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
Directly Jump To
The world of logistics transportation is witnessing constant disruptions in the form of diverse delivery types and logistics challenges. The rise of eCommerce and the need for faster delivery times has led to the development of new technologies and strategies to streamline the delivery process. Businesses are increasingly looking for solutions and technologies that can help them reduce costs, increase operational efficiency and elevate the overall CX via flexible and reliable service offerings.
One of the most significant changes in recent years has been the adoption of automation in first mile delivery. First Mile is one of the most crucial steps in the supply chain, as any kind of inefficiency that creeps into the system at that time can easily get snowballed into a huge business risk. The step involves the first movement of goods from a manufacturing facility or warehouse to the next destination, based on the type of industry, order, and customers.
The USA has an exceptionally strong eCommerce market, and eCommerce sales surpassed USD 1 trillion in 2022. The nation also has rapidly growing B2C and cross-border industry segments which amount to an immense load on the existing fulfillment network.
What makes the first mile movements so challenging is the fact that they are of different duration and styles, depending on the industry and nature of the goods. For example, the first mile is the shortest for domestic couriers, local retail, etc., while it becomes painfully long for international shipments.
Further, skilled labor shortages, rising delivery costs, increased fuel costs, and inefficient logistics are some of the perils being faced by the supply chain stakeholders, carriers, service providers, and shippers.
This paints an impressive landscape for reliable, intelligent, and scalable solutions for automating the first mile delivery in the USA.
Here, we will explore the challenges faced by businesses and other supply chain stakeholders for first mile delivery in USA, how automation can help, and what are the major advantages of automating the first mile. We also explore the challenges to the adoption of automation in first mile delivery and the key considerations for choosing the best solutions for first mile delivery.
Logistics has multiple moving parts that work disparately. This means that apart from the siloed data/information from multiple parties, businesses have to grapple with different information presentations across all these parties. For example, a simple event such as “shipment pickup” can be recorded in multiple forms across multiple parties, namely – “pickup done” “pickup completed,” “shipment picked” “driver picked the package” and more.
This lack of standardization across multiple parties makes it difficult to compile or consolidate the information from all the sources and analyze them for comprehensive management.
Label generation is a complex process, especially when it is handled manually, as labels vary across multiple carriers and service providers. The process consumes time, and it is highly likely for errors to creep in. Owing to this difficulty, sellers/businesses often end up using handwritten labels, which is neither scalable nor possible for large enterprises.
Further, it is important to note that any kind of error in the labels leads to shipment RTOs, and cancellations, ultimately leading to delivery delays. Hence, the absence of a digitized label generation and management process is another complex challenge faced by businesses during first mile delivery in US.
Businesses often shuffle among multiple systems, software interfaces, and channels to gain visibility across the first mile movements and to get updates about the shipments, billings, and other documentation. This lack of unified collaboration and transparent communication makes it hard to manage and track the logistical movements.
Thus, in order to just get a shipment shipped, the businesses have to communicate with multiple parties at once, which makes the overall first mile confusing, inefficient, and tedious.
Another critical challenge faced by businesses is onboarding and selecting the right carriers/service providers. In the absence of digitized onboarding and vendor prioritization or selection measures, they have to accomplish every task manually, which leads to higher logistics costs, inefficient collaborations, and manual latencies owing to complex documentation. Businesses are unable to figure out whether the current partner is the best fit for their business, and being unable to compare the quotes across multiple carriers makes it hard to get profitable deals.
Businesses like retail and manufacturing have multiple geographies for logistical coverage, such as warehouses, manufacturing units, storage facilities, and more. Hence, they need efficient and reliable logistics solutions for domestic as well as international areas.
Now, every vendor specializes in specific services and might or might not be the right fit for certain shipments, like FTL or PTL, hazardous goods, time-critical logistics, and more. Manual management of vendors inhibits them from realizing the full potential of their partnerships and might also lead to inefficient or costly partnerships.
Businesses using automated solutions for first mile delivery in USA can leverage the in-built features and functionalities to automate the workflows, consolidate data and information from multiple sources, and unlock unified management across all the systems. They can use the in-built carrier/vendor management routines to automate the vendor selection based on custom rules for vendor prioritization that are based on specific vendor and shipment constraints.
The automated first mile delivery solutions offer easy integrations across the existing tech infrastructure, such as ERP/CRM/OMS/WMS and more. Thus, businesses get access to standardized information for comprehensive management and unified collaboration via the integrated dashboard interface. They can leverage the smart allocation rules to automate vendor selection for specific areas/consignments/loads/capacity, and more.
Automated solutions for first mile delivery consolidate all the information from multiple sources in one place and present it to the business users in a standardized format. This allows businesses to set specific KPIs for performance measurement, report the shipment status, etc., to the relevant stakeholders in an easy manner, and make business decisions based on collective understanding.
Advanced first mile automation solutions, like Shipsy, offer automated label generation that ensures that the shipping labels for consignments are complete with all necessary details required for delivery. This makes it easier to generate labels for multiple carriers and reduces the overall order-to-ship time, ultimately reducing the costs of operations and delivery times.
Further, the smart label generation features can be easily customized to meet the unique labeling requirements of shipping companies or service providers. This helps to simplify the complex label generation process and eliminates the need to have an in-house engineering department to manage the technical requirements.
Automated solutions for first mile delivery in USA enable businesses to schedule pickups as well as ask for on-demand pick-ups. Thus, businesses are able to have planned consignment pick-ups at a later date and time as per customer convenience. The solutions offer automatic order clubbing for multiple orders to increase productivity and decrease shipping costs.
AI-powered solutions for first mile delivery allow businesses to digitize vendor onboarding. Smart solutions like Shipsy also offer highly powerful vendor management modules, such as rate masters, serviceability masters, etc., that allow businesses to directly find the list of relevant vendors for selected shipments based on the shipment characteristics and vendor rates, and service offerings.
Further, the solution showcases all the vendors ranked in order on the basis of performance delivered. As businesses are able to check all the rates across multiple vendors in one go, they gain the upper hand in negotiations and can make better deals for profitable logistics.
Despite the numerous advantages of automation in first mile delivery, there are several challenges to its adoption. One of the most significant challenges is the cost of implementing automation systems. The high cost of these systems can be a barrier to adoption, particularly for smaller logistics providers.
Another significant challenge is the issue of regulatory compliance, in-house engineering requirements, constant product updates, and third-party collaborations. This shifts the entire business focus from operations to product building which is neither advisable nor scalable, particularly for smaller businesses. This is where Shipsy comes into the picture.
Shipsy is an intelligent and highly configurable SaaS-based logistics automation and supply chain management platform with modular offerings for multiple industries and logistics use cases. Its first mile management solution automates first mile operations, consolidates information across multiple service providers, and offers intelligent in-built capabilities to unlock operational efficiencies.
Businesses can drive better and more profitable partnerships and enjoy transparent and performance-driven collaborations across multiple vendors. The solution comes with smart route planning and optimization engine, vendor management portal, vendor optimization capabilities, and much more to help businesses focus on strategic business development instead of manual communications.
With Shipsy’s smart automation for first mile delivery in USA, businesses can manage, track, control, and optimize all the operations via a single dashboard and unlock:
For more information on Shipsy’s first mile delivery platform or to get a hands-on experience of the intelligent capabilities it offers, please get in touch with our experts and schedule a customized demo today!
The rising average consumer eCommerce spending in US is driving massive order volumes across multiple industries. Here is how smart freight management software in USA can help.
The logistics industry in the USA is in for rapid growth and is expected to be $236.41 trillion by 2027. Here are the key growth drivers, market challenges, & future trends to watch out for.
