After significant advancement in commerce due to technology giving birth to eCommerce, much more effort has been put into facilitating the delivery of goods shopped online to the final consumers.
To put it straight, eCommerce cannot succeed if last-mile delivery—transporting merchandise from the closest distribution hub to their intended final destination, such as a home or business office—is not streamlined.
The need to streamline and smoothen the delivery process has a step from the traditional methods, which involved trusting a courier service to transport shipments to the final consumer.
It had less accountability and monitoring mechanism and only banked on the service provider’s dependability. Modern-day delivery is handled more skillfully, courtesy of companies like Leopard Systems, through top-tier delivery management software.
What is Delivery Management Software (DMS)?
Delivery management software is a software suite with built-in capabilities for automating the delivery process from beginning to end. Most features of delivery management solutions are tailor-made for small and large organizations, helping them to schedule and track orders, revamp driver performance, optimize delivery routes, and enhance customer satisfaction.
To put it briefly, delivery management software is designed to smoothen logistics. It smoothens B2B & B2C operations, making it cheaper and more efficient. It helps businesses overcome the drawbacks of traditional methods of delivery.
The significant advantage of using software to manage a delivery is that it significantly reduces operating costs while boosting customer satisfaction—a great need for every business.
How Delivery Management Software Can Fast Track Your Deliveries
Delivery management software is only beneficial to your business if you know how to use it to smoothen deliveries. Companies (big and small) offering local deliveries, regional distributors operating multiple fleets, third-party logistics, and many more can employ DMS in the following ways:
1. Planning Scheduling Deliveries
The primary way you will employ delivery management software is in planning and scheduling orders for delivery. This is important to ensure every order is remembered and noticed and that the orders leave the hub at the expected time to meet the customer’s expectations.
Nothing can be disappointing as overlooking schedules—it affects both the business and the customers who could have taken leave at work to pick up their shipment.
With delivery management software, the challenges of people-based operations are greatly reduced. Instead of having someone to oversee everything, the system takes charge, making the process smoother and more involuntary. This translates to utmost efficiency and customer satisfaction, a recipe for increased profits and customer base.
2. Route Mapping and Optimization
Delivery management software can also come through when you need to map and optimize routes for deliveries and service calls. The bedrock of delivery management rests on delivery planning which is only possible with clear route planning.
While manual route planning or route planning with non-commercial tools like Google Maps is fine for personal and adventurous trips, you need something else for business engagements. A commercial delivery is complex and could consume lots of time.
It requires competent knowledge of your delivery areas (which you may not have) and all else that could hinder on-time delivery, such as workforce shortage (drivers), limited vehicle capacity, road restrictions, et cetera.
Instead of hours of hard work, you can employ route planning features provided by delivery management software to have everything in place within minutes. There is reduced human error, and efficient routing can be established even in unfamiliar areas.
Route optimization and mapping help businesses meet customer expectations and navigate the challenges of manual operations that depend on trial and error. It will also lead to significant growth in the number of daily deliveries.
3. Real-Time Tracking
Tracking delivery vehicles in operations is quite significant. It has lots of benefits for businesses, drivers, and customers. The business must keep tabs on the driver’s activities while on a delivery mission.
Delivery managers should be able to say exactly where the shipment is, which they need to do without necessarily having to depend on updates from the drivers. Low network bandwidth can affect drivers, making them unreachable sometimes, which is unsafe for businesses, especially when advising their clients accordingly.
With features enabling real-time tracking, businesses have all the privileges to stay informed of merchandise status in transit. The clients as well can track their shipments to help them plan accordingly to pick them.
Challenges like heavy traffic and any emergencies can be understood firsthand, and appropriate adjustments be made on the side of the business and the client to avoid disappointments that come with the wrong timing of waiting.
4. Monitoring Driver Behaviour
With the ability to facilitate real-time tracking, delivery management software enables delivery managers to track driver behavior. Delivery companies face some challenges that result solely from driver mistakes like over-speeding, sharp turns, and hitting bumps.
Goods in transit could be damaged because of such carelessness on the part of drivers. Knowing the cause of such eventualities can help the company understand who should shoulder the burden of replacement. More than word of mouth is needed in a commercial setup, and the drivers should be able to avoid losses they could not avoid by careful handling.
Monitoring driver behavior helps delivery companies weed out irresponsible drivers and revolutionize their services to meet business and client expectations.
Bottomline
Delivery management software is crucial for businesses to meet their growing delivery assignments. Employing DMS helps businesses deal with the challenges of manual operations and comes with significant benefits, including capabilities to plan and schedule deliveries, optimize routes, and track delivery vehicles.
Increasing demand and competition require businesses keen on competitive advantage to embrace delivery management software.
