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Do you ever look at your delivery network and wonder if your warehouses are actually positioned to serve your customers without your trucks criss-crossing one another paths? Or whether more of the items that are being returned to your warehouses could be sold on to other customers? What about how whether there are ways to move back your order cutoff time and more easily handle last-minute requests?
In a moment where the economy seems particularly volatile, and costs are rising faster than businesses can keep up, it’s important to be asking exactly those sorts of questions. In fact, it’s important not just to ask them, but to find a way to answer them with an eye towards making sure you’re delivering to customers in a way that’s cost-effective and positions you for future success.
Needless to say, it’s almost impossible to do that when it feels like your back is constantly against the wall and your time is taken up reacting to changes and disruptions. Unfortunately, that’s been the status quo at a lot of delivery organizations over the years, with planners being more reactive than proactive.
Changing the way you do things is always a challenge, but the current conditions in the market aren’t really giving most businesses another option. That’s why it’s never been more important for delivery organizations to find a way to be proactive instead of reactive. How do you make that happen? Start with a focus on strategic planning.
We don’t need to spend too much time belaboring the point about market conditions in 2023. Gas prices have been high all year, labor shortages aren’t going away any time soon—virtually everything that goes into a successful delivery seems like it’s becoming more expensive. Things like lumber prices that might impact buyers may have stabilized relative to last year, but there's still plenty of uncertainty.
Being asked to do more with less won’t be a new experience for most people who manage deliveries on any level. But this upcoming year may be particularly acute on that front, meaning that it’s more important than ever to find a way to create delivery and distribution plans that are flexible and resilient in the face of changing conditions.
At the same time that these challenges are arising, of course, the importance of delivery is becoming more and more obvious—even beyond the roles that traditionally interact with it. Your average CEO is more likely than ever to be actively interested in what’s happening across the company’s warehouses and distribution centers than ever. This level of scrutiny comes at a moment when customer experience and cost-efficiency have the potential to be at odds with one another—making it the perfect time to take a step back, accumulate some high-level buy-in, and start taking a proactive approach to planning out your delivery and distribution network.
By transitioning from simply reacting to changing circumstances with the best possible fixes in the moment to proactively plotting out the optimal way to meet customer delivery demand, you can position yourself to weather whatever storms 2023 throws at you.
In practice, this will mean different things for different businesses. But broadly speaking, this might involve a few elements:
Again, these are going to vary based on your industry, your size, and the particulars of your business. But it’s hard to overstate the importance of taking a more strategic approach to fulfillment. When you have the right transportation network, the right assets, and the right plan, you can decrease the waste and inefficiency that are often baked into long standing logistics processes. Not only that, but you can make your operations agile enough to handle changing conditions—from an unexpected demand spike to a huge supply chain disruption—quickly and effectively.
It would be perfectly understandable if you looked at some of the tactics above and thought that they seemed like luxuries. Not only does the kind of planning we’re talking about traditionally take a lot of time and resources—which businesses may not have to devote to this kind of planning—they can be imprecise and uncertain.
But these elements of strategic planning can be efficient, everyday activities with the right technology.
What does that look like in practice? It looks like leveraging delivery management software that offers the following:
When you have technology that meets these criteria, you suddenly have the ability to take a proactive approach to planning deliveries. With all the knowns and unknowns that are headed towards the global supply in 2023, there’s no time like the present for making sure you’re prepared.
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