Plan, procure, execute, & track transportation for every shipment across your supply chain & logistics operations
A SaaS solution to help grow your business by achieving 100% perfect order execution at high volumes
Increase vehicle capacity utilization and customer promise adherence
Grow your business with omnichannel presence and automated pickups
Consolidate shipments for hub to hub movement across land and air
Real-time customer communications and collect accurate PODs
Orchestrate logistics operations with multiple 3rd party carriers
Achieve cost effective, scalable, sustainable, and customer centric deliveries
Orchestrate all your cross-border logistics operations with ease
Improve address accuracy, ensure first-attempt delivery success, reduce costs and boost customer experience
Gain end-to-end shipment visibility, get proactive alerts, and send customers live tracking links
Grow business in a dynamic world and manage operations across First, Middle & Last mile
Delight customers by seamlessly managing store and online orders across own fleet and 3rd party
Reduce freight costs & get end to end visibility across shipments
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Statista reports that the global parcel shipping volume is expected to be 256 billion parcels shipped by 2027. Also, stats suggest that the parcel shipping boom is expected to stay in shape given the fact that eCommerce is rising and cross-border commerce continues to gain an audience all over the globe. As businesses continue to cater to this increasing demand, they actively look for ways to manage their operations in a smarter, better, and more efficient way, which brings parcel delivery software into the picture.
Apart from automating the delivery process, the parcel delivery software help manage, plan, monitor, and track the entire parcel delivery ecosystem from a unified interface. It also helps keep track of the parcels in various stages, such as pick-ups, transit, delivery, returns, etc. Businesses can effortlessly integrate the software with their existing technological infrastructures, such as ERP/CMS/OMS/WMS, and leverage automation in an even better manner.
Here, we discuss the parcel delivery software or the courier management software in detail, how it helps courier companies bring more efficiency in their operations and how businesses can unlock higher revenues and better utilization with it. We also discuss the must-have features every courier company should look for while investing in a parcel delivery management platform and why a customized platform works better than off-the-shelf options.
Parcel delivery software or parcel delivery management solution automates the tasks and operations in a courier/post and parcel ecosystem. It helps managers allocate parcels smartly, seat specific rules for allocation, delivery, routing, and ensures that all these rules are followed. It helps track all the parcels in real-time, manage and monitor their leg-to-leg movements, offers automated alerts that can be configured for various parties involved in the courier ecosystem, and much more.
A parcel delivery system is a smart automation that can offer a wide variety of services and functions depending on the service provider and business use case it is being used for. For example, if a business is looking for end-to-end parcel delivery management, then the software would offer highly advanced automation capabilities, such as:
While these are some of the capabilities and functionalities offered by the parcel delivery management software, the list can vary across solutions and industries as per the unique business use cases, etc.
Next, we discuss the major challenges in parcel delivery or courier management and how they can be overcome with solutions offering intelligent capabilities.
In 2021 alone, global eCommerce sales were USD 4.9 trillion, and this figure is expected to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, hitting the USD 7.4 trillion mark by 2025. The eCommerce growth is further fueled by increasing mobile commerce and internet penetration, which facilitates cross-border trade as well.
While the surge in eCommerce is generating a huge number of parcels, the evolving customer demands with complex deliverables in relation to same-day deliveries, free deliveries, and returns are pushing the parcel delivery managers to their limits.
The standard automation for delivery management and parcel status tracking crumbles down in the wake of these complexities, and the race to deliver delightful customer experiences is becoming more intense. All this is making it hard for the courier providers to operate on big margins.
AI-powered parcel delivery management software can help via automation, digitization, and optimization across all the core processes, such as invoicing, billing, picking, packing, tracking, and routing. These systems come with easy-to-use unified dashboards that can be customized for specific business requirements as well.
Despite adopting logistics automation and parcel delivery management tools, companies struggle when it comes to granular visibility into parcel movements, especially if they are working with multiple 3PLs. This is mainly because businesses are unable to automate parcel collection, information compiling, and presentation in a searchable format in one place.
The standard ready-to-use software tools also prove to be useless in this regard as they are made with a one-size-fits-all approach. As the courier managers are not able to access this information, getting visibility into the real-time movement of parcels right from the source to the destination becomes a challenge.
If they wish to know the real-time parcel status, they have to make calls individually to different carriers and delivery professionals, which becomes impossible for businesses with millions of orders per month.
On the other hand, customers look for smart features, such as accurate ETAs, dynamic order movement updates, real-time tracking of delivery, proactive communication in case of delays, etc.
AI/ML-powered parcel delivery software comes with automated workflows for parcel tracking, which enables every stakeholder to track the parcel in real-time and get automated updates for key milestone events. These intelligent software solutions for parcel delivery management also offer status standardization which means irrespective of the number of service providers, 3PLs, warehouse partners, etc., the managers can get all the status information for every parcel in one place.
