Tag: last mile delivery
The complete guide to Dispatch Management Software
As the demand in the supply chain industry is increasing, the logistics and transportation industries rely more on technology to streamline the operation to prevent any shipping delays.
The process is a lot more complicated than simply sending a delivery truck to pick up the package they’d like to deliver. There are many questions you need to address, such as delivery schedule, driver/vehicle assignments & availability, routes considering traffic, and tracking process.
These are the challenges of dispatch management, but these same issues are addressed with effective dispatch management software.
What is a Dispatch Management Software?
A Dispatch Management Software is a process of organizing, assigning, and optimizing delivery schedules and routes for businesses in the delivery, maintenance, and service industries. Dispatch Management Software optimizes your routes and schedules while maximizing efficiency, and minimizing costs.
How Dispatch Management Software works
By integrating with GPS tracking and mobile apps which provide real-time updates, you can track the real-time whereabouts of your vehicles, traffics conditions, and assignments of available carriers. This, along with advanced routing algorithms, provides automated assignments for pickups, drop-offs, service calls, deliveries, etc. These applications can provide Proof of Delivery or Service completion, with photos, signatures, and driver notes.
Keeping track of the locations and statuses of drivers allows you to improve your dispatching. It also helps connect a dispatcher with drivers for faster, better communication.
The software can help schedule plan, optimize routes, providing real-time routing, monitoring driver behavior, alert notifications, and calculate total route costs which allow your company to lower turnaround times and costs.
Why does using Dispatch Management Software dramatically improves your business’s efficiency and performance?
Leveraging dispatch management software brings you huge benefits by automating every process.
Without an efficient dispatch system in your business, time is wasted manually tracking the vehicles, planning routes, and managing driver schedules. With dispatch management software, managing all these processes is automated and easy.
Key aspects of dispatch management software
Better delivery routes
Instead of planning routes manually, dispatch management helps you generate optimal travel routes more efficiently.
Based on which vehicle is closest and available, service time commitments, and route preferences, what kind of capacity the vehicle has, traffic, the application provides planned routes with information on the estimated arrival time and mileage of each stop and route. Optimal routes will result in faster delivery & service times, increased customer & driver satisfaction, and cost savings.
Reduced service costs
Effective dispatch management not only saves time by optimizing routes but also saves money. Drivers spend less time on the road, along with optimized and improved routes, which results in reduced fuel consumption and reduced operation time.
According to ABI Research, the cost savings from having a dispatch management system could be well over 12% in profitability and 13% in vehicle utilization with a 15% decrease in travel time.
Dispatch management software also provides you with impactful reporting so that you can see precisely which areas need to be improved to lower costs and increase profits.
Improve customer & driver satisfaction
Customers always want to know where their packages are and when they are expected to receive their packages.
Dispatch management software can provide both you and your customers with real-time updates on driver’s whereabouts and estimated delivery schedules. Some applications allow clients to communicate directly with the driver.
These tools increase driver satisfaction because you don’t have to worry about a delivery delay due to unexpected traffic conditions, reducing driver’s stress levels. It can also avoid any irregular schedules by optimizing routes, assignments of available drivers and vehicles.
Improve driver behavior and safety
Real-time monitoring and data enable a dispatcher to measure driver behavior and safety. Dispatch management software allows a dispatcher to track the delivery process in real-time and respond to emerging issues through phone calls or chat. Dispatch management software will notify a dispatcher and driver via notifications whenever unexpected issues happen.
Astreon Dispatch & Order Distribution
Our dispatch management software is a fully-featured and integrated module to manage tasks, pickups, drop-offs, destinations for all order management business needs.
Contact our specialist today to learn more about how we can help your business.
Utilizing Big Data to improve critical fleet decisions
When it comes to the word “Big Data”, you might think of the following words: data science, engineer, or machine learning. It might seem like big data has no impact on your business. Big Data is a game-changer for you to improve critical fleet decisions.
Big Data is a common buzzword and bringing massive industrial changes across the board, especially in fleet management industries. Big data has transformed fleet industries from post-problem solving to proactive and predictive problem-solving measurements.
What is big data?
Big Data is a large volume of data that can be used to address business problems by analyzing and extracting information from said data. For fleet management companies and organizations that manage fleets, these data points are collected by GPS Fleet Tracking Platforms, IoT(Internet of Things) and integrated vehicle sensors. The information from those sources includes driver performance and behavior, vehicles/assets locations, fuel usage/costs, maintenance and other key telematics data.
Why is big data important for fleet management?
