Nearly 2/3rds of logistics businesses have limited visibility into their supply chains, which means that when it comes time to make a critical decision—or even a small one—about how to manage delivery logistics, nearly 2/3rds of organizations are stuck relying on guesswork. When you don’t have the data at your fingertips to make informed decisions, you spend a lot of time essentially rolling the dice.
When you have real visibility, suddenly the calculus changes. You have the data you need to exert meaningful control over your supply chain operations in general, and your delivery management in particular. Think of it like playing chess: the only way to succeed is if you can see the whole board.
Of course, once you have that visibility, you need to turn it into results, which can bring its own challenges. That’s exactly the part of the equation that we’ll be looking at in this post: how to gain visibility and clarity and ultimately take control of your deliveries. It’s a crucial piece of the puzzle for boosting efficiency and improving customer satisfaction.
When market conditions are less than ideal—and, let’s face it, they have been for quite a while—protecting your margins becomes more important than ever. At the same time, plenty of companies will look around and decide that the best thing they can do is renew their laser-focused commitment to their customers.
Either way, you need to find a way to take control of your deliveries and get the most out of your assets, your team, and your technology. Here’s how to do just that:
Like we alluded to above, it all starts with visibility. And how do you actually achieve visibility? It’s a matter of making sure that the right people can access the right information at the right time—in the right system. For an executive, the end goal here might be linking your delivery management software up to Power BI or Tableau so that you can get instant answers without hopping around between solutions.
For a dispatcher or manager, the visibility is much more tactical. You need to be able to see first mile and middle mile transfers during the last mile route planning stage, which means that data needs to be not just extant but immediately to hand.
And of course there are your customers, who want visibility into their own deliveries through the process, from purchase and scheduling to live delivery visibility and beyond. Studies show that this has been important to customers for years, and their demands aren’t lessening any time soon.
This level of visibility is essentially table stakes if you want to take control of your deliveries. It’s the backbone of successful delivery operations precisely because it puts you in a position to make informed decisions at speed and at scale.
Visibility is one (critically important) thing, coordination is another. Even when the left hand can see what the right is doing after the fact, that doesn’t mean they’re really working in tandem. That’s why setting up your teams for easy communication, data-sharing, and coordination across the organization is so important.
By way of example: When you have strong open lines of communication between sales and customer support, you manage delivery exceptions more proactively and offer a more cohesive experience to the customer. If the customer calls the original seller with a complaint, for instance, the sales rep can instantly see the order details and delivery status and work directly with customer support to get the customer what they need.
Without this level of communication, you’re stuck with a complicated game of telephone between different functional areas (to say nothing of the customer). This is just one example, but it should give a sense of the extent to which this kind of connectivity makes it easier to take control of a situation that’s gone awry—or even a situation that hasn't.
Let’s do a deeper dive into how the customer factors into all of this. When the delivery is a black box from the moment the driver leaves the distribution center in the morning, you essentially have no control over your deliveries. It’s anyone’s guess what’s going to come back to the warehouse.
Will all of the proof of delivery slips have been signed and collected? Will bits and pieces of different orders have come back because they were the wrong color? Will entire orders have been damaged because they were loaded off the truck only to be loaded back on when the customer wasn’t at the delivery site at the appointed time?
Even when you have a rudimentary degree of delivery tracking, these are still risks. The default position for delivery organizations is one in which you have very limited control over what happens on the day of delivery once the truck leaves the warehouse.
But modern technology makes it easy to turn this equation on its head. Step one is to ensure that you have real time visibility for your customers, e.g. via a tracking portal they can access via their phones. Next, you’ll want to operationalize that tracking internally, so that the right teams get alerts when an exception arises.
From there, you can make sure that you have two-way communication capabilities with your customers. When an alert comes through (or you spot a potential exception from your dashboard), you can immediately reach out to the customer to remediate the situation.
This helps you ameliorate exactly the kinds of sub-optimal delivery outcomes that we sketched out above. Rather than flying blind on the day of delivery, your teams can take an active role in steering each route and each delivery towards success.
Of course, you can’t manage by exception when late and failed deliveries are the rule. In other words, it’s only when most things are already going right that you can take control of the few deliveries that aren’t.
To get to that point, you need close alignment between delivery planning and delivery execution. To a large extent, this comes down to route optimization. Your team needs a routing engine that’s powerful enough to generate routes that optimize capacity utilization and minimize miles per stop—while simultaneously resulting in routes with ETAs that drivers can actually achieve.
Empowering drivers to meet their ETAs 98% of the time or better starts with strong routes, but there’s more than can be done in the driver empowerment department. For instance, you can offer service and compliance forms that give drivers a checklist for ensuring that they meet particular service level requirements. You can even provide AI-powered stop briefings via the driver mobile app to give drivers important context at the job site.
The result is that your plans are better and get carried out more consistently. Fewer things go wrong over the course of each delivery run, putting you in greater control and empowering you to reduce costs.
Nothing we’re describing is a one-and-done process. You’ll need to iterate over time—doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. But the good news is that you’ve set yourself up to gain clarity into the results of each new strategy or experiment.
All of the operational data you’re collecting can and should be put to hard use at this step. This is where you can zoom out, take a longer view, and find new and strategic ways to make your deliveries more efficient and reduce your overall distribution costs.
If there’s one common thread running through this 5-step guide, it’s this: you can’t take control over your deliveries without visibility, and you can’t achieve visibility without the right technology.
Getting the right technology can be a real feat in and of itself, but if you use these steps as guideposts you can find and deploy a solution that turns operational complexity into efficiency and effectiveness.