Delivery Management Software Buying Guide

There’s plenty of advice on the internet about how to purchase delivery management software, from software review sites that offer reviews and tips to opinion pieces in publications like CIO magazine on how delivery management software is evolving. The wealth of information available to you has never been greater—but, at the same time, it can be challenging to sift through all of the data to find the data that’s most relevant to your decision-making process. 

If you’re exploring the possibility of upgrading your delivery management software, we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll go over the essential features to look for in delivery management software and give a rundown of ways to tell if it’s time to upgrade. 

We’ll also cover DispatchTrack’s delivery management software capabilities, so you can get a sense of how that option could impact your last mile delivery operations. 

What to Look for in Delivery Management Software

If you’re reading this article, you probably have a pretty clear idea already of what your delivery management software needs to offer. Capterra lists a handful of features in its comparisons of different software solutions, and these can be a useful baseline:

• Delivery tracking
• Live driver tracking
• Mobile access
• Proof of delivery
• Real-time monitoring
• Real-time notifications
• Route optimization
• Routing
• Scheduling

Here are some other features that aren’t included that group that can add additional value when you’re implementing this kind of software:

• Configurable customer communications and alerts
• Customer self-scheduling
• Billing and settlement automation 
• Strategic route planning/hybrid route planning
• Telematics integration
• ERP integration 
• Customer satisfaction surveys 
• Configurable delivery forms
• Real-time exception management

The goal of this isn’t to risk feature overload or to present an impossible list of requirements. The goal is to suggest what’s possible. Delivery management software solutions will vary a lot in what they offer, and it’s important to keep in mind that there isn’t one simple checklist to figuring out what your organization needs. 

Rather than thinking about features, you can turn the question on its head and work backwards from what capabilities would be most impactful for your organization. Ask yourself, what do your delivery processes look like now? Where do you think your processes have room for improvement? What do you think those improvements would look like, and what processes and functionality would you need to have in order to back them up? What are your actual goals for your delivery organization?

Let’s say, for instance, that one of your goals is to reduce the number of unplanned returns and cancellations on any given delivery run. In order to make that happen, you need to find a way to turn up potential conflicts or other issues before you route your deliveries—or, at the very least, before you load the orders onto the truck. 

Notifications in the narrow sense might not be that helpful here. Sure, a well-timed text on the day of delivery  can alert a customer to the fact that their order will be there within the hour, but if they’ve forgotten all about their couch or their pallet of lumber or their case of fizzy water and are nowhere near the delivery site, that notification won’t be too much help. 

Instead, you probably want to send a schedule confirmation a few days before the actual delivery. This shouldn’t be too difficult—but you might also want to segment and customize different messages for different delivery or service types, or for different products. This goes beyond simple alerts to give you a lot more control over the last mile delivery experience—and it can go a long way towards helping you ensure that your trucks only go out with goods that are actually going to get delivered.  

Is It Time to Upgrade Your Last Mile Delivery Software?

The above is just one example of how the right delivery management software can impact your delivery operations. There are plenty of others along the same vein. Let’s say you want to improve customer experience and speed up time-to-revenue by improving your billing process. You might opt for software that can instantly send out time-stamped, geostamped photographic proof of delivery in a delivery receipt. You might also want something that can generate delivery invoices automatically based on the delivery details captured during deliveries. 

The list of possible options goes on—which can make it somewhat daunting to figure out whether you need to upgrade your existing software or not. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to suss that out:

• Are you still running on-premise software? If so, it’s almost definitely time to make the switch. Cloud technology takes the onus of you to ensure security, compliance, and frequent updates throughout your network.
• Do any of your critical processes feel disconnected, or like they’re in silos? Data and decision-making silos are often signs that your technology isn’t covering everything you need it to, or it can’t effectively integrate with your other supply chain-related platforms. 
• Can you easily see your cost-per-stop, cost-per-delivery, and cost-per-route? Modern delivery management technology makes it easy to see these numbers at the planning stage, which can power more data-driven decisions and more profitable delivery runs. 
• How much training does it take for new users of the software to get up to speed? Many old deployments of this kind of technology are cumbersome and difficult to use and implement (a related question would be around how long it takes to deploy your delivery management solution at any new branches or locations). Modern, SaaS-based tools are often much user-friendlier, which can have a huge impact on your ability to get value from the solution. 

Depending on your answers to these questions, it might be time to get in the market for a new solution. All of these should suggest potential areas for cost-savings, scalability, and increased customer satisfaction—all of which can pay off in the short and long term. 

DispatchTrack’s Delivery Management Software Solution

DispatchTrack’s delivery management software offers a wide range of capabilities for modern delivery organizations—whether they’re food distributors trying to make sure their customers get their produce on time, big and bulky retailers scheduling deliveries to customers’ homes, or anything in between.

Here’s what our platform offers:

• Best-in-class route optimization: Our AI-powered routing engine gives you the flexibility to create routes that are optimized to your unique use case in a matter of minutes—all with 98% accurate delivery ETAs. Not only do we offer dynamic route optimization, but we also offer a hybrid of static and dynamic for businesses that have a mix of new and recurring stops each week.  
• Full-lifecycle customer communications: DispatchTrack users can configure text and email messages to go out at crucial moments before, during, and after the delivery—from schedule confirmation messages a few days in advance, to automated “route start” notifications, to post-delivery surveys and other follow-up. 
• Real-time last mile visibility: From our last mile delivery dashboard, you can see the status of every order, truck, and delivery in real-time. You can also manage exceptions from that same dashboard and instant message bi-directionally with customers when situations arise that require your attention.
• A mobile app drivers love: We’ve never had to offer trainings on the driver mobile app because it’s so intuitive to use. Not only that, but it enables drivers to capture pictures, signatures, and notes for proof of delivery, which is available instantaneously to dispatchers and managers. 
• Scalable SaaS technology: Our solution was built in the cloud, which means we’re able to innovate constantly to keep up with the changing needs of our customers. 
• Automated route costing: Users can see the impacts of their decisions on route route in the planning stages, which enables them to make data-driven decisions about route profitability. 

Of course, features are nice, but the value of a delivery management platform like DispatchTrack really comes in covering the entire last mile delivery journey from end to end. That’s one of the areas where we differentiate ourselves from the competition—we support you from order in to the delivery site and beyond, covering all relevant roles and functions in the process. 

If this sounds like it could have an impact for your last mile deliveries, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d be happy to discuss further.