What is Order to Delivery? How to Stand Out in the Last Mile

Being a dispatcher in the last mile is challenging. When dispatch plans run out of control, goods are stockpiled in warehouses or when deliveries get delayed, you are the first point of contact. As you are the engine that drives customer experience, it is crucial to ensure smooth-functioning of order to delivery operations.

On a regular work day, you handle multiple tasks ranging from managing order schedules to meeting stakeholders and updating the dispatch status. With so many tasks in hand, effective time management becomes crucial to deliver goods on time. When goods are not delivered on time, the First Attempted Delivery Rates (FADR) fall, and it may result in added costs from reattempted deliveries. Beyond all that, you lose customer trust, and your business revenues take a huge hit.

What is Order to Delivery?

Order to Delivery is the end-to-end last-mile logistics management process that involves initiating, processing, and managing the delivery of orders till they reach the customers.

Key Challenges of Delivering in Last-mile

Here are some simple reasons that make last-mile delivery a tough nut to crack.

• Difficulty in managing rising fuel costs and its impact on operational fleet expenses 
• Frictions in handling customer delivery requests and rescheduling requests 
• Increase in idling time due to high traffic restrictions and higher number of delivery stops
• Drivers losing the track of complex routes leading to out-of-mile routes 
• Communication breakdowns with drivers and customers 
• Difficulty in handling ambiguous addresses and names 
• Difficulty in setting realistic ETA (Expected Time of Arrival) for deliveries 
• Customers not being available when delivery is made (failed and missed deliveries) 
• Inability to consistently maintain a stable on-time delivery rate

Excel in Delivering in the last-mile

It can be highly stressful for dispatchers to schedule routes, coordinate with drivers and keep a track of moving things. Handling massive order volumes on a daily basis, things can go haywire when drivers fail to reach customers on time. To stand out in the last-mile delivery business, dispatching operations should be efficient, seamless and simple, so that drivers are happy. When drivers are happy, customers are happy. And when customers are happy, your business grows.

Let’s explore the three ways to stand out in your last-mile delivery operations.

1. Address and bridge communication gaps

The inability to convey delivery information and updates makes communication time-consuming and costly. When there are communication gaps, it becomes difficult to monitor driver performance and loads. It also results in customers waiting too long for their deliveries, making them frustrated. 

It is therefore important to address the communication gaps and bridge them. The best way to do this is to invest in an order-to-delivery dispatch management platform that can enable end-to-end communication. With better communication, you can avoid scheduling conflicts and develop goodwill with drivers. Also, you can set realistic ETA targets for your drivers.

2. Achieve growth with optimal routes

All last-mile businesses want to maximize vehicle output and boost the efficiency of order fulfillment. But to achieve that, you need to plan and schedule delivery routes that are shorter and cost-effective.

By using the last-mile routing feature of a dispatch management platform, you can recommend the most efficient routes for your drivers. Its Machine Learning (ML) algorithms factor in multiple logistics constraints, business goals and customer preferences, to come up with optimal routes that maximize your vehicle output.

3. Minimize out-of-miles and empty miles with advanced analytics

No business wants a loss in revenues, fuel wastage, or a loss in Hours of Service (HOS). But if you don’t minimize empty miles and out-of-miles for your fleet, you cannot avoid these.

With the help of dispatch management software, you can factor in backhauling options when vehicles return back after completing scheduled delivery tasks. It ensures that your vehicles do not return empty. Its advanced analytics feature helps you track the out-of-route miles, and make necessary corrections to it. By improving the accuracy and quality of your routes, dispatch management software can maximize the efficiency of your deliveries.

Conclusion

Changing customer preferences, rise in order volumes and increasing delivery complexities have added enormous burdens to last-mile dispatch management. With increasing operational cost pressures, it isn’t easy to succeed in the last mile without the help of a smart and integrated platform that can handle order to delivery in a single, unified space.

Locus dispatch management platform helps you solve the real-world problems in the last mile that eat up your revenues. Its advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities enable you to generate efficient schedules for drivers and optimal routes for deliveries that maximize your on-time delivery rates. Its advanced analytical insights help you identify the weak spots in your last-mile deliveries and rectify them.

Wish to elevate the quality of your last-mile delivery? Talk to our experts!