Big Data is extremely important for organizations and their fleets. Utilizing Big Data enables fleet managers to make informed decisions about daily operations, such as driver performance and behavior, vehicles/assets locations, fuel usage/costs, and maintenance. Big Data mainly helps cost savings, risk mitigation and driver safety. Thanks to this technology, Fleet managers no longer require relying on spreadsheets or paper records. All data, such as engine status, vehicle speed, vehicle location, number of stops, fuel consumption, trip history, tire pressure, ETAs and more are saved in a cloud-based fleet management platform. With this insightful data, you can perform predictive analysis to prevent any future risks and reduce costs.
What is predictive analytics and why you should use them?
Critical decisions for corporations are based on data today. Predictive analytics is one of the value-added features that make predictions about future outcomes using historical data with statistical modeling, data mining and machine learning.
Fleet management predictive analytics is an ideal tool for
- Driving risk analytics
- Equipment usage analysis
- Fleet productivity schedules
- Future maintenance schedules
How can fleet industries benefit from predictive analytics?
Most advantages of using predictive analytics are accident prevention and driver safety. According to Automotive Fleet, a primary cause of preventable fleet accidents is driver distraction, which accounts for 25-30% of all fleet-related accidents. Costs caused by accidents typically represent 14% of a fleet’s total expenses, not including soft costs such as downtime and lost employee productivity, according to Automotive Fleet. This is a huge opportunity to cut fleet costs and prevent future accidents by taking advantage of Big Data.
Predictive analytics can improve the following;
Improve driver safety and behavior
Combining Big Data with telematics enables fleet managers to monitor and manage driver behavior and safety. This data includes driving route, real-time location, harsh braking, harsh cornering, harsh acceleration, fatigue, idling and other risky driving behaviors.
Fleet managers can evaluate this data to see the drive’s pattern and behavior and provide additional coaching if needed.
Improve routes
Without accurate and detailed data, it is difficult to know why delivery is taking longer than expected, or why certain routes are consistently causing problems. Having real-time data, like traffic, weather, or accidents can help fleet companies save time, improve customer service, reduce vehicle idling/wear and reduce operational costs efficiently.
Improve maintenance and vehicle life cycle
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you know vehicle maintenance issues in advance and receive notification automatically when to act? That could be a huge help to save costs. By leveraging Big Data, you can monitor vehicle health and diagnostics such as engine status, fuel level, and mileage. With predictive analytics, your fleet management platform allows you to automate your regular scheduled maintenance work by tracking vehicle operation in real-time, by sending notifications to your team for a truly preventative and proactive approach. As the result, predictive analytics helps you mitigate the risk, assess costs, and manage fleets to reduces costs and improve life cycle management.
Enhance fuel costs
Fuel costs are one of the largest components of total expenses. The fuel data collected from integrated IoTs’ sensors is transmitted to fleet management software and based on the data, you can detect fuel thefts or unreasonably large fuel burn incidents. According to the data from our customers, using fuel management decreases 90% of fuel thefts, 15% of fuel costs and optimize 30% of fleet efficiency.
Compliance
As of June 12th, 2021, fleet vehicles are required to use ELDs (electronic logging devices) to record driver duty information. These devices can be integrated into fleet management platforms and provide all data so that fleet managers track driver schedules and comply with the regulations.
Big Data needs an advanced and comprehensive fleet management software
Big Data is a huge benefit when being integrated with advanced and comprehensive fleet management platforms. Integrated sensors and telematics data don’t work on their own. An advanced fleet management platform sorts, analyze data and creates insightful reports which help with business decision-making.
Astreon offers the most Comprehensive & Advanced Fleet Management platform available for your Vehicles, Trailers, Machinery and Equipment, with over 2.9 million+ tracked assets globally. Our software is easy to use, fully customizable, and advanced. With our Fleet Management platform, you see all your assets on one screen in a simple to operate, powerful application. Our in-house development team is always developing leading-edge technology to allow us to exceed our clients’ expectations.
Why you need to integrate Last Mile Delivery with your Fleet Management Software
E-commerce industry is booming as consumer buying behaviors have changed to largely online. Today, consumers expect cheap, free and fast delivery and this is becoming the standard in the e-commerce space. In order to meet consumer expectations and move past competitors, companies need to find a way to improve delivery efficiency but maintain their margins when funding their shipping logistics.
The most important part they need to improve is their last mile delivery process. Last mile delivery is where most logistics companies have the most room for improvement, mostly lacking tools or services that cater to these needs.
What is Last Mile Delivery?
Last Mile Delivery refers to the last leg of a journey of the delivery process when a package is moved from a transportation hub to its final destination, which is usually end-users.
This is the most crucial step in the delivery process because customers expect fast and free delivery, and this demand increases constantly in e-commerce as competitors constantly push these boundaries to maintain competitiveness. The faster and more efficient the last mile delivery process is, the more you can improve customer satisfaction which will ultimately boost sales.
What is the biggest challenge with last mile deliveries?
