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When most logistics delivery company owners or managers think about shipping to a customer, they focus on the product quality and the customer’s delight upon receiving it.
But there are so many things that happen in between.
There’s a lot more to getting a package from Point A to Point B than may appear at first.
In fact, you have to consider everything from payroll to performance.
Many factors control how quickly or cost-effectively valuable packages travel from a warehouse to the client’s doorstep. These factors also affect the quality and customer satisfaction.
If you don’t consider all the factors, you’ll end up making blunders that severely affect your business.
Below are the common factors that logistics companies forget to consider. This will help you avoid making the same mistake.
Mistake 1: Not Separating Pickup Areas and Bulk Storage
Logistics companies often don’t separate the fast pickup areas from bulk storage. As a result, the stock consumes the space meant for storing fast-moving products.
Don’t make the same mistake.
If you keep bulk quantities and fast-moving products all in one place, it’ll create such clutter that it would be challenging to locate the required merchandise when you need it quickly.
Instead, create a dedicated space for storing fast-moving products away from primary stock storage.
You can then easily keep various products within a restricted area while keeping bulk quantities in other parts of the warehouse.
Mistake 2: Using Old-School Technology
Digitization has made logistics management more effortless than ever before. But logistics companies often still use outdated technologies that push their businesses behind instead of pulling them ahead.
The latest technologies make it easy to pick out products in the warehouse, optimize routes, track packages in transit, and track inventory.
Using these latest technologies, you can even share information on order statuses with your customers. But you can’t reap these benefits if you use legacy technology.
Way back, DC Velocity reported that even big-name carriers like UPS and FedEx spend a billion dollars a year on new technology and upgrading their existing functionality.
Luckily you don’t need to have such deep pockets to invest in the latest technologies.
You can use an all-in-one logistics management software like Route4Me that offers all the necessary features you need to make your logistics operation more efficient.
Below is a quick rundown of some of the most critical features and benefits of the Route4Me route planner, making it one of the best route planners available.
Optimize Pick-and-Pack Routes
Route4Me’s trucking GPS app can optimize pick-and-pack routes inside your warehouse and yards for human and robotic operators.
You just need to describe the item types and number of items in each part of your warehouse, bin, or cabinet.
Route4Me’s advanced routing algorithm will route your human operator or robotic loader to the nearest inventory pickup location.
The software also ensures your loading equipment or robots aren’t overloaded by weight.
Plus, it provides analytics about all the routes inside your warehouse or yard.
Optimize Delivery Routes
Route4Me’s route planner multi-stop helps plan well-optimized routes with accurate turn-by-turn directions for delivery drivers.
It even factors in weather conditions, traffic, avoidance zones, one-ways, left turns and U-turns, sunrise and sunset times, delivery time windows, and more so these factors don’t affect your drivers on the road and cause delays.
You just need to upload the list of addresses, set some parameters, and hit optimize. That’s it! Your routes will be ready in 30 seconds.
Learn how to plan a route with multiple stops in 30 seconds.
Monitor Your Vehicles on the Road
Route4Me’s route optimization software comes with a GPS tracking feature that helps you track your vehicles on the road in real-time.
This ensures that the drivers follow the routes as instructed. For example, if they make unscheduled stops, you’ll know about it immediately and can communicate with the drivers to ensure they get back on track.
Also, if they engage in aggressive driving, you’ll get alerts and can take the necessary actions to rectify their behavior.
Plus, you can send immediate roadside assistance if a vehicle breaks down and re-optimize the route to send the nearest driver to the affected customer to still make the delivery on time.
Learn the top ten benefits of GPS tracking.
Other Essential Features
There are many other essential features offered by Route4Me’s route optimizer, such as:
- Geofencing to automate check-in and check-out. Learn what geofencing is.
- Reporting and analytics to track performance and fuel expenses
- Driver breaks to reduce driver fatigue and improve productivity
- eSignature to ensure digital proof-of-delivery
Learn the top six benefits of delivery management software.
Mistake 3: Guessing Transportation Costs
Logistics expenses are factored into product costs. Variables in these costs include speed, location, weight, and distance.
Ultimately, estimating transportation costs may affect the product’s value, making prices too high or very low.
Highly estimated costs diminish product demands, while low shipping costs may cause your business to incur losses.
Also, don’t estimate the current costs by past metrics.
Things change fast and, in the logistics industry, being unprepared for those changes can lead to financial whiplash.
You simply can’t expect next year’s expenses to be the same as last year’s or even this year’s costs due to transportation costs increasing faster than distribution costs.
Many factors are making the shipping costs go up, such as:
- A driving shortage that’s driving up wages
- Soaring fuel costs
- Regulatory mandates requiring more fuel-efficient, cleaner, and more expensive engines
Route4Me’s map route planner can help you here as it takes the guesswork out of the equation.
With the route planner app, you can create mock routes and precisely determine how much it’ll cost you in fuel expenses and employee wages to visit a hypothetical set of addresses.
It also helps you make competitive bids for new contracts without bidding too low so that you can’t turn a profit.
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
Mistake 4: Not Sharing Delivery Statuses with Customers
Customers love transparency. So, if you don’t share their delivery statuses, they’ll lose trust in you and might switch to your competitors.
Many logistics companies make this mistake and suffer from high customer attrition rates.
Fortunately, sharing delivery progress with your customers isn’t that hard.
For example, Route4Me’s delivery scheduling software offers a customer portal feature that allows your customer to learn their package delivery statuses on their own and so they’ll know when to expect them.
The software also comes with a customer alerting and notification feature to notify your customers when their packages are out for delivery or are about to arrive.
Mistake 5: Not Verifying Customer Addresses
Another mistake that many logistics delivery businesses make is not verifying addresses before delivery and transporting goods to incorrect addresses.
If you keep repeating trips to the wrong address, subsequent (often futile) efforts to re-deliver packages will raise costs.
You could end up losing thousands of dollars and negatively impact your customer service if your database includes the wrong addresses.
Therefore, you should double-check every address before sending your drivers out for delivery.
Manually, that’s a tedious and time-consuming process. Also, the chances of human errors are too high. So, you need a delivery route planner like Route4Me.
Route4Me comes with a geocoding feature that automatically flags and rectifies any wrong customer addresses entered into the system.
Route4Me’s bulk geocoder can geocode thousands or even millions of addresses per day. Managing this volume of geocodes would have taken weeks or even months of work to do manually.
So, you’ll never need to worry about the accuracy of an address again, and it won’t even take you any time or effort.
Mistake 6: Not Following the Trends and Market
The logistics industry is constantly changing, and with it, newer, faster, and better ways of delivery management are continually being introduced. But many businesses don’t follow the delivery logistics trends.
Don’t make the same mistake.
Pay close attention to what your partners, clients, and competitors are working on. Even a tiny change in the way you manage deliveries can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Also, be open to new ideas as they come along and follow the logistics trends as much as possible.
Final Words About the Mistakes Every Logistics Delivery Company Makes
Mistakes are pretty common when it comes to transporting goods from one place to another. And there’s always room for error when it comes to logistics delivery management. However, you should always look for ways to minimize such errors.
When you learn from others’ mistakes, you can take the necessary steps to not make the same mistake.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for development opportunities and learn from every new logistics delivery experience. It’ll help you become faster, better, and more efficient, which will ensure more happy customers along the way.
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
