Crowdsourcing Deliveries: The next frontier for QSR Chains

Third party delivery apps have been on a massive rise. Quick deliveries are here to stay and customer expectations have changed rapidly. One of the major food ordering and delivery companies in the US, DoorDash, alone delivers to more than 20 million end customers every month via a network of more than a million drivers (source). And yet, this is less than 15% of the total number of online food deliveries in the US. In this situation, if you’re a large QSR chain, there are three options you may be grappling with:

  1. Having a completely self owned fleet
  2. Owned Fleet + 3rd Party Carriers
  3. Owned Fleet + 3rd Party Carriers + Food Aggregator Apps

The first option definitely gives you complete control over deliveries and ownership of the entire customer experience, but it requires a long term view with great marketing muscle to execute. 

The second option is an extension of the first version but provides higher flexibility as the total rider pool increases but there is a need for load balancing as well to ensure costs are managed well.. 

If one is looking to scale orders and volumes, ignoring third party aggregator apps is not really an option. And once you’re relying on third party apps, order and carrier management may become a challenge.

Carrier Management: Challenges and Solutions 

Whichever route a QSR chain decides to take, managing drivers and carriers is a big part of the larger problem. There are three major challenges that can come in the way:

Challenge Solution How
Too many service providers Efficient management A single dashboard view for all carriers along with their details
Multiple Contracts Automating contract management The LogiNext platform lets you assign different carriers to different hubs and efficiently manage contracts
Differences in rates Rate Profiling Rate Profiles can be defined by giving basic cost, cash handling fee, insurance, re attempt fees, etc as inputs. 

Improve driver efficiency by more than 200%

Carrier Management plays a large role in meeting the delivery time SLAs (service level agreements) and improving customer experience. One of the largest QSR chains in South East Asia used the LogiNext platform to improve driver performance by over 200%. 

Their average across stores for doing deliveries was around 1 order/driver/ hour. Using carrier management and the LogiNext optimization platform, this number was improved to 3 orders/driver/hour. Some of the modules that allows for this:

Dynamic Route Optimization: Applicable for on demand and scheduled operations, this module hosts several features like distance and time optimization, cost optimization, fleet utilization, territory based planning, skillset matching, driver sharing across hubs and such. 

Order Management: Efficiently allocate forward orders, handing of returns, order processing at hub via inscan and outscan, re attempting orders, lifecycle event tracing and such can be handled with ease through the order management module. 

Resource Handling: Managing fleets is one of the biggest challenges. This module has features like fleet onboarding and management, fleet tagging according to skillsets of delivery drivers and vehicles, fleet performance tracking and such gives a detailed view of how resources are being utilized. 

Control Tower: This is the heart of the LogiNext platform through which an operations manager controls the entire delivery operations using delivery management software. The live screen is a single screen from where status updates on drivers, orders and trips can be tracked in real time. There is the dashboard which gives a summary and details analytics on the KPIs (key performing indicators) which are configurable. 

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