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Efficient delivery operations are essential for businesses that want to maintain customer satisfaction. As consumer expectations rise, aka everyone wants things fast and efficient, turning to advanced logistics solutions and real-time tracking systems can provide the edge needed to meet and exceed these demands.
Enter delivery management software.
Delivery management software has emerged as a game-changing tool, offering benefits that range from improved route optimization to more accurate delivery windows. But efficient deliveries also rely on reliable fleets, and ensuring vehicle readiness through regular equipment inspection software is key to maintaining smooth operations and preventing costly downtime.
This article explores seven compelling reasons why implementing delivery management software can transform your business, empower your delivery managers, and ultimately lead to happier customers.
What is Delivery Management Software, Anyway?
Delivery management software (DMS) are comprehensive systems designed to oversee and optimize the entire delivery process from order placement to final drop-off.
The right platform integrates and automates various aspects of your delivery operations. DMS features to look out for are the ability to optimize delivery routes, effective driver management, and performance analytics.
From your delivery management software dashboard, you can oversee and adjust all aspects of your operations in real time, ensuring efficient routing, streamlined driver coordination, and data-driven decisions to enhance overall performance.
Whether you’re running a small local operation or a large logistics network, you can use delivery management software and customise it to fit your needs.
7 Reasons You Need Powerful Delivery Management Software
1. Deliver faster with delivery management software
A full-featured delivery management software has both route planning and route optimization features.
Route optimization is about creating the most efficient route possible for your drivers, which helps you deliver your goods faster.
More efficient routes mean you can deliver more packages in a single day, as well as helping you stick to prescribed time windows and reduce costs. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But route planning can be a complex and time consuming process.
To truly optimize a delivery route you need to factor in many things:
A driver’s workflow
Freight they have onboard
Order of their stops
Travel time between stops
Time taken to complete a pickup or delivery
Delivery management software takes all of this into account and generates the best possible route for your drivers within moments.
2. Effective driver management
You can be reassured that you’ve optimized your routes, but route planning is just the beginning of a dispatcher’s day. You can also use route allocation and driver tracking to better manage your drivers.
Here’s how we do it at Transvirtual:
Allocate pickups seamlessly. With allocation control, you’ll always know what needs picking up and which drivers are where. You’ll be able to manage workflows better and cut down on missed collections.
Know what’s outstanding. You’ll have visibility of every outstanding pickup at any given time. Check a live view of load details, including total and cubic weights. Match this to available drivers and items are on the road again in no time.
Proof of delivery pod. Delivery management doesn’t end with the product on your customer’s door. You still need to secure a proof of delivery.
Delivery management software offers electronic POD capabilities, allowing drivers to capture signatures, photos, or scan barcodes digitally. This electronic process is far more efficient than traditional paper-based methods, reducing errors, eliminating manual data entry, and providing instant confirmation of successful deliveries.
See driver capacity and solve overdue pickups quickly. Available drivers are sorted by location, so you’ll know who’s closest to the pickup point. In addition to their GPS position, you’ll see what they’ve got on board and where they’re heading next.
Our delivery management software can also auto-allocate pickups for you, or you can step in manually. With real-time information on the status of live jobs, it’s never been easier to match the best driver for the pickup at the last minute.
Intuitive scheduling. Plan jobs in advance, build capacity for recurring runs and view vehicle capacity. Why reinvent the wheel manually when our powerful software can schedule your operations in the most efficient way?
Manage runs. View maximum loaded weights and see overloaded vehicles. Create runs based on drop off location or frequency. Pre-plan jobs with multiple legs. Bulk-edit and re-assign jobs to different drivers or dates.
Detailed reports. Calculate fleet data, check weights and measure driver efficiency. Let the software pull strategic information. You’ll make informed decisions, keep customer accounts, tighten your whole operation and ultimately raise your profits.
3. Grow your business with a delivery management system
When you automate repetitive manual tasks, you can save a lot of time. You can use this free time to grow your business.
A full-featured delivery management software will be able to keep up with your business as you grow. From one driver to a fleet of vehicles and drivers, make sure your delivery management software has the functionality to support you. You may even need to scale up and down with the busy periods, so choosing flexible software solutions is important.
At Transvirtual, we pride ourselves on being truly useful and accessible no matter the size of your business. We’ve designed the software with optional add-ons to suit you, and you’ll only pay for what you use. There are no set-up fees, minimums or any other upfront costs. After a free trial, you can continue on and simply pay per consignment.
We’ve built an enterprise quality product that’s priced for everyone and has minimal barriers to entry.
4. Reduce your wasted time
We’ve mostly covered this by now, but it deserves its own section because it’s one of the most enjoyed benefits of using delivery management software: reclaiming all of that time. Save time to take breaks or, as stated above, reinvest it in your business.
Time-saving features to look out for include: electronic proof of delivery, consignments allocation, route optimization, driver tracking, automated invoicing and electronic fleet management/CoR.
5. Get nothing but positive customer feedback
Using delivery management software not only gives your time back, but control too. Control your processes from order to last mile delivery, giving you the power to manage customer expectations.
For example, using a combination of route allocation, route optimization and order tracking means you can give an accurate ETA to your customers. We all know how hard it can be to wait at home for a parcel (let alone if it’s later than expected).
Imagine yourself as the customer for a moment, knowing that something is arriving between 9 and 10, rather than anytime before midday. It’s a great way to improve customer satisfaction!
You can also see automatic status updates if delays do occur, which can be shared with customers to keep them updated.
Of course, arriving early can sometimes be just as disruptive as arriving late. Using delivery management software means you can be sure of meeting those time windows across a driver’s entire day.
6. Reduce your fuel costs
This one’s pretty simple: saves fuel costs on every single trip. A full-featured delivery management software will also be able to monitor real-time traffic conditions and, if need be, optimize routes which saves you both time and fuel.
Being sure of your driver’s arrival time and communicating this to your customer also means that there’s more likely to be someone home at the right time. Meaning your driver doesn’t need to take the package anywhere else for holding.
7. Manage busy holidays and peak times
We touched on this above, but it’s also worth its own section. If your delivery management software is flexible then it will be able to scale up and down with demand in peak times.
It would be such a shame to miss out on your share of the Christmas pie just because your systems aren’t set up to allow you to temporarily grow. Transvirtual is deliberately flexible and scalable so that all types of business can take advantage of the software, but also so that one business can use it in multiple ways or throughout differing business cycles.
Improve Your Delivery Experience Today
The key takeaway here is that delivery management software streamlines delivery processes. Not only does this allow you to run a smoother, faster and more reliable delivery service, it gives you more time and money to grow.
Talk to the Transvirtual team about how we can help you do just this. Get in touch today to see how we might be a good fit. We’re here to help.
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