Last Mile Delivery Software - Transform Last Mile Deliveries
By Komal Puri | October 13, 2022
Key Challenges a Last Mile Delivery Solution Addresses and The Benefits it Delivers
Leveraging an advanced last mile software to drive customer centricity and profitability
The need to embrace last mile delivery software is being driven by the need to boost customer loyalty, optimize operational costs and curb manual dependencies. With growing customer expectations the need to craft new last mile delivery models is becoming eminent. Businesses across industries are realizing that their traditional delivery models are simply not efficient enough to drive same-day deliveries, on-hour delivery, contactless deliveries, hyperlocal deliveries, curbside pickups, white-glove services among others. Hence, embracing advanced last mile software to digitalize core logistics operations is rapidly emerging as a key business enabler.
Modern last mile management software empowers brands to balance cost and customer experience. It helps them achieve agility but not at the expense of efficiency. It leverages disruptive technologies to augment human efforts when executing final mile delivery service.
Enterprises across B2B, B2C & D2C are facing the need to deliver a perfect last mile experience and hence leverage last mile solutions. A last mile delivery platform or last mile delivery software empowers businesses to cater to ever-increasing customer expectations and achieve operational efficiency. It keeps costs under check, provides a range of operations like delivery scheduling, task allocation, routing, real-time tracking, tracing and more.
FarEye's last mile delivery routing software helps them deliver the perfect final mile experience to customers at optimal efficiency.
Key Last Mile Delivery Challenges Enterprises Need To Address
1. Lack of Real-Time Last Mile Visibility
Poor or lack of visibility into last-mile operations have historically been a major challenge for the logistics industry. Poor visibility triggers a series of inefficiencies like delivery delays, increasing logistics risks, inaccurate benchmarking, diminishing OTIF (on-time in-full) volumes, poor delivery productivity and more. A modern last mile visibility software can go a long way in helping enterprises gain high-levels of delivery visibility.
2. Control over Last Mile Operations
Traditional means of managing delivery operations cannot cope up with the rapidly growing speed of delivery operations. In absence of robust tracking and tracing mechanisms, it's extremely difficult to have a firm grip over ground-level delivery operations. Especially when it comes to managing third-party logistics partners, control is key. Leveraging manual methods like calls, lengthy spreadsheets, dated physical documents among others make logistics partner management a daunting task. Hence, savvy delivery executives are investing in last mile delivery tracking software to drive intelligent 3PL management and boost control over last mile operations.
3. Increasing Customer Anxiety
Modern customers are impatient. They are driven by the need for instant gratification. Businesses that do not succeed in providing customers with delivery transparency will find themselves swimming in hot waters. Intimating customers about delivery progress through automated alerts and notifications is not just a 'good to have' anymore. It's a necessity and it also empowers brands to fight competition.
Two key reasons behind rising anxiety levels are delayed deliveries and inaccurate ETAs. Traditional methods of calculating ETAs are inefficient. These methods cannot compute multiple variable factors, both internal and external, before confirming the exact delivery time.
It's not easy to gain the confidence of modern customers with such processes. If the ETA says one-hour, the customer will expect the delivery within an hour.
4. Growing Volumes of Shipment Status Check-in Calls
Growing volumes of calls from customers to know about the shipment status are one of the most frequent challenges businesses face. Hours of time, money and energy goes into picking up customer query calls and responding to them, and coming up with the right response can in itself be a tedious process.
For instance, if a customer asks an agent when her courier will be delivered, the agent needs to first trace which transporter is responsible for the delivery. Then narrow down the search to the person who is working on the ground to ensure that the customer's order is delivered. In most cases, the agents need to connect with a middleman, who then connects to a driver and finds out the delivery status and then gets back to the agent. The agent then reverts to the customer with a befitting answer.
This is still a simple scenario. It gets extremely complex in reality. Answers to 'where is my delivery?' can often get lost in an infinite loop between multiple transporters, multiple middle and multiple drivers. To eliminate this hassle businesses must embrace last mile automation software. Such software automates the entire process of notifying customers.
Through auto alerts, smart tracking links, mobile apps and text notifications, last mile automation software drastically reduces the need for customers to make calls to know about their delivery status.
5. A Dearth of Day-to-Day Operational Clarity for Drivers
Drivers often face a situation where they hardly have any idea about the delivery tasks they are supposed to complete or the targets they need to meet on a given day. Delivery tasks get assigned in an ad-hoc and random manner without considering any factors like delivery type, proximity from customer location, empty miles, opportunity for multi-drop deliveries and more.
This makes it difficult for drivers to manage tasks and ultimately impacts their productivity. Embracing a last mile delivery management platform is a smart way to address this problem. It makes drivers proactive by automatically planning delivery schedules in advance. Last mile software solutions also makes delivery executives extremely productive.
