What’s the Best Dispatch Application for Building Supplies Deliveries?

The “best” software is one that best fits your operation while providing essential features and a path for future growth.

Building supplies delivery is complex. Meeting tight site schedules, handling large and heavy loads, complex installations and same-day orders demand efficiency that can only be achieved with the right dispatch application. But which one is right for your operation?

The answer depends on your business structure, including the size of your fleet, daily delivery volume, integration requirements with your tech stack, territory planning needs and your organization’s growth roadmap.

However, there are some essential features that any software intended for use in building supplies delivery should have.

Order Management

The order management system should smoothly import orders, ideally from your ERP or through a CSV file. It should support all order types including scheduled deliveries, rush orders, and will-call pickups, while maintaining detailed tracking of materials and quantities. It should also capture any special handling instructions, such as when a forklift is required or materials are fragile, and store essential information about customer site requirements and access restrictions. The system also needs to manage delivery window preferences to meet customer expectations and site schedules. All of these elements need to work together seamlessly.

Fleet and Crew Management

Your building supplies dispatch application must assign service units and crews that are appropriate for each delivery. Does the delivery require a lift gate, crane, flatbed or forklift? Is there an installation that requires special knowledge? And the software should go beyond just checking a box: Tracking crew performance allows you to assign complicated installs or deliveries to crews that are the most efficient. 

Detailed information about service units and crews should be housed in a central database where they can be used in optimizing routing and in business process analysis. When it’s time for the trucks to roll, routing that considers fuel consumption, driver HOS, total weight and route times will need that information.

Route Optimization

This is where information about your fleet, crews and customers comes together to create a daily execution that maximizes both efficiency and customer satisfaction. It’s essential that the dispatch application have AI as its core functionality. In recent years many delivery applications have added some AI features, but to reach peak effectiveness, AI has to be the foundation of the application, not an afterthought. Drawing on a comprehensive storehouse of data, AI can quickly plan routes that optimize fleet capacity while also respecting crew requirements and KPIs such as cost to deliver.

Optimized routes save wear and tear on your fleet and have been shown to reduce fuel costs by up to 10 percent.

Many building supplies dispatch applications stop with creating routes; the most useful incorporate territory route planning. Planning territories can be slow and tedious so territory revisions are done infrequently. Sophisticated applications can replan territories quickly, allowing frequent updates to eliminate the inefficiencies that build up over time as building sites are completed and closed and new ones start up.

Robust Mobile App

While drivers are on the road they need all of the information — route stops, manifests, site access and customer information, and communications — literally at their fingertips. An intuitive mobile app is a must for turn-by-turn route navigation, digital access to delivery documents, and the ability to capture photos of delivered materials and job sites. The ability to scan materials on and off the truck speeds deliveries, eliminates manual errors and the app should enable electronic signature collection for proof of delivery.

 The mobile app also needs to facilitate real-time communication between drivers, dispatch, and customers. On the customer side, the application should offer convenient access to order tracking, real-time delivery status updates, and easy retrieval of important documentation such as delivery receipts and invoices.

GPS tracking allows real-time ETA updates, and the mobile app should vacuum up volumes of data that is then fed back to the central database to become part of the pool of knowledge that powers the AI. That data informs the routing optimization by capturing crew efficiencies, changing traffic patterns and customer preferences and habits.

End to End Integration

Your building supplies dispatch software should have comprehensive integration capabilities that connect seamlessly with other layers of your tech stack. This includes integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, accounting software, and Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) to ensure smooth data flow across inventory, orders, and financials. The system should also integrate with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and connect with electronic logging devices (ELD) and telematics for compliance. These integrations create a unified ecosystem where data flows automatically between systems, eliminating manual data entry and reducing errors while providing real-time visibility across all aspects of the delivery operation.

The Path Ahead

The building supplies industry is very dynamic, with consolidation creating ever-larger competitors. The industry isn’t static and your delivery operation shouldn’t be either. Even if you believe your tech needs are modest today, what happens when your cross-town rival is bought by a massive regional chain? Having the best tech in place before you need it is a smart defensive move, giving you service and efficiency advantages over current and prospective competitors.

Your operation may be the one acquiring smaller suppliers, which means you’re now managing more locations, more trucks, more customers and more deliveries. If you choose an application now that won’t scale, can’t handle higher volumes and more vehicles, you’ll handicap your operation and will face the disruption of changing software in the future.

Capabilities like customer self-scheduling, click and collect with optimized delivery slot awareness, customer satisfaction surveys and advanced analytics can push your operation to the head of the line and keep it there whatever the market may bring.

DispatchTrack: The AI-Powered Building Supplies Dispatch Application

DispatchTrack has proved its power and value for more than a decade. In industry after industry the company has gone beyond listening to customers, partnering with them to create custom capabilities that solve their specific problems, including those faced by building supplies vendors. Day-of orders that once sent your operation into chaos are not only smoothly managed, they’re integrated into the existing daily execution without sacrificing efficiency or cost to deliver. Fleet utilization is optimized so you deliver more with your existing service units. Crews with scarce talents are scheduled to maximize their availability. Customer tiers and preferred delivery windows are respected, increasing satisfaction.

Because DispatchTrack embeds AI at its core and lives on high-speed cloud servers, it’s always available, updated frequently and does not slow down when you throw an extra hundred — or even thousand — deliveries at it. It scales seamlessly from managing a dozen trucks to thousands of trucks in dozens of locations without missing a beat.

To learn more about how DispatchTrack can optimize your operation and increase customer satisfaction, talk with one our solution experts: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/book-a-demo