Plan, Route, and Execute Within a Single Solution

Successful deliveries don’t happen in a vacuum. They require close connections between planning and execution across functions. That means delivery, sales, and merchandising need total visibility and coordination. So how do you make that happen?

Food and beverage distributors need the ability to utilize one platform to schedule merchandiser visits, sales stops, and deliveries. Users need the ability to schedule merchandisers to be onsite at the time of delivery, or several hours after, and give merchandisers the ability to record key details about their visit using a mobile app if desired. With sales, you want the same thing: the ability to create routes that are informed by delivery plans and give sales personnel visibility into delivery and merchandising.

With the DispatchTrack solutions for sales and merchandisers, you can break down the functional silos that make it difficult to coordinate a world-class delivery experience that includes delivery, sales, and merchandising touchpoints—meaning you can more effectively measure—and optimize—delivery cost from a holistic perspective.

For businesses that regularly distribute to the same accounts, purely dynamic routing doesn’t make sense. The trouble is: static routing doesn’t work either.

Yes, on paper the average distributor is doing a lot of recurring business and making the same stops week in and week out—but, in point of fact, there are constantly going to be changes in delivery volumes, special requests, off-day deliveries, and holiday swells in demand to contend with. Static routes are designed to be just that—static—which means that making all these necessary adjustments to the plan requires a herculean effort.

That’s where hybrid route optimization comes in. By pivoting towards a hybrid of static and dynamic routing, you can do exactly that. You can flexibly meet the needs of your top customers—i.e. sending the same driver to the same location at the same time every week, with adjustments in volume and occasional off-day deliveries—while filling out your routes in a flexible way that ensures a reasonable cost-to-serve. When you use the technology underlying AI-powered dynamic routing to adjust and perfect static routes templates, you can begin to gain the efficiency and cost saving benefits of dynamic routing without starting your routes from scratch (and risk unhappy customers) every day.

Profit margins in food and beverage distribution are typically razor-thin, which means you can’t afford to spend $50 delivering a $35 case of enhanced water. Unfortunately, gaining enough visibility into the last mile to accurately measure cost per stop or calculate your most profitable accounts is often difficult or impossible with legacy technology.

Simply put, when you have the right data in the right place, this is something you can automate. If you’re able to track delivery costs within the same solution you’re using to plan routes, you can estimate delivery costs at the planning stage, and then compare your actual performance after the fact. The trick is to find a solution that’s intuitive and easy to use while offering the processing power required to handle any and all delivery data you can throw at it.

Every distributor is different—and your technology stack is going to be unique to the particulars of your business. At the same time, there are a handful of best practices that will typically apply for consolidating your IT:

• Concentrate on the cloud: cloud-native applications save you the IT costs that come from running your applications in house—but they also set you up for easier integration and data sharing between systems.
• Look for fast, powerful, scalable applications: When you have the capabilities to create routes and perform reroutes at lightning speed, streamlining your processes (and therefore your technology) is only a step away. Often, this comes down to finding apps that have serious processing power and are architected to handle high volumes as needed.
• Focus on user-friendliness: High-quality UX doesn’t have to come at the expense of functionality. On the contrary, solutions that make it easy for users to do what they need to do to excel at their jobs actually improve your organization’s capabilities.
• Seek out innovation:This doesn’t mean following the latest trends. Rather, it means going out of your way to work with companies that regularly roll out updates and improvements to their software—this helps you ensure that your IT will be able to evolve alongside your business and the market as a whole. This goes a long way towards future-proofing your technology stack.
• Leverage cross-functional capabilities: WWhen the same platform is able to provide routing, planning, and execution across sales, merchandising, and delivery workflows—you simply don’t need as many software solutions.