How Food Distribution Software Should Empower Different Functions

As a food distributor, getting deliveries right and delighting your customers doesn’t start and stop with your delivery drivers. It’s a team effort that pulls in people and processes from across a host of different functions: sales, merchandising, warehousing, services, and more. When these functions are all able to coordinate effectively towards a common goal—keeping customers happy in a cost-efficient way—then you can set yourself up for success and growth.

When these functions are disconnected, on the other hand, it’s all too easy to wind up with service that’s disjointed and inefficient. Merchandisers can wind up on-site before the delivery has even arrived. Sales teams can’t figure out which customers to prioritize visits to because they can’t easily tell how the deliveries are going. All the while, opportunities for improved cost efficiency become hard to capitalize on.?

Achieving solid coordination between different functions isn’t always easy to get right—but it is crucial to success. Whether you’re able to make that happen or not comes down to whether you have the right tools for the job. In this case, that means finding a delivery management solution that empowers roles across a number of different functions and promotes delivery visibility from end to end.?

Why Food Distributors Need a Comprehensive Delivery Software Solution

First things first, why is it so important to find a software solution that can empower different roles across a distributor’s operations? Why not leverage multiple more specialized solutions for the different functions that touch the fulfillment process?

In many cases, you will wind up supplementing even the most comprehensivefood delivery management technology with systems that are specific to, say, sales operations. But when you commit to separate IT for each function, you can set yourself up for data and decision-making silos. You might be planning the world’s most efficient delivery routes and executing them to a t, meanwhile merchandising has optimized its own plans to ensure efficiency—but the plans don’t make sense together.?

The result is service that’s disjointed and doesn’t satisfy the customer. It’s not just that these planning processes that are closely related wind up being carried out in their own separate silos, it’s that one function doesn’t have visibility into another. Sales operations can’t easily see when deliveries are being carried out to particular customers, so they can’t coordinate their own visits effectively. Delivery and service technicians can’t coordinate easily, so they wind up working at cross-purposes.?

When you have a comprehensive delivery management solution that actually provides visibility and support for each of your different functions, the script turns on its head. With the right food delivery technology , users across roles can gain total visibility into delivery operations and plan their own visits and activities accordingly. This ensures that when you’re optimizing deliveries, you don’t leave out all of the other functions that go into great customer service. It also helps ensure that when you’re estimating delivery costs, you account for the entire fulfillment journey, rather than just focusing on delivery driver time and fuel costs. This gives you a much more complete picture of your cost-to-serve, which in turn makes it that much easier to reduce that number over time.?

To learn more about how individual functions can be empowered by the right software, read the whole article here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/blog/food-distribution-software-different-functions