Static planning is a function of yesteryear. Wake up to new-age dynamic route planning for your field agent management. Most of Fortune 500 companies are maximizing the value of their active field agents using intelligent planning and optimization. It’s the most appropriate tool at the hand of managers to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Technology has enabled us to record, plan, allocate, dispatch, track, validate, and analyze all freight movement from a single dashboard with clear and real-time actionable insights in an easy-to-understand format. This leads to an agile, reactive, and dynamic setup for a company’s transportation management system.

Optimization is doing more with less while sustaining (or bettering) the efficiency of operations. With multiple orders and shipments constantly moving with an excess of customer requests and demand, fulfilling on-time deliveries consistently not only saves costs but also increases the overall brand value for the company.

With effective schedules and permanent journey plans for the delivery and field agents, resource movement cost can be reduced while increasing overall resource utilization. Shorter distances traveled with lesser detention leads to higher number of deliveries fulfilled and visits accomplished.

Enterprise mobility solutions are unlocking a new phase of benefits with respect to resource movement efficiency. With multiple industries and markets getting more and more focused on consumerism while finding new and better ways to satisfying the increasing global retail and e-commerce demand.

Under-utilized capacity carries a clear cost which adds to the cost-per-unit carried by the resource. It isn’t feasible to run under-utilized resources to fulfill the ever-increasing demand created due to expectations of on-demand, same, or next day deliveries. On-demand and preferred slot delivery (or pick-up) is made more efficient with the use of an auto-allocation engine.

Traditional trade occupies close to 90% in key developing markets. By leveraging cloud-based technology, last mile delivery can be optimized for such distribution networks, bringing in organized patterns within the industry and generate more value for all the stakeholders involved namely the retailers, the distributors, the manufacturers, and the end-customers.

We recently integrated with Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Siri. Now, the manager can simply relax and instruct their personal assistant to fetch the information for them. Almost anyone can use the personal assistant without any hassle. It doesn’t matter if they are tech-savvy.

Polar Vortex can disrupt logistics movement pushing up freight rates due to a shortage of trucks and drivers. Shipments may be delayed either due to rerouting away from snow-blocked highways or, being detained due to traffic bottlenecks. Multi-modal transport via railroads and ports are also affected.

We saw last mile delivery being used as the key input in all omnichannel strategies. We saw localization in distribution strategies centered around making last mile delivery more effective. We also saw machine learning being implemented successfully in logistics and field workforce planning. These trends would be the greatest influencers in 2018 for logistics and field workforce management.