How To Automate Your Delivery Management System
Managing your deliveries manually can be a challenge as your operations grow.
What begins as updating a spreadsheet and calling drivers soon becomes a job that requires hundreds of orders and dozens of drivers, hundreds of delivery locations, customer updates, route planning, proof of delivery, and reporting.
The more delivery activity you manage the less time your team has for repetitive work.
Fortunately, delivery management software makes it easy to automate delivery-related work.
It can help teams simplify delivery coordination, make routes more efficient, and deliver a more consistent customer experience.
In this article I will cover what delivery management automation is, which tasks you can automate, how to automate your delivery workflows and what to look for in a delivery management platform.
What Is Delivery Management Automation? Delivery management automation uses software to do delivery work with the minimum of human input.
Of each employee performing a task every time automated workflows can help to:
Import orders Assign deliveries Create routes Notify customers Update delivery status Capture proof of delivery Generate reports Track your delivery operations They might look like:
Order Accepted Delivery Created Driver Assigned Route Optimized Customer Notified Delivery Complete Proof Captured Report Generated
But every business can optimize their workflows differently.
Why Use Delivery Management Automation? Manually managing your delivery workflows becomes much more difficult as more and more delivery requests come in and more drivers get on the road.
Your operation might currently spend hours each day:
Updating spreadsheets Calling drivers Sharing addresses Planning routes Sending customer updates Collecting proof of delivery Creating reports Automation can reduce these admin hours so your team can focus on exceptions and decisions, not repetitive work.
It's not about replacing humans with robots.
It's about reducing the amount of low judgement work a person needs to do.
10 Automation Tasks For Your Delivery Operations 1. Automate order import The very first step in automating your delivery workflow is to get your orders into your delivery platform.
Instead of manually entering every order, you can connect your delivery platform to your existing systems.
Your orders could come from:
Ecommerce platform ERP systems CRM systems Orders Management System's Warehouse management system's APIs CSV files Once there the delivery flow can begin automatically.
For example:
Order received = delivery created Removed from manual data entry and reduced data entry errors 2. Automate driver assignment Instead of manually assigning every order to a driver, you can set delivery assignment rules that take into account things such as:
Driver availability Location Current work number Delivery priority Vehicle capacity Time windows For example:
New delivery check for available drivers pick suitable driver assign delivery Your operations teams can still review driver assignments and manually make changes if they need to.
3. Automate route planning Manual route planning takes a lot of time.
Using delivery automation tools you can generate routes based on:
Locations and distances Delivery priorities and time windows Driver availability and workload Vehicle capacity Delivery time Window's For example:
Create route based on delivery distance and driver locations Route optimized based on delivery efficiency Location-specific stops 4. Automate customer notifications Instead of your employees notifying customers about deliveries, you can automate customer updates.
Orders can trigger notifications that go to your customers about dispatch, delivery, orders received and other statuses.
For example:
Dispatched message Out for delivery message Delivered message Driver approaching message Depending on your chosen platform messages can be sent via:
SMS Whatsapp Push notifications Email Digital alerts 5. Automate delivery status updates We often see teams updating spreadsheets with new driver statuses every 30 minutes, missing out important information.
With delivery automation, drivers can directly update delivery statuses.
For example:
Assigned Accepted Picked up Out for delivery Delivered statuses These updates then become a part of a seamless and accurate digital delivery record. 6. Automate proof of delivery Instead of capturing delivery confirmation on paper, drivers can update the delivery system with proof of delivery.
Depending on the platform drivers can capture proof that includes:
Unique access codes OTP verification Photo GPS locations Digital timestamps Signature's Delivery notes Customers details 7. Automate unsuccessful delivery workflows Instead of managing every single failure manually, your delivery management system can automate delivery failures by:
Recording the reasons for failed deliveries Notifying customers about failures Scheduling reattempts For example:
Delivery failed delivery reason set Retry delivery Successful delivery workflow 8. Automate delivery tracking Managers can now check if a driver is on time without calling drivers.
The platform reports on a shipment's progress so your team can save time focusing on the deliveries that need attention.
For example:
- No alerts, continue monitoring - Alert on delay Operations team Multi-delivery deliveries during the day can be tracked to allow your team to give attention to on-time deliveries while minimizing interruptions to drivers. 9. Automate delivery reports Your teams can generate a delivery report from a delivery platform rather than pulling together information from spreadsheets.
The report can analyze:
- Successful deliveries - Failed deliveries - Number of hours per delivery - Average delivery time - Distance traveled - Performance of drivers and other teams Automated delivery metrics make it easier to generate and act on your data. 10. Automate repeating delivery flows Once your core delivery process is automated your teams can create delivery workflows that link various delivery tasks together, such as:
- A new order creates a new delivery, driver, and route - Out for delivery updates driver and customer and updates the delivery status - Delivery complete updates the driver, customer, and the delivery status - Delivery failure updates the driver, customer, delivery status, and creates a new delivery If you want a fully automated delivery platform that includes document storage, proof of delivery, and advanced reporting, Drop Proof can help to create a workflow that makes delivery management simple. Final thoughts If you want to automate your delivery management system, don't get rid of your people.
Focus instead on eliminating low judgment work from their schedules.
Automate tasks like order management, driver assignment, route planning, notification, tracking, proof of delivery, reporting and linking recurring tasks together so your teams don't waste time, replacing the repetitive with the automated.
