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Long gone are the days when customers used to wait happily for weeks before their online order arrived. Customers now want their products to be delivered on the same day, along with the power to track their shipments in real-time, which has sent businesses brainstorming over last mile best practices.
Research says that 41% of consumers are even willing to pay more for same-day delivery of products and for white-glove deliveries. Yet, in specific market segments, like on-demand delivery, QSR and eCommerce, they expect brands to deliver at speed without charging any delivery fee. They also expect brands to be more proactive with customer communication, follow-ups, tracking, order updates, etc.
However, the demand for free, on-time deliveries and shrinkage in the delivery window puts huge pressure on Last Mile logistics, making it hard to manage. And as Last Mile is directly linked to consumer experience, not managing it properly could lead to delays in shipment delivery, cost bleeds, and thus poor customer experience. Therefore, businesses must create a robust Last Mile strategy that helps them manage their operations, ensure timely deliveries, and provide seamless CX without violating their bottom lines.
Below, we discuss the top 10 Last Mile best practices every business must follow to reduce costs, improve profits, and scale their operations in a smart manner. Following these practices, businesses can effectively formulate a robust Last Mile strategy and steer their operations towards excellence and sustainable growth.
Last Mile best practices are basically the most accurate and effective methods or guidelines to help businesses simplify and efficiently manage Last Mile operations. The last mile best practices empower businesses to exercise better control over assets, stakeholders, processes, and the entire ecosystem.
They can assess, track and measure the results produced by these best practices and leverage them to formulate better strategies for the future.
The Last Mile is the most complex and crucial leg of logistics and is directly linked to customer experience and business profitability. Owing to the involvement of multiple moving parts and stakeholders, it is also the costliest leg of the journey accounting for 53% of the total shipping cost.
Because of its complex nature and importance in the supply chain, if everything is not managed well, it will lead to missed or delayed deliveries which not only adds to the last-mile costs but also hampers the customer experience.
However, by following Last Mile best practices, businesses can deal with inefficiencies and tackle the challenges. For instance, by opting for a smart delivery routing solution, businesses can plan an optimized route way before the drivers hit the road, reducing excessive fuel expenditure and ensuring timely deliveries.
In addition, businesses can automate redundant processes like planning routes, sending alerts, allocating drivers, etc., reducing reliance on human elements and making operations more efficient.
Moreover, by following best practices in last mile, such as data analytics, businesses can find gaps in their management and address those issues for better performance.
Consequently, businesses can reduce costs by reducing manual reliance and automating different tasks, achieve higher profits and customer experience by delivering shipments on time, and constantly improve their operations.
Data is one of the most important assets for every business, especially in last mile deliveries, as it helps businesses track and measure multiple metrics and KPIs. The right data helps businesses find gaps in their operations, predict contingencies better and be prepared to deal with them in advance, ensuring seamless Last Mile operations.
Therefore, businesses must also pay attention to ‘data’ best practices in the Last Mile deliveries. Here are some reliable data best practices in the Last Mile deliveries:
Businesses must opt for a delivery optimization platform that not only helps manage, monitor, control, and track but also gather & utilize crucial data for improving Last Mile operations.
58% of respondents in a survey consider frequently performing data assessment to determine the accuracy of data. Doing this helps businesses determine if the data they’re collecting is useful and accurate because only high-quality data yields high-quality results.
Businesses must set up a dedicated management team that looks into the collection and analysis of data. While this comes as an added operational cost and management overhead for small businesses, and SMEs with limited financial resources, investing in AI/ML-powered last mile orchestration solutions that offer in-built data analytics and reporting can be a game changer.
Such platforms overcome the need for in-house engineering and data analytics teams and offer highly accurate and actionable data insights for smarter, better, and data-driven business decision-making.
All the data needs to be appropriately identified and documented in a single, easily accessible location for easy utility. This overcomes one of the most crucial hurdles for data analytics and visualization, as data is no longer siloed or unstructured.
