6 Trends You May Have Missed About Delivery Management

The continuously evolving landscape of e-commerce is presenting online retailers with fresh and innovative methods of doing business online. Delivery management is gaining more attraction with automation, digitalization, and personalization. With more and more customers demanding for same day or next day deliveries, maximizing the efficiency of last-mile delivery operations has to remain a high priority for retailers. Nowadays, modern delivery platforms provide features that help engage companies throughout the delivery cycle, including instant communication and visibility with drivers and transparency over orders, features that help with efficiency of the operations to deliver better customer experience.

Companies are constantly looking for new ways to improve and optimize their deliveries as per the customer’s demand and to gain competitive edge companies need to understand the top 6 trends driving the last mile deliveries.

• Smart Planning With IoT

Ditching the traditional transport planning and scheduling based on reducing the distance traveled the world is moving towards the Internet of things. However, urban freight is more focused on time of delivery, reducing the maintenance cost, behavior monitoring and much more. Modern delivery management solutions are developed using big data to forecast delivery routes, real-time traffic information, and predictive measures of the vehicle. Coming delivery management solutions are smart and intelligent with the capabilities for dynamic planning. The planning buckets will be no longer in minutes, just seconds.

• Faster Fulfilment

You can never take customers for granted! Companies must adapt to customers changing demand. With the expanding internet network, consumers are able to find products faster than ever. It becomes easier for the consumer to buy a product online in just a click at the same time they want their product to be delivered faster. This has resulted in creating a push in two-day, one-day, and even same-day delivery. With this growing trend of instant deliveries now it takes minutes which used to take days to be delivered.

• Automation To Remove Delivery Complexity

It is necessary for companies to accurately identify the aspects of delivery and logistics which can be automated. For example, a company having a wide range of products faces a complicated process when it comes to delivery.
Some of the very frequent questions they face are,

• How to optimize the route for delivery drivers?
• How to match a particular delivery type and delivery carrier?
• How to assign tasks to delivery agents as per their availability?
• How to automate the checkout process?

All these questions can easily be answered with automation. The trick here is to use tools which come with pre-configured services and carrier options along with in-built machine learning. To be able to give the best solution considering all the possible factors including the type of product, the order destination, the basket mix, etc the tool must rely on a robust algorithm.

• Focus On Traceability

Modern customers are not only interested in receiving their orders as soon as possible, but they also want to be able to track their package throughout the delivery process. Every day improving technology has made it possible for companies to provide the step-by-step tracking information for the entire delivery cycle. Delivery agents can collect electronic proof of delivery when the delivery is completed. Smartphones have revolutionized the entire process of traceability with GPS  

• Insourcing Deliveries

Outsourcing delivery services seem like the topic of the year especially among companies proving third-party logistics. There is a significant increase in the numbers of companies using their own shared vehicles to make last-mile delivery that includes a name like Amazon in the list. These companies have their own vehicles and drivers on the payroll for making local deliveries, not long haul.

• Unmanned Deliveries

Deliveries with self-driving cars, drones, and robots are the futuristic delivery options which are being developed and tested. Delivery by autonomous vehicles or drones will change the game considerably. Around sixty percent of the cost in delivery is labor. Currently, deliveries are limited by labor, cost, and shifts whereas robotic deliveries can be done 24 hours a day. However, drone deliveries may have limited use in urban areas due to regulatory and operational issues. Robot delivery is already being tested in San Fransico for yelp Eat24 using a Marble Robot.  

Future in last mile delivery holds tremendous potential for existing and new and consumers in the field looking at the rapid growth. The future is autonomous, these trends show stakeholders throughout the delivery management are actively trying to perfect the last mile in order to keep up with greater consumer demands.

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