Delivery planning is the brain of logistics operations. See it as the checklist for ensuring your company meets customer satisfaction, makes realistic last mile delivery plans, and ensures on time delivery.
Different products from the same business can require different delivery methods, and the delivery plan helps you assess and plan accordingly.
By outlining the deliverables in a delivery plan, you need to establish which model will work best for you to deliver products.
For example, food deliveries require different delivery planning from construction materials. The same is true for fresh produce that needs to be kept cool compared to clothing.
In this article, we’ll outline five strategies for improving your delivery plan, ensuring customer satisfaction, and optimizing delivery capacity. So, let’s get started.
The Importance of Delivery Planning
Meeting customer expectations is all about fast deliveries. To improve your delivery times, you need to consider same day shipping and optimized routes.
However, to ensure products are dispatched to the right warehouse or stores, the target is to use maximum capacity in trucks or vans without overloading the fleet and drivers.f
That’s where good delivery planning plays a significant role. Having the best fleet management software can help the business have proper access to data that can be used to optimize the delivery plan at any given time or day.
How to Benefit From Thorough Delivery Planning
Precise planning is required for a successful and accurate delivery. With the right route and delivery planning software, most of the work is done for you.
Planning routes and logistics for delivery helps the business to ensure that the driver uses the best route and delivers efficiently every time.
How do you do this? It’s about balancing speed, profitability, and affordability. It’s normal to want to maximize profit by overloading trucks to get as many parcels out as possible in one day. But this should never compromise the product; this leads to customer dissatisfaction.
Effective delivery planning has a massive advantage for the company, as it increases revenue at an optimal pace without compromising on speed and affordability. Keeping online shoppers happy can lead to constantly building a loyal customer base.
How Technology Helps with Efficient Delivery Operations
Delivery route planning software helps improve delivery planning and reduce working hours. It optimizes the routes for effective deliveries, saving hours of time spent manually scheduling each delivery.
Delivery and Route Planning Software
The route optimization software takes into account the distance, traffic congestion, delivery time windows, and the truck’s capacity.
Knowing exactly where a driver must head to avoid a traffic jam on the freeway reduces travel time, translating into less fuel spending.
Overall productivity shifts significantly, giving drivers ample time to make their deliveries on time without feeling the urge to speed or risk their lives.
Even as the driver is heading to a delivery, additional deliveries can be easily added.
Optimizing Delivery Routes with a Delivery Route Planning Solution
There are multiple constraints and stumbling blocks in the delivery process, but minimizing them with a delivery plan helps to know how to respond to each potential threat without delay.
Key Considerations
A delivery route planning solution considers multiple constraints simultaneously, such as vehicle capacity, driver availability, and specialist equipment requirements.
No business owner can afford to have more expenses than the money coming in from sales. Route optimization technology helps to improve route efficiency while also cutting down on costs.
Good communication results in great plans. Real-time tracking plays a vital role in the delivery route planning solution, enabling customers to communicate fast and efficiently during the delivery processes.
Strategies for Mastering Delivery Planning
Whether you already have a delivery plan, hope to update yours, or want ideas on where to start with your own, here are simple and practical steps to get you going.
Strategy 1: Improve Communication and Visibility
Many customers will avoid purchasing from your online store again if they feel there is no seamless communication. According to an eMarketer report 79% of consumers won’t buy again from a brand after a poor post-purchase experience.
What is needed to improve communication?
Customers want to stay informed throughout the last mile delivery process. By implementing real-time tracking, customers can know exactly where the delivery vehicles are in the final leg of the delivery process.
Keeping customers informed, especially when a delay is anticipated, can keep a customer on your side.
Using route planning software, customers receive accurate ETAs and updates throughout the process. Delivery drivers can also easily communicate with customers about where to leave the parcel.
Forbes warns businesses that a standard “your package is en route” message is insufficient. Customers want real-time communication.
Strategy 2: Balance Your Workload
A tired and overworked driver leads to a stressed-out delivery that makes avoidable mistakes. To use your driver optimally without overburdening the worker, use a delivery route planning solution to balance workloads.
With this feature, a fleet manager oversees what each driver is working on and how long he or she takes to make a delivery. A manager can also improve a driver’s resource allocation by adding or removing more trips.
Strategy 3: Analyze and Adapt
Now that you have specific information on driver behavior, customer feedback, delivery rate, and other essential data, you can identify critical areas that need urgent attention.
Use the data to plan and adapt to changes in demand, traffic, and other factors affecting your delivery operations.
This data can be used again to optimize routes, avoid certain areas and times of the day, or even ensure that only certain drivers are allocated for a specific delivery. This can improve overall operational efficiency.
Strategy 4: Invest in Employee Satisfaction
Happy employees are more productive and efficient. According to research by Gartner, nearly 50% of workers with more flexible working hours believe it makes them more productive.
Investing in people and employee satisfaction, offering a balanced workload and opportunities for growth, pays off when you need it most.
Employees tend to give more than expected when they feel recognized and rewarded for contributing to efficient deliveries.
Strategy 5: Streamline Delivery Planning
Streamlining delivery planning with route optimization software results in less wasted time and money.
Simplifying the delivery planning process can also help reduce manual planning and scheduling hours. No one wants to waste hours a day manually adding new deliveries to a spreadsheet when it can be done within a few minutes.
With optimized routes, customer satisfaction improves, and more timely and accurate deliveries take place—regardless of whether it’s fresh produce or building material.
The Result: Successful Delivery Planning
Mastering delivery planning is essential for businesses to stay competitive in today’s market. Technology can help you navigate the process, reinvent your delivery operations, and improve customer satisfaction.
Efficient delivery planning leads to more business opportunities, improved operational efficiency, and loyal customers who return for more online shopping and deliveries.
Share this article
About the author
Mia is a multi-award-winning journalist. She has more than 14 years of experience in mainstream media. She's covered many historic moments that happened in Africa and internationally. She has a strong focus on human interest stories, to bring her readers and viewers closer to the topics at hand.