With proper data documentation, businesses can create a highly organized and reliable data store, which can be used by smart data analytics tools to derive actionable business intelligence.
Next, we discuss the best last mile practices in relation to operational management and orchestration.
Manual management of various processes and assets in the last mile leads to poor optimization, which directly hampers the operational efficiency and customer experience in last mile. Hence, the very first step is the automation of tasks, processes, workflows, etc., to reduce the dependence on manual elements.
Opting for a smart delivery planning or routing solution helps reduce reliance on human elements and error margins, thus, enabling faster deliveries and better customer experience.
AI-powered smart last mile automation makes delivery orchestration highly efficient by optimizing all the entities, such as drivers, vehicles, miles traveled, time, resource utilization, and even vehicle capacity. The managers can leverage the smart in-built algorithms for route planning & optimization as well as delivery management to unlock benefits such as dynamic ETAs, real-time optimization, order clubbing, etc.
This not only helps get more work done in lesser time, but it also reduces human reliance, bringing more business accuracy.
By following Last Mile best practices, businesses can make the most of data. For instance, modern-day solutions allow businesses to gather, monitor, and analyze data and make data-driven decisions that are more accurate and reliable.
Businesses can check which processes and assets are performing the best, uncover hidden optimization loopholes, and draw highly reliable insights for smart business decisions.
By automating different processes, making data-driven decisions, reducing reliance on manual elements, and working on inefficiencies, businesses can Save costs and ensure timely deliveries without fail, delivering better customer experience. They can improve SLA adherence and delivery NPS, ensure customer delight via feedback, automated delivery validation, authentication checks, and more.
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of Last Mile best practices let’s uncover how not having a robust Last Mile strategy can negatively impact operations.
Last Mile best practices can help businesses revolutionize how they manage Last Mile deliveries. For instance, businesses can save time by automating route planning and other redundant processes allowing them to focus more on core operations and ensure business scalability.
Also, with the right Last Mile best practices, businesses can cut short the travel distance, reducing fuel expenditure and thus reducing the overall transportation costs. This supports the bottom line and helps improve profit margins.
In addition, Last Mile best practices can help businesses get real-time visibility at a granular level into all the operations, delivery partners, and orders, making it easy to notice any gaps in the processes and to ensure everything is moving as expected.
Moreover, hyper-local businesses, retailers, QSRs, and on-demand delivery businesses can prep-plan all their orders individually, no matter how different their requirements are. Given the extent of optimization and smart automation these business models rely upon, it is not a far-fetched thing to say that last mile best practices are their foundation.
Next, we discuss the top 10 best practices in last mile deliveries that businesses need to follow to reduce costs, smart scaling, and improve profits.
Using a dedicated route planning and optimization platform, businesses can standardize and automate the Last Mile delivery process to reduce errors and increase the productivity of the workforce. Also, using automation solutions, businesses can automatically plan routes for individual orders and even handle bulk orders, completely bypassing the disadvantages of manual route planning.
Once the automation solutions are in place, businesses can standardize them to ensure effortless management of operations across multiple parties and stakeholders, which leads to timely deliveries and better customer experience each time.
When it comes to Last Mile deliveries, every individual order has to be shipped to different customers meaning there’ll be hundreds of delivery partners on the road with the parcels. And to ensure that all the orders reach consumers on time without fail, route planning and optimization are required.
With automated route planning and optimization, businesses can find the most optimized and shortest route while considering factors such as customer delivery window, traffic congestion, driver availability, etc. This way, each driver can operate seamlessly and deliver shipments on time.
Businesses must opt for delivery planning software that offers real-time visibility over all the operations from fleet movement to driver location. This way, managers can ensure everything is moving as expected.
Also, by using smart delivery planning solutions, businesses can offer customers the ability to track their orders in real time. This helps reduce calls to the customer care center and improves customer experience because of increased transparency.
