What Are the Best Practices for Final Mile Plumbing Supplies Delivery?

The plumbing supply industry is no stranger to supply chain challenges. In the past few years, the plumbing industry has had to grapple with wild fluctuations in demand, material prices, and labor availability. In spite of that, most plumbing suppliers continue to go out of their way to do right by their customers.

When it comes to the final mile of the supply chain, many of these challenges come to a head. Labor shortages can make it difficult to get orders to the right place at the right time—and supply chain issues upstream can make quick delivery turnarounds incredibly difficult. At the same time, rising material costs mean that keeping delivery costs down is more critical than ever. 

With some prognosticators seeing a downturn for the plumbing market in the coming year, that last point is especially salient. Last mile delivery costs can account for as much as half of your total logistics costs, which means that for most delivery organizations it’s a key area to focus on for reducing supply chain costs overall. 

In this post, we’ll go over some best practices that can help keep delivery costs under control—all while ensure happy customers and smooth operations.  

Top Challenges in Final Mile Plumbing Supplies Delivery

Plumbing supplies deliveries are about more than just delivering product—they’re about helping contractors and homeowners alike keep their projects on track. To make that happen, you need to be able to identify the right inventory, get it routed and scheduled on the right truck with the right driver or technician, and deliver at the right time—all while keeping your customers in the loop and ensuring a complete audit trail for your records. It’s easier said than done—but with the right approach it’s possible to make all that happen smoothly and in a cost-effective manner. 

Optimize Your Routes with AI

One of the most impactful ways you can boost efficiency in your final mile is to upgrade your route optimization. If you’re planning your delivery routes by hand, there’s every chance that you’re running your trucks in a less efficient way than you could be. In fact, even some legacy routing solutions will be putting you in a position where you can’t get the most out of your available truck and driver/technician capacity. 

When you start optimizing your route with next generation technology, that changes in an instant. By leveraging AI and machine learning, you can generate highly accurate delivery ETAs—even accounting for differences in service time for different types of trips, differences in driver speed, and even differences in timing for different types of products. This added level of precision helps you ensure that you’re completing the most stops you can per day without setting unrealistic goals for your drivers.

At the same time, this kind of technology can help you grapple with the complexity that comes with planning complex routes. It can remove that guesswork that comes from figuring out not just the right sequence of stops, but the right truckloads and the right drivers to keep customers happy in a cost-efficient way. 

Build Flexibility into Your Processes

One of the most representative examples of the kinds of challenges that plumbing supplies organizations have had to deal with is the recent pipe material shortage. When the basic building blocks of a lot of commercial and consumer projects are in short supply, businesses need to find ways to get creative. This might mean sourcing material further in advance, as well as finding new ways to increase the use value of the material you already have. 

To take advantage of creative thinking in a chaotic market, you need to find ways to stay flexible—particularly when it comes to the last mile. This means staying flexible when customer orders come in, e.g. by setting yourself up operationally to handle last-minute orders. Most of the time, this will come down in large part to how quickly you’re able to optimize your routes. When you route by hand, your cutoffs have to be too early for you to really stay agile. 

This also means building flexibility into the way you plan and execute your last mile deliveries. In the case of a disruption on the day of delivery, you want to be able to call the contractor before a late delivery turns into a problem and find a way to remediate the situation. By the same token, if a last-minute order change comes in, you need to be able to accommodate it without creating chaos. 

This is where the speed and transparency of a true next generation last mile delivery solution for plumbing supplies comes in. By ensuring connectivity between customers, drivers, dispatchers, and other teams throughout the last mile delivery process, you can have 360-degree delivery visibility across the entire delivery process—resulting in increased flexibility and reduced costs as a result. 

<< Learn how Ferguson Enterprises leverages DispatchTrack to scale up their last mile processes—read the case study! >>

Communicate Early and Often

Amidst all the issues that plumbing suppliers need to overcome, there’s also the question of how to deal with rising customer expectations. Consumers expect the same kind of delivery experience whether they’re getting a parcel of office supplies, a scheduled appliance delivery, or an order of pipes for a DIY project. And when it comes to commercial clients, the situation is much the same. 

So how do plumbing supplies distributors ensure that they’re meeting customers' delivery expectations? For starters, you can update your customer communications. 

Keeping customers in the loop at multiple stages throughout the process is the cornerstone of modern customer delivery experience across industries—and it’s no different with plumbing materials. Customers want to know what to expect and at what time, and it’s your job to make sure they have answers to those questions.

This comes in the form of branded communications at a set number of touchpoints (delivery confirmation, delivery schedule email, delivery reminder, day-of-delivery notifications, etc.) via text and email. Ideally, you’ll also be able to offer real-time delivery tracking via a dedicated customer tracking interface. 

This isn’t just a matter of boosting your NPS—though that’s obviously important to a lot of businesses. It’s also a matter of reducing your overall delivery costs. How? By making sure customers have multiple opportunities to let you know if something isn’t going to work for them. If the delivery time no longer fits with their job site schedule, or if the order is for the wrong SKU, these communications give them the opportunity to let you know before you load product into trucks. 

By the same token, keeping relevant stakeholders apprised of when and where their plumbing supplies will be delivered is a great way to ensure that there’s someone to sign for the delivery at the delivery site. This saves money in the form of fewer redelivery attempts and a reduction in unplanned returns, which can have a significant impact over time. 

Capture Digital Proof of Delivery

Speaking of making sure someone is around to sign for the delivery when your driver reaches the job site: the quality of your proof of delivery has an outsized impact on your last mile delivery costs. Why? Because the better your proof is, the more quickly and consistently you’ll actually get paid for deliveries. 

Imagine a scenario in which you’re capturing proof of delivery on paper. Someone signs for the plumbing supplies at the jobsite on a borrowed clipboard and hands the slip back to the driver. Because this is a paper slip, it takes a while to get filed and is in danger of being lost altogether. When the invoice reaches the client, they say the delivery wasn’t made in full, or wasn’t made to the right place, and that it wasn’t signed for by the right person. They don’t want to pay, and getting them to do so will be time-consuming and potentially fruitless. 

When you have digital proof of delivery, the whole equation changes. Instead of your word versus the client’s, you have photographic evidence of what was delivered—time stamped and geo stamped so you can show exactly where and when it happens—all in addition to a digital signature. Better yet, it’s transmitted instantly to the field right back to your office, so you can get it processed while it’s still fresh. 

Like the other best practices we listed above, this helps your entire final mile delivery operation run more smoothly. Not only does this help reduce costs (and, in the case of proof of delivery, boost revenue), it helps you to have a more agile and adaptable operation. As the plumbing industry continues to weather storms, those qualities will continue to be crucial.