6. Reducing Operational Efficiency
Inefficient delivery operations directly impact the bottom line and increase the total cost of ownership. By operational efficiencies we mean unnecessary fuel consumption, growing instances of empty miles, thefts, inefficient route planning, inability to respond to emergencies and exceptions, increasing vehicle wear and tear, poor delivery productivity, shrinking on-time in-full delivery volumes, growing delivery failures and more.
Some key reasons behind inefficient delivery operations are increasing dependencies on manual intervention, lack of visibility, poor communication between delivery stakeholders, inefficient 3PL management and dearth of capabilities to ensure data-backed decision making.
A robust enterprise-grade last mile platform helps businesses address operational challenges by leveraging automation, machine learning, the Internet of Things, predictive intelligence and analytics.
The Importance Of Last Mile Tracking
Ensuring efficient last mile tracking, a key feature of last mile software solutions, is a great way to address some of the key delivery challenges we mentioned above. The significance of last mile tracking lies in how it impacts customer experience and delivery profitability both in the long and short run. Using last mile tracking capabilities delivery stakeholders can improve visibility of ground-level delivery activities.
Knowing where a vehicle is, what's the status of a delivery, what's its ETA, who is executing the last mile operation, what's the customer's location and more becomes extremely easy.
It helps identify any inconsistencies at a micro-level. Hence, it makes absolute sense to deploy last mile routing software. Such software empowers enterprises to track and trace delivery fleet in real-time. An advanced last mile routing software or an advanced last mile platform is powered by predictive intelligence and machine learning that proactively alerts delivery managers about a delivery being completed early, on-time or delayed.
Another key advantage of last mile tracking is providing customers with delivery transparency.
Benefits of Last Mile Delivery Tracking Software
Modern last mile delivery tracking software or last mile tracking software generates multiple benefits that range from automating repetitive manual tasks, boosting profitability to enhancing customer experience. Let's quickly glance through some of the major benefits of such last mile tracking software.
1. Real-Time Route Optimization
Last mile delivery tracking software optimizes predefined delivery routes in real-time. Based on factors like traffic congestion, weather conditions, delivery urgency, sudden road closures, on-ways, number of deliveries on a single route amongst others, it constantly looks for ways to ensure that a driver is armed with the most efficient route and that ETAs are adhered to.
2. Proactive Delivery Monitoring
An advanced last mile delivery tracking platform empowers businesses to get proactive with deliveries and help their customers prepare contingencies in case of any unprecedented events. By studying patterns and analyzing historical data a last mile delivery tracking platform accurately predicts by how much time delivery will be delayed, will it be on-time or early.
3. Enhanced Delivery Productivity
Last mile delivery platform boosts productivity by ensuring drivers follow highly-efficient routes, it eliminates chances of unnecessary delays and stoppages and triggers alerts in case of potential risk-situation. All these positively impact delivery turnaround-time and reduce overhead expenses.
4. Data-Driven Decision Making
A modern last mile delivery tracking platform is powered by machine learning algorithms and business intelligence that empower delivery stakeholders to make prompt and accurate decisions based on data.
5. Intelligent Third-Party Logistics Management
Such software tracks every movement of 3PL providers, carriers and shippers. At any given point in time businesses can know the delivery status of an order that's being shipped by a logistics partner. Last mile delivery tracking platform accurately benchmarks KPIs of third-party logistics providers by analyzing historical performance. It helps select delivery partners based on the type of delivery, size of the order, location of parcels, nature of items and more.
6. Improved Customer Experience
Last mile delivery tracking software empowers businesses to provide high-levels of delivery transparency to the customer. Customers can know at any given time where her delivery is, when will it reach and who will bring it. Such software sends out automated notifications to customers updating them about delivery progress and delays if any. A last mile tracking platform is powered by natural language processing chatbots that boost customer engagement.
Optimizing Last Mile Delivery Costs
The last mile is known to be expensive. Having said that, it's also true that there are multiple opportunities to optimize key delivery processes and reduce last mile delivery costs. So, the answer to 'how to reduce last mile delivery costs?' lies in optimization. By reducing miles per delivery, improving visibility, mitigating risks, boosting driver productivity, generating multi-drop delivery routes and ensuring SLA adherence, enterprises can drastically improve their existing last mile delivery cost structure.
Embracing Last Mile Route Optimization Software
A secret to efficient and fast last mile execution is embracing robust last mile route optimization software. These tools analyze historical data and automatically generate highly efficient delivery routes. This helps enterprises reduce fuel consumption, shrink carbon footprint and ensure fast, same-day and one-hour delivery. Modern routing tools also optimize delivery routes in real-time to ensure Estimated Time of Arrivals (ETAs) are met.
Driving End-to-End Last Mile Connectivity
Connecting every moving part in the last mile ecosystem is critical to ensuring end-to-end delivery visibility, eliminating downtimes, mitigating risks, improving stakeholder collaboration and accurately benchmarking carrier performance. Hence, there is an urgent need for businesses to quickly address the last mile connectivity issue. Modern last mile connectivity solutions can easily connect with disparate logistics IT architectures like TMS, WMS, OMS, 3PL networks and more to drive seamless interoperability across delivery silos.
