Amazon’s same-day delivery service allows customers to place orders and have their products delivered within 24 hours. This service forces small delivery service-based companies to improve delivery efficiency to complete orders faster if they want to remain competitive. Statista shows that 9% of customers desire same-day shipping while 18% and 44% will wait for next-day or two-day shipping.
If you fail to deliver quickly, your customers will look elsewhere. Delivery efficiency is a type of operational efficiency. It allows you to fulfill more customer requests per day, making customers happier and increasing your net revenue. If done right, you will see a decrease in cost-per-delivery as well as an increase in net revenues each day, week, and month.
3 Obstacles Preventing Businesses From Delivering Efficiently
Before we can discuss how to improve delivery efficiency, let’s first understand why they happen. Knowing how inefficiencies occur will help us take the right steps to correct them and increase our revenue. Delivery operations can be negatively affected by several factors, which will impact your bottom line.
Manual route planning
For route optimization, factors such as delivery driver schedules and truck capacity, pick-up points and drop-off points, and package weight, size, and delivery times-windows must all be considered individually. This can take hours to finish for even small packages. Last-minute orders that arrive after your driver has left will make it difficult to optimize your delivery route. Delivery efficiency will also decrease.
Also read: What is Distribution Management and Planning?
Outdated or ineffective technology
Technology that is outdated can only make you just as efficient as it was when it was invented. You can make butter with a butter churn, but it is not as efficient as today’s standards. It’s also possible to compete with larger companies that use the most recent technology for optimizing their routes if you are using old technology. You can set yourself up to succeed with the most recent technology so that your delivery efficiency is as high as possible.
Lack of prioritization with deliveries
Your overall efficiency will be affected by how you prioritize your packages. One example is that if you get one large package off your vehicle in the morning, there’s still room for many smaller packages later. But delivering items as they arrive and go out can lead to inefficient delivery that could cost you revenue and potential orders. To increase efficiency, think about how you prioritize, such as package size, expiration dates, and fast shipping payments.
Let’s take a look at how your business can improve the efficiency of delivery to increase sales and order quantity.
Six Ways to Improve Delivery Efficiency
Advanced and automated planning is key to increasing revenue and completing more delivery.
1. A route planner can be used to update routes in real-time
Routing and scheduling software options such as OptimoRoute allow you to make adjustments before and during your drivers’ departures. This can increase delivery efficiency and be more flexible in dealing with unexpected events.
Let’s suppose you have a route plan for the day. However, the driver leaves, and a new pickup must be planned. The routing and scheduling software will adjust automatically for the new delivery. To achieve the best delivery efficiency, ensure that you choose a routing option that allows drivers to receive real-time updates.
2. Prioritize orders according to the importance
Some orders may need to be delayed during a busy week. Delivery efficiency is the ability to identify which orders have the greatest impact on your business and ensure that they are completed first. Priority orders are the best way to increase revenue and decrease impact if not all tasks can be completed.
Consider the importance of each delivery and decide which one should be delivered first. To ensure that frozen goods don’t spoil, pick up and deliver frozen goods first. To ensure that your delivery schedule is optimal for worst-case scenarios, leave less important deliveries until the last minute.
3. Schedule orders and routes weeks ahead of time
Advanced scheduling allows you to plan ahead for high and low customer demands, rather than waiting until the last minute. This reduces the chance of driver shortages or excesses, which can lead to costly last-minute changes. You can use the knowledge that you have about upcoming orders to optimize drivers’ scheduled for next month.
If you plan ahead for the deliveries that you expect to receive in the next month, you will have enough time to hire a driver. if you wait until the last minute to schedule all your deliveries, You might be understaffed and not able to finish your job.
For the best results, schedule deliveries well in advance to allow for new orders. However, it is important to keep your workloads up to date weeks ahead of time.
Also read: Top 10 Shipping Software for Growing eCommerce Businesses
4. Factor driver breaks and lunches into your schedule
Optimizing drivers’ lunches, breaks and work hours can help increase efficiency. If you don’t plan driver breaks and drivers then take them, You create the illusion that you have missed time or quotas, when in fact, your schedule was impossible.
If you plan well, your driver might schedule a 30-minute stop near popular lunch spots after all important deliveries have been made. Your driver may have to travel a long way to find food, which could cause important deliveries to be delayed. Instead of missing quotas or misinterpreting the reasons, plan ahead and monitor your delivery efficiency.
5. Track driver performance over time
To improve delivery efficiency, look at driver performance metrics such as delivery time. It’s not a simple task to optimize your driver’s schedules and improve your delivery efficiency. Instead, route optimization and schedule optimization are ongoing tasks that require evaluation of performance metrics since routes and packages (and sometimes drivers!) change frequently.
Let’s suppose you spend a week optimizing your routing and implementing these tips. A month later, you notice one driver always takes longer. This allows you to look at what is causing delays and how they compare to other drivers, further improving delivery efficiency.
You can improve your performance by using routing and scheduling software with performance metrics.
6. Send Proof of Delivery and Realtime Delivery Notifications
Let your customers know when to expect their package using delivery proof or live delivery notifications. In the event of delays or missed deadlines, proof of delivery can be used to improve customer experience. We all know that delays and missed deliveries are inevitable, regardless of how efficient your delivery methods are. Track everything and create transparency to increase customer satisfaction and trust and save time
Transparency is key. You don’t need to make excuses for delays if you’re transparent. Customers will trust you more if they know that you’ll tell them the truth, no matter what. You should make delivery tracking live. One option is to show the customer how far the driver has traveled from their home, as well as the estimated delivery time. Electronic proof of delivery is possible, including a photograph of the package at the customer’s house.
Conclusion — Improve Delivery Efficiency
You can take simple steps today to increase your delivery efficiency and generate more revenue by completing more jobs each day. Automation via route optimization software and scheduling software can help you increase your revenue and efficiency. Delivery management software automatically optimizes routes based on the data you input and the current data. This allows you to spend more time on other tasks.
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