Note: This article was originally published in 2022, and has been updated to include new information and insights.
Do you ever look at your delivery schedule and wonder why you’re delivering a single keg of beer every Wednesday to an account that receives large orders every Tuesday and Thursday? Or why you never seem to have enough capacity to handle the holiday rush on Memorial Day? Or how much it actually costs to organize your deliveries the way they’re currently organized?
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 going into 2024. Labor shortages aren’t going away any time soon—virtually everything that goes into a successful delivery seems like it’s becoming more expensive.
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.
Businesses that deliver mostly to consumers may have to deal with downturns in demand, though it seems likely the trickier issues will come from rising costs. B2B organizations, e.g. those in food and beverage distribution, may find themselves grappling with order mixes that change faster than ever, and they’ll have to find a way to keep customers happy without raising prices.
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 2024 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 2024, there’s no time like the present for making sure you’re prepared.