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6 Minute Read
Let’s picture a hypothetical scenario: it’s 6 o’clock on a Thursday and somebody walks into your showroom. They’re desperate for a new couch, and they demand to have it delivered tomorrow. The next day’s routes have been finalized already, so you have a dilemma. You can try and shoehorn this order onto a truck route that’s already set—potentially risking late deliveries to other customers on the route and potential knock-on effects—or you can disappoint this customer and lose out on a sale.
There’s no great answer. If you upend your existing routes, it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen—you might be able to slot this order in easily, you might not. If you say that you can’t get it delivered the next day, you have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to happen—the customer is going to try and find someone else to fulfill the order—and it’s certainly not what you want.
This is a problem that only becomes thornier when disruptions make the rest of the supply chain unpredictable. If a customer is worried that they'll run into stocking issues, they're that much more likely to jump ship and get their goods from whoever can fulfill them the most quickly.
If only your routing cutoff were later in the day, this whole dilemma would be moot.
As it happens, that’s what modern delivery route management systems can offer you. With the advent of SaaS technology, AI, and machine learning, route optimization technology has only gotten faster and more sophisticated. Delivery businesses that adopt this technology can now put themselves in a position to speed up routing, reduce costs, and get more out of their delivery capacity.
The question is: how do they do it?
Index:
In the hypothetical above, we actually hit on a few of the different challenges that make route management so thorny:
This last point shines a light on the fundamental tension between customer experience and efficiency. If it didn’t matter when your customers got their orders, you could route deliveries the same way that parcel delivery companies do, with the shortest possible routes and as many orders as you can fit on the truck.
But customers often have specific scheduling requests that you have to work around. Even if they don’t, you still need to find a way to give them an accurate ETA.
Getting the day right doesn’t feel like too much to ask—and AM vs. PM is usually doable even without a sophisticated delivery route management software solution—but narrowing delivery times down a two-hour window? That’s incredibly difficult to accomplish by hand.
This has implications not just for cost, but for capacity utilization as well. If you’re not sure how long a route is going to take, you don’t know if it’s overloaded or underutilized. And this is before we even start thinking about optimizing delivery costs.
When you can speed up your optimization, delivery route management gets radically simpler. You have more time to accept orders, and you have more time in which to make adjustments when orders come in late or other changes arise.
Here are five key ways of making that happen:
Okay, let’s say you’ve achieved faster delivery route management by following the best practices above. What benefits can you actually expect to experience? In other words, how will these improvements save you time and money when it comes to last mile delivery management?
Here are a few concrete ways that the best route optimization software can benefit businesses that handle last mile deliveries.
At the end of the day, each of these benefits adds up to one thing: lower costs. And how do you achieve all of that? It starts with leveraging the right delivery route management software for your business.
If you think faster, smarter, and more efficient routing has the potential to impact your business, reach out to one of our experts. We'd love to show off the impact that improved delivery route management can have.
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