Improving The Last Mile Transportation Ecosystem
Inefficiencies like poor routing, lack of delivery visibility, increasing transportation risks, unnecessary logistic downtimes, poor utilization of capacity and last mile delivery vehicles have been weighing down transportation operations for a long time. Modern last mile transportation solutions powered by disruptive technologies like AI, Machine Learning, IoT, analytics and predictive intelligence can seamlessly address these challenges and drastically optimize transportation operations.
Questions To Ask Before Investing in a Last Mile Delivery Platform
1.Is the last mile delivery solution adaptable to changing market dynamics?
It does not take long for customers to change how they buy products and this directly impacts business objectives. The pandemic is a good example. A last mile delivery solution should be able to help businesses quickly respond to changing market dynamics by understanding patterns in how customers want to buy products and what they want to buy online. It should have capabilities that empower brick and mortar businesses to migrate to digital efficient online delivery models without having to ripping and replacing existing resources.
2.Can a last mile delivery management platform scale delivery operations?
Ensuring that your last mile delivery management platform can scale easily is important. The demand for online sales drastically increases during peak business and holiday seasons. Such a platform should have in-built capabilities to quickly scale delivery operations by onboarding delivery executives from local gig-economies as and when required.
3.How flexible is your last mile logistics platform?
The last mile logistics software you are going to invest in must have the ability to make deliveries flexible and customer-centric. It should quickly change delivery workflows in case a customer decides to change the delivery location and time. This boosts customer experience by generating self-service type delivery models.
4.How intelligent should my last mile delivery platform be?
The last mile delivery platform needs to be intelligent enough to leverage best practices from across disparate industries while creating routes, outsourcing deliveries, benchmarking delivery partner KPIs and more. It should have the capabilities to understand the current status of a delivery and send automatic notifications to concerned delivery stakeholders and customers about the same. Last mile logistics software should be able to accurately identify transportation risks and trigger alerts so that delivery managers can quickly act upon them.
Final Mile Delivery Software: An Emerging Trend
Owing to growing environmental regulations around carbon emissions, businesses that are heavily dependent on transportation operations need to embrace digital means to manage deliveries to shrink their carbon footprint. Therefore, savvy and socially aware enterprises are leveraging cutting-edge final mile delivery software to make delivery operations autonomous, reduce fuel consumption and shrink miles travelled. Final mile delivery software also shrinks paper usage, eliminates vehicle idling and reduces empty miles. These factors when put together can significantly curb a brand's carbon emissions.
How FarEye’s Last Mile Optimization Software Can Help
Delightful Deliveries With FarEye's Last Mile Delivery Optimization Software FarEye is a customizable SaaS based delivery management platform that has helped world’s leading enterprises solve their last mile challenges. FarEye's last mile delivery management software empowers enterprises with the following capabilities:
- Fully customizable solution
- Automatic order allocation
- Automatic dispatching
- Chatbot-based customer support
- Real-time dynamic routing
- Flexible delivery scheduling
- Customer live delivery tracking app
- Electronic proof of delivery
Key Highlights
- Machine-learning based routing
- Geofence based attendance tracking
- Digital run sheets
- 1-click tracking
- Real-time ETAs
- SMS & web-based fleet tracking software
- KPI dashboards
- Digital control tower
- Predictive alerts & notifications
- Pick-up point & parcel shop deliveries
Benefits of Last Mile Delivery Logistics
Improved Delivery Happiness Score
Using our modern logistics platform businesses can enhance customer experience through a seamless execution of last mile delivery process. Provide them advanced facilities like customer scheduling, real-time live tracking, predictable ETAs.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Leverage the power of our final mile delivery automation software to make your deliveries error-free, efficient and optimized. Save a lot of operational costs as a result of optimized last mile delivery processes. Track core KPIs using FarEye’s customizable control tower.
Improved Real-time Visibility
Curb the challenge of poor logistics visibility with our last mile visibility software that gives real-time predictive visibility to all your last mile delivery operations. Whether it is a warehouse or en-route or delivered or returned shipment, keep all your stakeholders informed through multiple modes such as WhatsApp, SMS, email and more.
Increased Courier Productivity
Advanced logistics platform ensures better automation, visibility and predictability. This helps delivery agents do more with less time. This means a significant increase in your deliveries which you can measure per hour. Equip them with our modern logistics app to boost productivity and keep them engaged. To know more about FarEye’s last mile delivery platform you can quickly get in touch with our delivery management experts here.
Increase On-Time Deliveries With
Last Mile Delivery Software
Komal Puri is a seasoned professional in the logistics and supply chain industry. As the AVP of Marketing and a subject matter expert at FarEye, she has been instrumental in shaping the industry narrative for the past decade. Her expertise and insights have earned her numerous awards and recognition. Komal’s writings reflect her deep understanding of the industry, offering valuable insights and thought leadership.