Last-mile delivery: Problems and solutions explained

Your business gets into trouble when you deliver to an incorrect address as it results in the re attempting these deliveries. This eats up your drivers’ operating time, frustrates the customer, and increases delivery costs.

The best way to counter these mistakes is by getting a geocoder. With a geocoding engine, you can easily convert vague addresses into exact geographical coordinates. This helps your delivery partners locate addresses easily and deliver packages on time and in the first attempt.

Last-mile delivery demands can only be optimized through complex mathematical operations, which was what academics tried to work out in the form of the traveling salesman problem. However, technology solutions have now been able to compute the optimal route possible between two or more destinations.

But to build these cost-effective and optimally efficient plans for the final mile, you need data that reflects the on-ground reality and it is here that we need the help of advanced analytics.

The key to attaining operational flexibility in your last-mile delivery is advanced analytics. Last-mile decisions without data is mere guesswork that can ramp up costs and kill your brand reputation through consistently delayed and less-than-ideal fulfillment experiences.

With proper insights and analytics, you can easily track what’s happening in the last-mile delivery. You can find answers for some crucial questions like:

• What is the percentage of First Attempted Delivery Rates (FADR)?
• Which hour of the day has the highest frequency of deliveries?
• What time of the day are deliveries made quicker and cost-effective?
• Which delivery zone or region incurs the highest last-mile delivery cost?
• Which driver has the highest average idle time?
• What is the average cost per mile for all deliveries?
• Who are the drivers outperforming and underperforming?
• What was the peak time performance of our deliveries?
• What is the cost of visiting and servicing the stops on the route?
• How much fuel is consumed daily for deliveries per day?
• What is the profit obtained while driving one mile on the route?

By using advanced analytics, you can get answers for critical business questions like these in the final mile. It allows you to obtain a comprehensive picture of your last-mile logistics costs in a comprehensive way. It helps you make informed decisions, rectify logistical weaknesses, and improve delivery efficiency, thereby minimizing delivery costs.

Every second when your customer fails to know the status of order fulfillment makes them frustrated. Especially during unpredictable events, when customers are unable to track the delivery status, they cancel the order. This puts your business in a dire situation.

When you provide the live tracking feature and send timely notifications on order status, your customers trust you more as you’ve met their base expectation of providing complete turn-by-turn visibility. Sharing messages and real-time alerts on Expected Time or Arrival (ETA) helps you avoid failed deliveries. It also reduces your rate of reattempted deliveries resulting in saving more costs.

• Are my fleet plans working properly?
• Are my drivers taking more breaks than the scheduled time?
• Is there a possibility of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) breach?
• How many of my drivers have completed their trips and ready for the next one?
• Is there a possibility of vehicle downtime or a delivery exception?

These are very serious questions on internal visibility and it can make or break your delivery performance.

As fleet managers, you need to know what’s happening to your scheduled plans and tweak them if necessary. Without these updates, you cannot plan upcoming deliveries and this puts your delivery operations at a standstill.

Using a control tower application, you can easily have a bird’s eye view of your delivery operations. Beyond this, it enables you to tweak the delivery schedules based on critical metrics like geography, time, and vehicle type.

If your vehicles take longer distances, incur high costs, and more time to travel, it means you are spending costs on wasted time and miles. As you work on this fundamental vehicle routing problem, you end up spending unnecessary hours on the process of planning routes. This leads to delays in picking and packing operations from the warehouse which adds to overtime costs.

The recent last-mile delivery trends state that customers want a speeder, flexible, and predictable deliveries. To enable this, it is necessary to get your delivery routes right.

An optimized delivery route is much more than the shortest distance or avoiding traffic. With a route optimization software, you can generate perfect optimal route plans based on the real-world constraints like

• Multiple time windows per stop
• Fuel stops
• Regional regulations of local authorities
• Maximum number of stops per route
• Special vehicle requirements
• Route distance
• Route duration limits
• Proximity to the depot
• Loading and unloading time
• Driver breaks/ Unavailability
• Vehicle capacity utilization
• Scheduling of return orders from customers
• Expected Time of Arrival (ETA)
• Customer-preferred delivery slots

By using these optimal plans generated by a route optimization software, you can minimize the time drivers spend on the road. This helps you minimize the cost and duration and maximize the productivity, Service Level Agreement (SLA) adherence, and customer satisfaction.

The success of Amazon Prime in recent years has showcased the benefits of effective time slot management in improved customizability and convenience for users.

By providing different time slot options, you let your customers conveniently choose a time slot that best suits them. Also, it helps you power higher first-attempt rates and on-time deliveries.

It also lets your business unlock multiple streams of revenue. You can offer premium time slot options that can be unlocked on a charge. With multiple time windows and alternate delivery options, you can add predictability to your deliveries in addition to speed.

With a delivery-linked checkout feature, your resource allocation becomes much easier. Based on the time slots highly demanded by your customers, you can plan your fleet requirements. This improves your turnaround times for all orders.

Using a delivery-linked checkout, you can provide sustainable delivery options at checkout that facilitate carbon-efficient route plans. By batching forward and reverse orders from the same service areas together, it minimizes the distance traveled per order. By ensuring high drop density, optimal load capacity, and a lesser number of vehicles, it embeds sustainability into your last-mile delivery.