According to the American Trucking Associations, freight tonnage hauled by trucks would increase by 27% (between 2016 and 2027). With global retail sales to touch $27 trillion by 2020, it just adds to the problems of high volume and restricted resources. Most of these companies would win or lose based on how they optimize their last mile deliveries.
Know where your drivers are at all times. A trucker was lost in snow-covered woods in Oregon for four days when the wrong address was plugged into the GPS. He managed to survive and walk back to more populated areas when his truck got stuck on small roads.
We have seen the Walmart acquiring Jet, Bonobos, Modcloth, and Shoebuy while planning to set up around 1000 pickup locations for online grocery shoppers. Racing Walmart to the front is Amazon with its grand acquisition of Wholefoods to enable faster deliveries with multiple pickup options.
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.
