First Mile, Middle Mile, Last Mile: How Do They Connect?

Last mile delivery has become such a focal point for consumers in recent years that in some circles it’s easy to forget how complex the global supply chain is up to the point where individual orders are loaded onto box trucks and routed to final customers. The last mile continues to be the most resource-intensive leg of the journey—and often the one that’s most prone to going wrong—but the process leading up to that point can be complex and have serious implications for logistics costs.

Before you get the final mile, you first have to tackle the first mile and middle mile. But how exactly do these processes differ? Where does one start and the other begin? And, crucially, how do they interact within the larger context of your supply chain?

First Mile vs Middle Mile: What’s the Difference?

Let’s start with the first two legs of the fulfillment chain:

First Mile: This refers to the transportation of goods (furniture, lumber, cases of beer, you name it) from the site where they’re manufactured or produced to a warehouse or distribution center where they can be stored until they’re ready to be staged for the next leg of the journey. 

How the first mile is administered will depend a lot on your business’s overall approach to demand management. For businesses with a build-to-stock model, for instance, your first mile deliveries might be regular and predictable—X number of units will get loaded onto an eighteen-wheeler at the same time every week and driven from the factory to the warehouse. For build-to-order models, there might be less predictability. 

Middle Mile: The middle mile is the segment of the supply chain that bridges the gap between the first mile and the last mile. Once you’ve gotten your goods from the site where they were produced to the right warehouse or distribution center within your network, you need to then get those items to the right local fulfillment center where you can start routing items onto smaller trucks to get them to the end customer. 

The middle mile can be fairly nebulous in many cases. Goods sometimes move between multiple warehouses, distribution centers, hubs, and cross-docks before they actually start the final mile journey. While this isn’t the costliest leg of the journey, these ambiguities can still make the process quite thorny. 

How Does the Last Mile Fit In?

Once the first mile and middle mile processes have been completed, it’s time for the last mile of the logistics chain. This involves getting the goods from the distribution center to the final customer. Like we said above, this is the most expensive leg of the journey, accounting for more than 40% of total logistics costs by most estimates. 

Why does this part of the process eat up so many more resources than the first two legs of the journey? There are a few reasons:

• Last mile deliveries are all going to different places, which means that the driver needs to make numerous different stops along a route. This limits the number of pallets that a driver can deliver in a single day significantly. 
• More stops means more possible disruptions—customers might not be at home, or they might reject a delivery because it’s the wrong color couch, or traffic might impact a dozen stops rather than just one dropoff at a warehouse. The fuel and driver pay that come with redelivery attempts and managing unplanned returns can add up quickly.
• Some last mile deliveries will also require skilled technicians to perform installations and other services. This can make each delivery more costly from a labor perspective. 
• Deliveries to the end customer require communication—in the form of phone calls, emails, or text messages depending on the operation—which can be expensive at large scales. This is particularly true if you’re mostly relying on phone calls to let last mile delivery customers know when to expect their deliveries. 

All of these added sources of logistic costs also come with added opportunities for optimization in the form of automated communications, improved delivery routes, and skilled-based routing for more complex services, as examples. 

But there’s also opportunities for cost optimization when you examine the handoff between the middle mile and the last mile. Real-time delivery visibility is a huge source of value in the last mile, but it’s not emphasized in the middle mile to nearly the same extent—in spite of the fact that better tracking has the potential to empower stronger coordination between different legs of the journey. 

For instance, if you’re moving perishable goods like produce from a distribution center to a hub where customer orders will actually be fulfilled from, you’re on the clock as soon as the middle mile has been completed. The faster you can schedule a last mile delivery of those pallets, the better in terms of ensuring a longer shelf-life and preventing spoilage. 

When you can see where your middle mile trucks are in real time, you can plan your routes accordingly—shortening delivery lead times and improving coordination in the process. The result is reductions in both total logistics costs and spoilage. Here, you can even leverage automated communications to let internal teams know when middle mile trucks are arriving at their destination. 

First Mile, Middle Mile, Last Mile: Bringing It All Together

First mile, middle mile, and last mile transportation may be handled separately in most operations (with good reason!), but they’re ultimately smaller pieces of a larger whole. Businesses across the spectrum need to get their wares to the customer at the right time and the right condition, and it takes each leg of the chain going right to make that happen. 

When you consider all these processes as part of a larger whole, the importance of connectivity becomes obvious. The easier it is for planners, managers, and other decision-makers and stakeholders across these to get accurate, up-to-date logistics information, the smoother the entire process can be. And when the systems that are used to manage these processes are closely integrated, you achieve real visibility across your entire logistics chain. 

At the end of the day, the goal of logistics software is to help businesses cut through the complexity. Complexity exists in vast quantities within the first mile, middle mile, and last mile processes individually, but it also crops up at the points of handover. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize tight integrations between different software solutions across these touch points. When you can understand the entire process more cohesively from end to end, you can more effectively satisfy your customers—and improve your bottom line. 

What does this mean for last mile delivery processes in particular? For starters, it means leveraging the power of modern, cloud-based technology that’s easy to integrate within a larger technology stack. It can also mean leveraging AI and machine learning to turn smarter integrations and better data into more efficient delivery routes—and thus reduced costs. But at a higher level, it means thinking big. However you’re thinking about your supply chain at the moment, you can always take a step back and look at how it works together as a whole: 

Do your first mile, middle mile, and last mile processes complement each other? Or is there room to streamline your logistics approach with an improved technology stack?