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7 Reasons to Trial Delivery Management Software

by Matt Corby,
Jul 29, 2021
feelt management platform
feelt management platform

A plain-speaking guide to improving your business.

We want to answer a question once and for all: why should you use delivery management software

Pen and paper have done the trick for a long time now. Or maybe you’re happy with a basic driver tracking app and separate POD

Well in this article we’ve thrown together all of the real-world benefits of using a delivery management software in one easy-to-read list for you. Find out how to:

✅ Deliver faster
✅ Manage your drivers better
✅ Grow your business
✅ Stop wasting time
✅ Make your customers happier
✅ Lower fuel costs
✅ Stretch and scale during holiday booms.

1. Deliver faster with delivery management software

A full-featured delivery management software will be able to optimise your routes for you. Route optimisation 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 optimisation itself can be complex and time consuming. 

To truly optimise 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. Route optimisation becomes an automated process and can save you hours every day. What would you do with that much time to put back into your business?

2. Manage your drivers

You can be reassured that you’ve optimised 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.

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 system can 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 respond quickly if a vehicle is overloaded. 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 geographical 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 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 a flexible software 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 this precious time with your family or, as above, reinvest it in your business.

Time-saving features to look out for include: electronic proof of delivery, consignments allocation, route optimisation, driver tracking, automated invoicing and electronic fleet management/CoR.

5. Keep your customers happy

Using delivery management software can give you back not only time, but control too. Control of your processes from order to final delivery, which means you get to control your customer’s experience.

For example, using a combination of route allocation, route optimisation 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.

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: route optimisation 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, recalculate 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.

Final thoughts

The key takeaway here is that delivery management software streamlines every part of your business operations. 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 or book a free demo online to see how it might work. We’re here to help.