Why You Need a Single Platform for Managing B2B Deliveries
If you handle B2B deliveries at scale, your technology stack is likely to be fairly complex. You need solutions for ingesting orders and customer information, for tracking and managing what’s in your warehouse, for sourcing, for operational planning, for managing your fleet, and for actually planning and executing deliveries. Different functions—such as sales and delivery—may have totally different solutions, even when the functionality between those solutions is overlapping or the same.
This complexity isn’t surprising—it just reflects the reality that delivering to B2B is often quite complex. In food and beverage distribution, for instance, the sheer number of moving parts that go into delivering to your accounts in an efficient way is huge, and your distribution plans have to reflect that. That means that creating those distribution plans is a high wire act involving many different departments and technology solutions.?
So how are delivery businesses supposed to balance this complexity with the need for efficiency in their own processes? After all, the more technology solutions you have, the more opportunities there are for disconnect across different processes. When each individual planning or execution puzzle piece happens in its own solution, it can easily wind up becoming a silo. You need the right tools for the job, but you also need a clean workbench that isn’t cluttered with unnecessary tools.?
When it comes to managing deliveries, this balancing act between streamlining IT and ensuring you have the right capabilities is extremely important. Simply put, it can determine whether you’re able to efficiently meet the demands of a changing market or not. And that’s precisely why modern B2B delivery organizations need to prioritize investing in a single solution for managing deliveries.?
Powering the Entire Delivery Journey
What exactly do we mean we say that businesses like food distributors, beer wholesalers, and other B2B delivery organizations need a single solution for delivery management? Obviously, we’re not suggesting that any one platform can replace all of the various solution types that touch a given delivery. But we are saying that it’s possible—and preferable—to plan, manage, and execute deliveries with one single platform.?
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Such a platform might cover a handful of different processes:
This doesn’t mean that no other systems will touch your deliveries. You might leverage telematics to enhance your tracking capabilities on the day of delivery, for instance. But compare what this hypothetical platform offers to what you would get in a world where it took three or four separate solutions to manage all of those aspects of the delivery process.
For one thing, it would be difficult to ensure that your territory plans were constructed in such a way as to actually result in efficient route plans. You might wind up spending valuable time generating territories, trying and failing to create base routes based on them, then going back to the territory planner to make tweaks. Here, you’re essentially flying blind as you try to make these two closely related processes work together.?
To learn more, read the full post here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/blog/b2b-deliveries