What Is Last Mile Delivery?

Last mile delivery is about a lot more than just cheap, fast order fulfillment. It’s about a lot more than the Amazon effect, or the e-commerce boom. It’s about managing complexity in the last leg of the supply chain management process in order to keep your customers happy—whether they’re consumers waiting for a new dishwasher to arrive, grocery stores awaiting pallets of lettuce, or busy job sites in need of lumber.

Anyone who lives this process day in and day out can tell you how much goes into getting it right. This is meant to be a resource for precisely those people. We’ll elucidate on some of the challenges that face last mile delivery business, the trends that are impacting deliveries this year and beyond, and some of the ways that modern last mile delivery software can impact operations.?

What Is Last Mile Delivery?

If you’re thinking of last mile delivery as something that starts when the delivery driver starts their route for the end and ends at the customer’s doorstep, then you may need to widen your definition. In point of fact, last mile logistics optimization starts before the first pallet has been loaded onto the truck and doesn’t finish until long after the order has been delivered and documented.?

• Middle mile/shuttle routes: Depending on the type of business and the specifics of your transportation network, the first step in the process might actually be getting the right goods from the warehouse or distribution center to a transportation hub or cross-dock. This may involve shuttle drivers and other personnel.?
• Warehouse loading: Items have to be scanned onto the right trucks at the right times, either by drivers or warehouse staff, with thorough documentation.?
• Routing and planning: This one also depends a lot on the industry—a furniture retailer might be creating dynamic delivery routes from scratch every day, while a food distributor or services company might be starting from a baseline plan. Here, routers and routing specialists need to create optimized delivery routes that ensure that the right goods get to the right place at the right time.?
• Dispatching: Simply put, once routes have been created you need to dispatch the right drivers with the right skills and equipment to get the job done.??
• Customer communication: This is something else that feels like second nature to recipients but can create real complexity for delivery businesses. Customers need to know when their orders are coming and what to expect when they arrive. Ideally, they’d have some degree of?visibility into the delivery process as it’s unfolding. Doing this at scale can be a challenge.
• Last mile delivery tracking: A crucial piece of the last mile puzzle is tracking the order from dock to destination. Dispatchers and managers need more than just GPS coordinates on a map for this—they need live status updates and other data to put those GPS coordinates in context. More than that, they need a way to track everything that’s happening across every delivery run from a single dashboard so they can spot and respond to exceptions quickly.?
• Proof of delivery: Drivers are often the unsung heroes of the last mile journey—they’re the face of your brand in many situations—and one of the most crucial things they do is document the last mile deliveries from end to end. This comes to a head with the driver capturing proof of delivery, ideally via photos and digital signatures.?
• Backhauls and returns: In cases where an item is damaged or simply doesn’t fit the customer’s needs, you might need to haul it back to the warehouse. Or you might be hauling away someone’s old fridge after delivering a new one. You might want to avoid driving back to the DC with an empty truck by making some pickups on your way. All of this has to be planned for, optimized, tracked, and documented.?
• Post-delivery follow-up and reporting: After the delivery is completed, you might want to send post-delivery follow ups, surveys, or other communications to customers.?

With the whole journey in mind, you can start to see just how much falls under the last mile logistics umbrella. Why is this so important? Because it helps delivery businesses to better understand how they can tackle the challenges of last mile deliveries head on.?

What Is the Last Mile Problem?

Every dispatcher has been there at some point: A highway pileup first thing in the morning has made all of your ETAs for the day obsolete, and your switchboard is lighting up with customer calls. You scramble to reschedule impacted deliveries to ensure consignees will still be home when the driver gets there.?

The result? All of your truck routes become jagged and inefficient. Your drive times increase, your fuel costs go up, and your customers start drafting irate Yelp reviews.?

People talk about the last mile problem—the problem of getting the goods from the warehouse to their final destination—but really there are (at least) two distinct problems that we talk about when we talk about last mile routing:?

Complexity makes it difficult to set efficient routes. This leads to increased drive time, sub-optimal capacity utilization,? and higher fuel and labor costs.?

That same complexity makes it difficult to set accurate ETAs. Whether routes are efficient and cost-effective or not, businesses need accurate ETAs in order to reduce failed deliveries, reverse logistics costs, negative customer reviews, etc.

More often than not, these two problems go hand in hand. And because of the difference in travel times between trucks and cars, it’s something Google Maps and Waze really can’t help you with.?

Neither of these are new challenges—but changing customer expectations mean that dealing with these problems is no longer optional.

To learn more, read the full article here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/blog/last-mile-delivery