4 Ways to Reduce the Miles Traveled for Supply Chain Sustainability with Smart Automation

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4 Ways to Reduce the Miles Traveled for Supply Chain Sustainability with Smart Automation

According to CDP’s Global Supply Chain Report 2020, within the next five years, businesses would face up to US$120 billion in costs by environmental risks in their supply chains. As 85% of universal shopping, sentiment steers toward sustainable products and services, and logistics transportation still accounts for 37% of CO2 emissions, supply chain and logistics stakeholders are brainstorming over the ‘Miles Traveled’ KPIs. Yet, 87% of companies have committed to integrating sustainability into company strategy.

With a granular understanding of how their assets complete the deliveries and how the on-field movements can be optimized, businesses not only build sustainable operations but can also cut down operational costs by a significant measure. Reducing ‘Miles Traveled’ directly reduces fuel costs, rider payouts, vehicle leasing costs, and more. However, strategizing with such fine-grained KPIs over an order volume in millions, with multiple moving parts, requires highly optimized supply chain management via intelligent automation.

Here we share four awesome ways smart logistics automation reduces miles traveled for sustainable supply chain operations.

Reducing Distance Traveled for Supply Chain Sustainability: 4 Ways Automation Can Help

Route Optimization

Static routes tend to deliver partial optimization because of the inability to plan for real-time road conditions and working constraints. Incidental planning and optimization have become crucial as customers’ demands are now evolving at a breakneck pace.

Advanced route optimization considers multiple constraints like delivery type, order volume, weight, costs, distance, traffic considerations, and more to chalk out the shortest and most efficient route possible to reduce fuel consumption. Hence, optimization becomes a multivariable function where managers can define highly precise constraints for optimized and resource-efficient delivery orchestrations.

Territory Optimization

Leveraging advanced territory optimization capabilities helps logistics stakeholders plan resource utilization to serve their demands and cover geographies optimally. Smart automation for territory optimization facilitates planning to keep area-specific delivery constraints in mind for hundreds of shipments in one go. Thus, businesses can energize highly sure, efficient, and precisely controlled delivery operations for specific territories.

Intelligent Route Planning

Using intelligent route planning, businesses can find the most efficient route based on consignment mapping with the vehicles. Efficient logistics planning and increased fleet capacity minimize the distance traveled, fuel consumption, and delivery time.

AI-based route planning engines come with highly efficient and smart in-built routines that offer hundreds of custom optimization constraints to supply chain professionals, such as vehicle capacity, vehicle make, consignment weight, consignment volume, rider payouts, areas, delivery pin codes, etc.

Leveraging dynamic routing capabilities helps reduce resource wastage further by planning for planned/slotted/on-demand deliveries well ahead of time.

Dynamic Order Batching

When it comes to 30 mins, 20 mins, or 10 mins delivery, delivery managers must leverage dynamic automated order batching to significantly reduce the distance traveled for order picking with similar pickup locations.

Smart delivery orchestration and management platforms leverage highly efficient AI/ML-based workflow automation routines to do this process within seconds and save a significant amount of time, money, resources, and effort for orchestrating more deliveries per trip. The extended functionalities also include clubbing deliveries with returns, pick-ups with drops, etc.

Make Miles Traveled Greener

A smart logistics management platform helps delivery managers to automate prioritizing order allocation to electric vehicles and bicycles over conventional means based on predefined distance limits. Studies reveal that businesses can save USD894 annually by replacing motor scooters with e-bikes.

Apart from using electric vehicles and bicycles, it is crucial to partner with the right carrier. Using automation and analytics-driven platform to partner with carriers using sustainable fuel usage practices steers supply chain operations toward excellence and long-term sustainability.

Finally, businesses need to focus on increasing first-attempt delivery success. Better communication between drivers and end customers ensures fewer delivery attempts and boosts first-attempt success rates, thereby reducing the distance traveled. Businesses can reduce delivery failures by using proprietary advanced geocoding engines and leveraging live GPS locations to arrest fake attempts. 

Such smart logistics automation and end-to-end delivery orchestration & management platforms can help businesses boost vehicle capacity utilization by 31%, increase deliveries per driver by 14%, shrink trip volumes by 6% and reduce the distance traveled by 5%. 

With such fine-grained control over individual components, processes, and process variables, businesses can lay a firm and reliable groundwork for a highly sustainable and robust business model.

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