One Stop Guide To Understand Automated Dispatch Software

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One Stop Guide To Understand Automated Dispatch Software

Logistics management goes beyond transporting goods and packages from one place to another. It includes planning delivery schedules, unearthing efficient delivery routes, dispatching, ensuring delivery productivity, improving customer satisfaction and more. In order to streamline these operations and maximize efficiency, businesses are embracing digital tools like automated dispatch software and vehicle dispatch software. Let’s dig deeper into it.

What is automated dispatch software?

Automated dispatch software or vehicle dispatch software helps dispatchers and fleet managers organize and optimize delivery schedules and delivery routes. It contributes to maximizing operational efficiency and reducing delivery costs. With such software, a business doesn’t need to invest heavily in the workforce, track vehicles, and monitor drivers’ performance manually.

Why do businesses need automated dispatch software?

Leveraging an automated dispatch system or vehicle dispatch system makes a business to-

  • Optimize delivery schedules
  • Respond to last-minute delivery requests promptly
  • Improve customer experience
  • Arrange and assign delivery tasks beforehand
  • Improve productivity

Enterprises and logistics providers need to automate core logistics operations to improve delivery times, reduce costs and increase visibility into delivery operations. An automated vehicle dispatch system digitizes order and vehicle allocation processes based on multiple delivery constraints like distance, duration, customer proximity, delivery type and more. This helps address the below challenges efficiently:

 dispatch management challenges

Automated Dispatch Software- How Does It Work

Every business that owns a fleet for moving products from one place to another requires fleet management and thus, automated dispatch software. The software automates the entire process and makes it easy for the fleet managers to monitor movement of all goods under one roof. Moreover, it also helps in identifying and overcoming inefficiencies that cause delivery-related problems. But before getting one for your business, it is good to know how the software works. And for that, let’s consider this scenario-

You are a fleet manager in a 3PL company and are responsible for ensuring on-time deliveries of each order to all locations. What will you do? You will hire resources to:

Key Responsibilities of Fleet Managers

  • Determine suitable delivery vehicles
  • Assign drivers for each trip
  • Planning secondary and tertiary trips
  • Tracking each vehicle
  • Getting the updated delivery status
  • Dispatching control teams in case of vehicle breakdown or other such issues
  • Measuring the performance of all your drivers

Despite doing all the measures, you fail to deliver orders on time. You figure out the common causes by creating various reports, and they turn out to be poor weather conditions, road restrictions, traffic jams, etc. Understandably, you can’t have control over such situations with zero visibility on the trips and manual dispatch management.

All you can do to fix this and a plethora of other dispatch-related issues is invest in automated dispatch software. Backed by AI, ML, and other top technologies, such software automatically looks into new orders, finds a suitable delivery vehicle, assigns delivery drivers, and provides fleet managers 100% visibility on each trip.

Yes, you don’t need to do anything. Just sit back, relax, and track each vehicle while monitoring all deliveries in real-time from a single dashboard. Most vehicle dispatch software also includes a mobile application for drivers. This app alerts the drivers about traffic jams, road closures, delivery time/location modification, and other crucial info to complete each trip efficiently.

Benefits of Dispatch Management or Vehicle Dispatch Software

We have already highlighted the importance of an automated dispatch system; let’s take a look at its advantages-

Better delivery management

The software helps in managing each delivery efficiently, that too with least or no human intervention. It further leads to the increasing number of trips per vehicle per day. Moreover, all the deliveries can be managed under a single roof.

Efficient delivery routes

Planning efficient delivery routes doesn’t mean finding the shortest distance from the source to the destination. Instead, it means designing a route by following which drivers can do multiple deliveries with different locations in the least time possible.

Reduced logistics costs

By minimizing fuel and operational costs, the software minimizes overall logistics costs while increasing business profitability.

automated dispatch software benefits

Improved driver productivity

Well-optimized delivery routes ensure that drivers spend less time on the road and avoid getting stuck in traffic. It improves their productivity as well as safety.

Improved customer experience

Offering customers the freedom to track their deliveries, communicate with drivers, and reschedule delivery time/date contributes to delight customers and deliver an unmatched delivery experience.

Simplifies communication

For efficient dispatch management and high delivery success rate, it is essential to have clear communication between dispatchers, drivers, and the end customers. Vehicle dispatch software helps in achieving this goal.

Choosing the Best Automated Dispatch or Vehicle Dispatch Software

Don’t forget to look for the following while purchasing vehicle dispatch software for your business-

Digitizing dispatching and workforce scheduling

Helps manage dispatch operations along with organizing and scheduling workforce to ensure on-time deliveries.

Centralized dispatching

To manage the dispatch of a large fleet, both internal and external, across different locations. Also, have real-time visibility on each trip.

Digitized route planning

With route planning feature, it design delivery routes based on data-based insights and factors like delivery time window, delivery location, and more.

Mobile app for drivers

To help drivers manage each trip efficiently, get new pick-up requests or alerts related to change in delivery time/location.

Real-time tracking

To track and monitor all the vehicles and deliveries and send control teams in case of any emergency.

Instant alerts

To get notifications about unexpected problems, delivery milestones, and other dispatch-related tasks.

Insights and analytics

To measure your drivers’ performance, delivery success rates and improve your dispatch-related operations.

Manual or people-heavy dispatch processes can make the entire fleet management and vehicle dispatch a tedious and time-consuming task. An automated dispatch system or vehicle dispatch software can help planning efficient delivery routes, dispatching vehicles without any manual intervention, maximizing efficiency, and delighting customers with timely deliveries and accurate ETAs. Get the best one for your business to streamline end-to-end dispatch management.

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