Search for software for delivery companies and you’ll find a lot of businesses touting their delivery software and a handful of listicles ranking the different options. This is undoubtedly helpful for businesses trying to find ways to optimize their deliveries—but there’s only so much research you can do into potential solutions if you don’t have a strong sense of what separates the “good enough” delivery software platforms from the cream of the crop.
After all, it can be tough to tell just from reading reviews whether a particular solution actually has the coverage you need to get a real impact from your deployment. And the last thing anyone wants after a long (or even a relatively short) process of rolling out software and dealing with change management is to realize that you can’t actually get the efficiency gains you were hoping for.
Luckily, there are ways to evaluate software for delivery companies in terms of their features, track record, and capabilities that can be helpful guideposts in your software selection process. In this post, we’ll dig into the delivery software market and look closely at the ways that different solutions do and don’t make it easy to streamline deliveries, control your logistics processes, and delight your customers.
What Most Software for Delivery Companies Offer Logistics Operators
When it comes to delivery management software, you’ll see a lot of providers offering the same overlapping set of things:
- Dispatching routes and orders to drivers
- Tracking deliveries in real time
- Sending notifications to customers
- Driver management via a driver mobile application
- Routing and scheduling deliveries
Different solutions will offer different levels of emphasis on the things from this list (and the list certainly isn’t exhaustive), but finding a solution to tick these boxes isn’t going to be too difficult.
The challenges start to come in when you begin asking more difficult questions: Will the routing and scheduling work for complex or big and bulky use cases like scheduled building supplies or furniture deliveries? Does the delivery dashboard actually give me the information I need at a glance to manage deliveries across my entire network? Is there functionality to ensure compliance on delivery and service runs across my logistics operations?
One of the key things to think about here is the difference in needs between parcel and courier deliveries versus more complicated use cases (e.g. building materials, food distribution, appliances, and most services).
- Parcel delivery: Customers usually don’t need to be at the delivery site to receive the order, so precise timing isn’t critical. Coordination with other services, installations, removals, etc. usually isn’t necessary. Customer expectations—while still extremely stringent—aren’t the same as they are for scheduled deliveries.
- Scheduled delivery: Customers are often making a point of being at the site to receive delivery, which means that they expect your drivers or technicians to show up within a short window of time. That doesn’t just require precision routing, it requires clear customer communications and visibility throughout the process. Your documentation needs are also much greater, and there’s a greater likelihood that you have to juggle multiple different delivery and service types that all have their own skillset and vehicle requirements.
This gets at just a few of the key differences—and it should give a sense of why a last mile operator who needs to manage scheduled deliveries needs to avoid delivery management software that’s optimized for comparatively lightweight use cases like parcel and courier.
How the Best Software for Delivery Companies Pushes the Envelope
The best software for delivery companies will offer all the capabilities we listed out above, but it will also offer a lot more than that. The right software for delivery management is the one that will actually yield results in terms of efficiency, visibility, and customer experience—and none of those things happen by accident.
Here are a few things to look for to set yourself up to actually get results:
- A focus on real, strategic visibility and integration. Your delivery software should make it easy to get the right information at the right time—across the first, middle, and last miles. This means leveraging not just software integrations with other parts of the technology stack, but also an emphasis on visibility and connectivity within the platform itself. The driver mobile app should instantly send proof of delivery back to dispatchers, routing and schedules workflows should automatically inform customer communications. Different roles and functions should be able to connect and gain visibility into one another’s workflows as needed.
- A track record of effective innovation and a roadmap for the future. With the current boom in AI functionality, the best platforms will have proven applications for leveraging AI for customer engagement, driver empowerment, routing and dispatching, etc. You’ll be able to tell the real innovations from vaporware based on the concrete results that other logistics operators have seen. The same goes for other areas of innovation: if your technology vendor isn’t keeping up with a changing landscape, they won’t be able to help you keep pace with your competitors.
- Configurable, flexible, scalable routing and scheduling. The ability to generate efficient routes powers a huge amount of operational efficiency if—and only if—the routing process is flexible and scalable enough to meet your needs. It should be able to handle reloads, backhauls, equipment matching, variable drive times, and much more. You should be able to configure your routes in a way that reflects your actual operational needs, and you should be able to do that in a matter of minutes, even for a huge number of trucks.
3 Keys to Achieving ROI with Your Delivery Management Software
- Develop a plan for change management: This is so critical it almost feels like it should go without saying, but one of the keys here is to make sure you’re partnered with a vendor who understands the common change management hurdles in logistics and can help you navigate them. Select your vendor with care and make sure you have roles and responsibilities figured out for deployment well ahead of time. This should include training time for the various teams that will need to interact with the software (which, in a perfect world, will be a matter of days rather than weeks or months).
- Digitize and standardize wherever possible: The goal here is to be able to optimize your delivery logistics, and you can’t optimize what you can’t see and measure. In order to make apples to apples comparisons between different delivery runs and even different parts of the logistics journey, your processes and documentation need to be standardized. This can include everything from proof of delivery to service and compliance forms and audit logs of customer interactions.
- Define visibility and make sure you achieve it: Visibility isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the key to achieving clarity and control across your logistics operations. Make sure your vendor knows that and bakes that idea into every aspect of the deployment. This means not just ensuring effective integrations across the board, but getting those integrations set up to empower your teams to plan and execute more efficient deliveries.
Conclusion: The Power of the Right Software for Delivery Companies
Anyone who works in logistics knows how important it is to have the right equipment for the job, and with software solutions it’s no different. The right delivery management platform can boost efficiency, improve visibility, and help you delight your customers—as long as you’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff in your selection process.
If you’re interested in learning more about how delivery management software can be deployed effectively and translated into ROI, reach out to our team today. We’d love to walk you through it.