Automating final mile deliveries

#finalmile delivery remains one of the most costly and unpredictable stages of the #supplychain, however, there is a solution that is proven to help speed up deliveries and enhance the customer experience while achieving significant cost savings by a whopping 30%

In this post, we explore the benefits of final-mile automation and how it can improve your service whilst cutting mileage, fuel, costs, and emissions.

Optimize to increase efficiency and reduce costs

Optimize is an AI-driven?#routeoptimisation?system that provides much more than just the quickest or most efficient way to get from A to B. Instead the #ai powered optimisation #algorithms can look holistically at a wide range of parameters such as vehicle/driver availability, traffic conditions, vehicle-specific speed profiles, customer SLA's (Service Level Agreements), driver schedules, and vehicle capacity, to help plan the most efficient vehicle selection and routes for multi-drop deliveries.

Once prohibitively expensive route optimisation software is now within reach of smaller fleets too thanks to the unique Pay As You Go model.?The easy-to-use, web-based route optimisation software can help you save money on fuel, cutting emissions whilst ensuring efficient use of your vehicles and increasing delivery capacity without increasing the number of vehicles in your fleet, ultimately giving you more for less.

Enhancing customer experience

Automating?customer notifications?relating to their order or collection arrival time is a real win-win and helps eliminate problems, reduces driver stress and time wasted on arrival. Optimize allows for automated messages that can be customised to send at various points along the chain for example:

·??Advising an ETA time window (customised with your chosen buffer around the planned arrival time)

·??Providing real-time updates on the delivery progress during the day of delivery.

·??That there has been a delay and the delivery will be slightly late.

·??Sending proof-of-delivery notifications once the goods have been delivered with all the relevant details including a picture of the delivery.

Customer notifications can be delivered via SMS and/or email, with real-time progress update triggers such as the driver completing the previous delivery or by automated GPS tracking of the handheld device or onboard telematics. Many customers find that having freed up resource by automating planning, they have people on hand to step in if there are any serious exceptions that occur.

These automated hands-free customer notifications ensure efficient communication with customers, which in turn leads to improved customer satisfaction and retention, helping to drive future revenue growth.

Empowering customers to reduce your costs

Inbound calls to customer service centers and dispatch locations are often a direct result of issues during the final mile of delivery, leading to higher costs and frustrated customers. Automating communications and allowing customers to check on their deliveries and provide special instructions to drivers significantly reduces inbound call volumes, wait times, or the need for drivers themselves to have to provide updates. This leads to a fall in issues such as missed deliveries, and long wait times whilst boosting customer satisfaction and reducing the cost of logistics.

Integration

Automating processes with direct integration with systems such as #crm (Customer Relationship Management), #erp (Enterprise Resource Planning), LOB (Line of Business) #tms (Transport Management System) #fleetmanagementsoftware or #telematics ensures the smooth passing of key information relating to job’s such as customer details, time windows, delivery notes, vehicle types and other pertinent information.

Optimize has successfully integrated with a wide range of back-office systems & provides well-documented APIs to enable a smooth integration of these processes, allowing you to automate end-to-end workflows while maximising efficiency and revenue for every delivery or collection.

Delivery management including customer engagement, route optimisation and #ePOD can all be managed within the Optimize platform or planned routes with #eta can be pushed back to source systems for completion. System integration offers improved transparency and less friction in operations are made possible by the elimination of paper-based systems.

Concluding the benefits of an Optimized final mile delivery

Automating the final mile of a delivery's journey does not require a major investment of time and resources. Operators within final mile deliveries can see rapid return on investment via savings generated from holistic planning that reduces mileage, fuel, costs and emissions by as much as 30%. You can improve your customer experience by sharing ETA updates fully automated to free up resource for exception management and other revenue focussed tasks.

Optimisation in final mile or van fleets can produce fuel savings of up to 30%. To put that in a decarbonisation context, a 500-strong facilities management fleet could be saving more carbon through optimisation than if it exchanged 80 internal combustion engined vehicles for electric – with none of the cost.

Although HGV fleets tend to still rely on the experienced transport planner, their fuel bills are so high and the availability of alternative powered vehicles so limited, that exploring optimisation is a no-brainer.

Optimize offer companies interested in assessing route optimisation a free benchmark to ascertain the savings and efficiencies they can achieve against real work planning.

If you are interested in a free benchmark, please contact us at:

#lastmiledelivery #lastmiledelivery #lastmilelogistics #lastmile #finalmile #logistics #logisticssolutions #decarbonisation #routeoptimization #fleetmanagement #fleetelectrification