Reputation has its rewards
Undisclosed flights of stairs and too-narrow doorways aside, when you take on furniture and appliance deliveries, you take on a lot of responsibility. That $25,000 appliance suite you just loaded up has a mirror finish that the customer expects will be installed in their kitchen unblemished. Clients want to know that their merchandise — and their brand — are in good hands. If you do it right, time after time, your reputation for performance will be as valuable as a houseful of Mitchell Gold furniture.
Accurate ETAs — every time
You’ll have a leg up with customers when you arrive on time. While it may be tempting to blame delays on drivers, drivers can’t keep a schedule that was never realistic. DispatchTrack’s AI-boosted routing optimizes each load, each truck and each route to put together the best combination of trucks, crew and schedule. It not only considers the assets needed — lift gate, crew with specific skills, heavy dollies — but also remembers what the roads in the delivery area are like during the customer’s preferred time window and how long this particular crew took to perform similar deliveries in the past. All of this intelligence helps you nail two-hour windows time after time.
Success starts before the truck is loaded
Before anything hits the dock, DispatchTrack is working to ensure your success. Customers can pick a time window online, one that not only works for them but is also optimized for your assets and schedule. Customers fill out a pre-delivery questionnaire so your crew will know about — and the route timing will be adjusted for — locked access gates, overly protective dogs and narrow doorways before they leave the warehouse.
Provide detailed workflow for installers
Keep the work flowing with the DispatchTrack furniture delivery app. You or your client can create detailed step-by-step workflow documents to guide installers. They’ll instantly know where to find the door lock release on the over-engineered oven, and they can check off each step as they go, assuring you and your client the job is being done right.
See your operation in real time in a single glance
From your all-in-one dashboard screen at headquarters, you’ll see every truck, every route and every delivery as it occurs. Just as important, customers waiting for their merchandise can see where their goods are and that they’re on time. If there’s a hiccup or a question, driver, dispatcher, client and customer can communicate in real time via voice, text or email.
Delivered, sealed, signed
Once the work is finished, your crew can document exactly what they did with notes, photos and videos. That big scratch on the kitchen floor? Photos will show it was there before they arrived, so not your responsibility. Everything is handled on the crew’s smart device. At the end, the customer signs on the screen and everything is uploaded to your dashboard in the office. This is how furniture delivery software should work.
In the world of building supplies, Ferguson Enterprises is a behemoth: 1,400 locations, 4,000 delivery assets, 27,000 associates. To its thousands of customers, Ferguson is both the preferred partner for supplies and one their biggest potential hurdles. If Ferguson doesn’t deliver their supplies at the right time — not before and certainly not after — huge construction projects can grind to a halt. The company’s decades old legacy in-house logistics software hadn’t kept up with Ferguson’s growth or with the fast-paced rhythm required by just-in-time construction processes. They knew it was time for a change, and they turned to DispatchTrack to implement a bold new vision.
Ferguson saw they could convert a potential liability — a legacy logistics system that rarely predicted ETAs correctly — into a best-in-class asset that would give them a competitive advantage. Their vision was to be completely transparent with customers by making ferguson.com their logistics hub. They wanted customers to see their orders, schedule and re-schedule deliveries and track delivery status. If that bar weren’t high enough, the new system would have to be able to intelligently route Ferguson’s 4,000 vehicles plus 3PLs Ferguson uses to flex capacity. Their choice of software partners was critical as it would deeply impact every aspect of their business: Warehousing, delivery, labor, profitability. Who did they turn to?
The decision turned on a single meeting between Ferguson and DispatchTrack. "The question we posed to DispatchTrack was, 'Could they provide everything that we needed?'" said David Simons, Regional Vice President of Distribution and Fulfillment at Ferguson. "They were able to articulate a plan in real time, on the fly, in such detail that our I.T. people walked away from the meeting with a great deal of confidence that DispatchTrack’s plan was a great idea and would solve our issues."
With DispatchTrack as their partner, Ferguson deployed a comprehensive routing solution across all of their sales verticals. “Things have been great,” Simons shared. “We now have a consistent experience across all sales verticals for deliveries to our customers. That’s been extremely impactful.” More than 10,000 Ferguson dispatchers are now using DispatchTrack to schedule and route deliveries. But the system doesn’t stop at deliveries. Dispatchers can also schedule and monitor complex installations that often involve third-party contractors. Customers who prefer contactless pick-up can do that as well without ever going inside a distribution center.
A tool only works if you use it. Ferguson knew that the system they created needed to be simple and intuitive — and easy to adopt — to be successful. "Ultimately, the tight collaboration between software vendor, IT department, and training teams resulted in 1,100 sales locations adopting DispatchTrack in three months with 98% compliance," Simons said. "DispatchTrack has the ability to be nimble. And that’s something I haven’t seen with other organizations in the same space. When you work with a partner like DispatchTrack that can truly make our associates’ lives easier at the local level, while also pleasing the customer, that’s a win-win situation."