Have you had a package “out for delivery” but you felt it took forever, even spanning multiple days? That means the last mile delivery process is inefficient or inaccurate and the consumer suffers, not knowing when their package will arrive, driving unnecessary calls into call centres, and driving up frustration levels in consumers.
According to the report from EFT (eye for transport), customers are expecting the following services;
In order to meet those customers’ demands, companies have to find a way to improve the last mile delivery process. However, there are the last mile delivery problems for companies.
Last mile delivery is both the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process. Last mile shipping can account for 53% of a shipment’s total costs but this number is increasing as supply chain inefficiencies are becoming more costly (INSIDER). At this point, companies have to implement new technologies and improvement of the delivery process.
Technology solutions to improve last mile delivery
How can companies provide customers’ expected demands, such as next-day delivery, free shipping and full visibility?
Having an effective fleet management tool is a solid place to start.
Astreon’s Logistics Solution is a fully-featured and integrated module to manage tasks, pickups, drop-offs, destinations for all order management business needs. Planning, recurring tasks, routing, two-way communication, and a feature-packed mobile app are all included in this effective operating management tool.
Astreon’s Logistics Solution is the best way to improve last mile delivery process and efficiency.
Here are 6 ways Astreon’s Logistics Solution can solve your biggest last mile delivery challenges;
1, Delivery route planning
Your driver has to follow a route to deliver. Your driver could have multiple stops with few drop-offs in total, or face the congestion of traffic and in both cases, a lot of time and gas can be spent a lot.
With Astreon’s Logistics Solution, it optimizes delivery routes automatically considering time, location, vehicle type, traffic to recommend efficient routes. It monitors vehicles in real-time so any updates on traffic that could affect these routes are sent to drivers in real-time with new optimized routes and ETA. It also provides an option to visually compare planned and actual routes both being shown on the map so a dispatcher can decide the most efficient routes under a variety of situations.
2, Delivery process monitoring
A dispatcher needs to monitor all delivery processes to make sure all deliveries are completed and respond to any emergencies.
Astreon’s Logistics Solution enables dispatchers to track the delivery process in real-time and respond to emerging issues through phone calls or chatting with the driver so that they can act on any situation quickly and accurately.
3, Effective communication
Communication between dispatchers and drivers are important to make all delivery process fast and efficient.
With Astreon’s Logistics Solution, drivers can communicate with their dispatchers and notify them of any circumstances considering delivery via a feature-packed mobile app. It also allows drivers to add a comment and take a photo to let dispatchers know their delivery completion.
4, Customer notifications
Customers are not as patient as you expect. Remember, they want free, fast delivery. As the customer demands graphs show, Customers need next day delivery and full visibility. Keeping your customers updated is considered a key to improve customer experience.
Astreon’s Logistics Solution enables you to keep your customers updated by offering not only tracking status but also talking to the driver directly or SMS notifications. Customers will always be notified of the forthcoming delivery and can track couriers via locator links too.
5, Reports and notifications
Identifying weaknesses before it is becoming critical issues, as well as monitoring KPIs are important to improve last mile delivery process and efficiency. To identify the issues, you need data to analyze.
With Astreon’s Logistics Solution, you can monitor key metrics, such as service time, fuel consumption, mileage, routes and route costs, fulfillment time, delivery interval, estimated departure time, estimated arrival time by teams, drivers, day, week, or even by the hour of the day. You can also download or preview reports. By taking advantage of these insights, you can track your company’s last mile delivery supply chain and find time allocation and possible improvements.
6, Driver’s Mobile app
Astreon’s Logistics Solution’s mobile app is designed for couriers and delivery drivers. Making your smartphone a fully-fledged working tool is easy – install the app from App Store/Google Play, authorize via the driver’s phone number, and you’re ready to go. Through the app, drivers receive detailed information on orders, as well as their pick up locations and planned routes on the map. All additional details – attached files, clients’ contact data, etc. – are present as well. The inbuilt chat function allows to communicate with an operator through text messages and send images.
During delivery execution, a driver can set order statuses (confirmation/rejection), attach client’s electronic signature or add new photos to order.
Astreon Logistics – Dispatch Solution
Our service allows you to perform a wide range of tasks in the area of logistics and delivery – transportation arrangements, delivery route optimization and cost-saving. Astreon’s Logistics – Dispatch Solution comprises a web-version for dispatchers and a mobile application for drivers.
Web version is an effective management tool designed for order placement and editing, distribution processes control, route planning and optimization, delivery progress control, notification on the events on the route, and service configuration.
iOS/Android app for delivery personnel features a user-friendly interface where your couriers and drivers get detailed information on each order, planned routes and sequences of delivery points, a built-in chat for courier-dispatcher communication, and a status-based system for quick updates on the delivery progress.
Need more information? Visit our Logistics page.
