place to manage your deliveries in real time and respond to exceptions with agility?

Here are five key steps to making that happen:

1. Leverage AI for Customers, Drivers, and Dispatchers

We won’t belabor the point: AI is changing the face of logistics at a rapid pace. That means there are a number of applications already out there that can make life easier for your teams and make real-time delivery management more feasible. To wit, you can leverage AI in route planning to ensure more accurate delivery ETAs—meaning that managing your deliveries in real time is smoother and easier from the jump. For drivers, AI can power stop-level location intelligence to make it easier to find parking and access quickly and move on to the next job. Customers, too, can benefit from AI-powered chat agents that have the ability to give them instant live updates on their delivery orders. Taken together, these AI-powered applications help ensure that everyone has the visibility they need and that delivery plans are more likely to be executed efficiently. 

2. Prioritize Connectivity

To spot a delivery exception in real time, you need to have access to live delivery data—not just access, but easy access from the moment you open your delivery management software. Making this work requires connectivity between drivers out in the field and teams in the office. Here, the right driver mobile app is crucial. Drivers should be able to update their statuses with the push of a button when they’re going to a job and collect proof of delivery via pictures, signatures, and notes. At the same time, the app should be transmitting the driver’s location back to dispatchers and uploading proof of delivery in real time. This goes a long way towards ensuring that dispatchers, managers, and customer support staff can visualize what’s happening in the field at a glance, rather than hunting for information as deliveries unfold. 

3. Prepare for Exceptions in Advance

When an ice storm hits a significant part of your delivery network, what does the response from your team look like? Is your customer support staff scrambling to call every customer along a given route to reschedule delivery while your dispatchers desperately try to get drivers off the road? Or is sending out a mass communication with rescheduling links a matter of a few clicks? We probably don’t need to sell you on the concept that the second option is preferable. The tricky part here is just finding technology that will support you by making it easy to communicate with customers en masse for impactful weather events. Likewise with more mundane, everyday delivery exceptions. 

4. Offer Live Delivery Visibility Across Roles and Functions

We’ve been talking a lot about dispatchers and customer support teams when it comes to real-time delivery management, but sometimes your customers might call their sales reps to ask about the status of an order, particularly in B2B circumstances like food distribution or building materials distribution. When that happens, you can set up your sales team to get instant answers to customer questions by giving them their own mobile app with live visibility into deliveries. This makes real-time delivery management something that all roles and functions can participate in. 

5. Level up Your Route Plans and Schedules

We mentioned this very briefly in the best practice on AI, but it really bears its own separate callout: Managing by exceptions works most smoothly if late, missed, and failed deliveries are really and truly the exception. In other words, when the majority of your deliveries are going right, you can focus on remediating the small number of orders that are going wrong. How do you make this happen? By ensuring that your route plans and schedules are accurate and precise enough to get customers their orders right when they expect them. 

Conclusion: Real-Time Delivery Management Software

Managing deliveries in real time is a critical strategy for keeping logistics costs manageable, but it’s nearly impossible to achieve without the right tools. Real-time delivery management requires connectivity, visibility, and agility—all of which come down to your delivery management software capabilities. 

Look for software that can easily connect different roles and functions under the same roof, with capabilities for driver management, route optimization, customer engagement, dispatching, and tracking. If you can create a central delivery management hub that functions with real-time delivery transparency, you can make smarter game-time decisions and ultimately reduce delivery costs across the board.