One of the biggest reasons businesses in the Last Mile logistics are inefficient is because there’s a disconnect across different operations. However, with a smart solution, businesses can consolidate all the operations and processes and enjoy unified operations view using a single dashboard.
When all processes can be viewed, managed, and tracked from one place, identifying gaps becomes easy, which further helps businesses improve efficiency.
Sometimes, because of the large distance between the distribution center and customers’ location, businesses are unable to offer same-day delivery on most of their products which impacts the customer experience.
However, if businesses tie up with local shop owners who use their shops as distribution centers, they can offer same-day delivery on a wide range of products, offering them a competitive advantage. While this might seem easier to say than do, leveraging smart last mile automation that enables working with multiple 3PLs and managing them in a highly efficient manner can work wonders for businesses with unique distribution/delivery needs.
Businesses must also go for route planning tools that offer dynamic ETAs. This way, all the stakeholders are aware of the precise delivery of ETAs. Also, when a roadblock or any other contingency forces the driver to re-route, such tools dynamically update the delivery ETA and alert the stakeholders, including the customers.
This way, the customer is always aware of the precise estimated time of arrival, and the delivery failures can be avoided.
Another important Last Mile best practice is relying on delivery planning software that offers automated order management. Such software solutions help businesses smartly allocate drivers and vehicles, considering factors like vehicle capacity, driver and vehicle availability, driver experience, etc., to ensure seamless operations.
They also automatically club different orders when required, find the most optimized route from source to destination, re-route in case of any contingency and even manage returns. This way, all the operations are taken care of, reducing reliance on human elements and maximizing efficiency.
Businesses must also integrate a geofencing solution to improve Last Mile operations. Using geofencing, businesses can track the movement of their drivers and ensure they’re on the route specified by the route planning software. If the drivers deviate from their route, an alert is sent to the managers, who can tackle the situation smartly.
In addition, businesses must enable their drivers to collect digital proof of deliveries, like signatures or photos, to ensure the item was actually delivered to the customer.
To reduce transportation costs and to improve overall efficiency, Last Mile businesses must ensure optimum vehicle capacity utilization. And this can be done by smartly allocating the vehicles by considering factors such as vehicle capacity, order type, route, and driver experience to ensure that the vehicle delivers the maximum possible orders in one go.
Lastly, businesses must have a solution that offers them centralized control of the entire ecosystem, from inventory management and stakeholder details to crucial data such as failed and successful deliveries, fuel consumption, driver behavior, weather, traffic pattern, etc.
A centralized view of the entire ecosystem offers both high-level and granular insights into all the operations, making it easy for businesses to notice any inefficiencies in the system. Also, data analytics becomes easy when all the data is available in one place, enabling data-driven decision-making.
With the aforementioned Last Mile best practices, businesses can reduce costs, dive deeper into inefficiencies, and gain granular visibility into operations, helping them create a profitable, sustainable, and efficient Last Mile.
However, to be able to follow these Last Mile best practices, businesses need a unified end-to-end Last Mile solution such as Shipsy.
The market is full of standalone software solutions that solve individual issues, such as route planning or optimization, making it hard to unlock complete growth. Shipsy, on the other hand, is an end-to-end logistics platform that can help businesses handle first, middle, and Last Mile operations efficiently in a scalable and flexible manner.
Using Shipsy, businesses can automate different processes such as route optimization and planning, driver and vehicle allocation, and reducing reliance on manual elements to achieve better efficiency and accuracy.
Also, businesses can get complete visibility into all the operations at a granular level using a single dashboard, making it easy to track, manage and plan all Last Mile operations. In addition, using geofencing, managers can ensure that drivers are following the route and ensure timely deliveries.
Moreover, Shipsy sends real-time alerts to customers allowing them to track their shipments in real time. Along with the above benefits, Shipsy also helps achieve the following:
To know more about how Shipsy works and how we can help you create a profitable, sustainable, and efficient Last Mile, book a custom demo now!
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