They can check the individual parcel status, take action on bulk parcel collections with the same status, and unlock greater business value.
Customers are becoming tech-savvy, with smartphone users falling in every age group, which is leading to an increase in their expectations as well. They are increasingly looking for real-time updates, personalized communications, omnichannel CX, and detailed information about the authenticity or product quality.
They favor brands and businesses that offer self-service modules for faster query resolution and seek feedback for actually making changes. However, these premium service offerings cannot come with legacy parcel management systems where automation is either rudimentary or negligible.
Further, with multiple moving parts and different business use cases, courier companies either make do with the IT capabilities offered by 3PLs, or business partners. This makes it impossible to incorporate the latest tech offerings in their business model and hence, renders the CX average or below average.
On the other hand, having smart AI-powered parcel delivery software with flexible integration modules helps businesses to get technology-powered benefits with ease. Such solutions can easily integrate with the existing tech infrastructure and make it possible to deliver customer delight and operational excellence at scale.
These smart solutions record historic data insights for every customer, every logistics services provider, and every process. These data insights are then processed to unlock hidden business trends that can be presented in reports for deeper analysis and deriving smart business intelligence. Thus, these solutions facilitate better strategizing and drive higher profits.
Not every parcel is sent over to the next city or via domestic carriers. Cross-border commerce is also becoming increasingly popular these days, and more than 2.14 bn people are buying goods and services online. Stats also suggest that 70% of them shop from foreign websites.
Hence, poor last mile delivery planning and inefficient orchestration without real-time monitoring can play havoc with the operations, degrade CX and take the revenues for a plunge. Some other consequences include package loss, mislabeled or misrouted parcels, and late deliveries.
These problems are generally unavoidable as in most courier companies, the last mile operations are managed by the 3PL partners. Hence, they become entry points for inefficiencies, process vulnerabilities, and errors.
Smart parcel delivery management platforms help courier companies overcome all these and many other last mile challenges in various ways, such as:
When it comes to scaling the pick-ups or operations across borders or multiple logistics service providers, the standard or legacy parcel delivery software solutions crumble down. They cannot perform tasks such as automated quotes management, smart invoicing, parcel tracking, data management, etc., in an efficient manner.
These limitations affect the entire logistical value chain from pick-ups or mid-mile operations to last mile and assume a critical stance with every step, just like a snowball.
Smart parcel delivery software offers intelligent capabilities, such as automated scan-based pickups, automated label generation, and hub & rider allocation. They offer a central ERP system for accurate in-transit tracking and unified communication. The manager can exercise automated order allocation to riders at the destination hub or warehouse. Finally, the software sends automated alerts for various events such as delivery completion, missed deliveries, and electronic PoDs (proof of deliveries)
With such transparent operations and end-to-end management of parcel delivery processes, courier companies can unlock high operational efficiencies and find their way toward effortless scaling as well.
A robust and comprehensive parcel delivery management software optimizes every single process in every single stage of parcel movement. As soon as a customer places an order, the automated workflows for WMS and OMS get started automatically, and every stakeholder works on a set step.
Intelligent parcel delivery software can help optimize operations at scale via automated and scheduled dispatching, real-time tracking of parcels, and real-time asset monitoring. It captures delivery feedback, maintains digitized proof of deliveries, and leverages efficient routing and in-transit movement monitoring for highly efficient operations.
The companies get in-built algorithms for fair and transparent cash reconciliation and strong communication among all the stakeholders, which further facilitates efficiency and optimization across the entire system.
All these features help reduce the customer call volume, and uplift customer satisfaction levels. Customers get automated alerts via personalized SMS, chat, emails or Whatsapp messages, etc., and businesses can schedule these alerts for every key milestone event in the parcels’ journey.
Next, we discuss some of the must-have features that every courier company must look for in parcel delivery software.
While the business needs of every courier company or courier service provider are different, the core pain-points and operational challenges remain largely the same. Hence, we recommend the list of must-have features in a parcel delivery software solution as per the common industry challenges.
Some of the must-have features and functionalities are as follows:
These are some of the must-have features in a parcel delivery platform.
Every successful platform implementation is a result of the right collaboration, the right solution, and the right integration. Shipsy is a smart logistics and supply chain management platform that offers all the above-mentioned features, offers custom SaaS functionalities, short onboarding times, and a minimal learning curve.
Its CEP orchestration platform is an end-to-end and highly smart parcel delivery management system powered by cutting-edge AI/ML algorithms and advanced data analytics. We help customers make the most of their resources, assets, and time by automating and optimizing every single process thread involved in a CEP order movement.
Shipsy’s smart courier management system helps:
For more information and to get in touch with our experts for a demo, please visit the official website.
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