Forward Scheduling in Last Mile Delivery Planning

There are some questions that route optimization software can answer for you, and some that you may need to answer for yourself. For instance, whether to route farthest first is something that your solution may be able to help you crunch the numbers on, but whether or not it’s the right way to do it comes down to your own knowledge of your operations.Forward scheduling and backward scheduling fall into that same category. To some extent, it’s a matter of taking stock of your operations and thinking through the best way to plan out your supply chain operations. That said, there’s helpful context and best practices you can dig into if you want to determine whether forward scheduling is something that could work for your business. 

In this post, we’ll aim to provide precisely that context, as well as a rundown of how you can leverage last mile logistics technology to power a forward scheduling process that works for you, your customers, and your bottom line. 

Forward Scheduling vs Backward Scheduling: What’s the Difference?

First things first, let’s define our terms:

• Forward scheduling: Is a process whereby you schedule orders further forward in time as they come in. That means that if you’re taking in orders for the next week’s slate of deliveries, the first set of orders would be scheduled for Monday and later orders would tend later in the week. 
• Backward scheduling: Is the reverse of forward scheduling. You start by filling in the latest time slots (e.g. Fridays if you’re doing this for the entire week), and move earlier in as you get more orders.

Each approach has different pros and cons—and different implications for last mile delivery and route planning. Forward scheduling puts you in a position to stay agile and keep lead times down if you’re fulfilling a rolling set of delivery requests over the course of the week or month. However, there is a risk that you won’t be able to accommodate extremely last-minute orders if you’re already booked up for days in advance. 

Backward scheduling, by comparison, helps provide stability and predictability for recurring orders—you have your regular stops on the calendar already and work backwards to fill in the rest of the week around them. You can slot in a hotshot more easily, but you have a little less flexibility over the course of the week. You also have a more complex route optimization use case, since most routing platforms are designed to dynamically route forward in time. 

At an extremely high level, backward scheduling is often better for businesses with more recurring customers—e.g. food and beverage distributors, uniform and linen distributors, and many other B2B use cases. The trick is to overcome the tradeoffs that you’re making in terms of complexity and efficiency when you work backwards from existing delivery dates. 

Conversely, most B2C use cases—retailers, furniture and appliance distributors, building material suppliers—call for forward scheduling in most instances. That said, if you’re offering customers the ability to self schedule deliveries, you may need a hybrid of the two approaches. 

Either way, optimizing your scheduling to ensure effective logistics processes requires the right best practices and the right technology to back them up. 

Best Practices for Smooth Forward Scheduling and Backward Scheduling Processes

Whether you opt for forward scheduling or backward scheduling, you need to approach the logistics chain in general—and last mile logistics in particular—with a connected, agile, and intelligent approach:

Codify Your Delivery Parameters 

Which types of deliveries go with which types of vehicles? How long do your delivery teams expect to spend on site for different types of deliveries or services? Which types of deliveries or services require specialized skills that only some of your drivers or technicians have? How many deliveries or service calls can you handle in a day? Do you have any recurring stops or customer requests on the calendar, and what are their specific needs?

These aren’t the sorts of questions that you want to have to answer on the fly. Instead, you want to already know the answers and be able to plan around them. 

Back in the day, a lot of scheduling would have happened based on this kind of knowledge residing in someone’s head. But as technology has evolved, it’s become much easier to codify it within a solution that can then help you schedule more efficiently. By codifying your routing and scheduling domain knowledge within a solution that can translate it into efficient schedules, you save time, boost efficiency, and future-proof your processes. 

Provide Dynamic Self Scheduling 

Self scheduling for customers lives in an interesting gray area. You can work it into either forward or backward scheduling workflows, but it can create complexity either way. If you’re scheduling forward, you need to be able to provide up-to-the-minute delivery options so that customers don’t claim time slots that you no longer have the capacity to handle. 

To make this happen, you need a dynamic route optimization solution that can generate scheduling options for customers in real time. With this kind of technology underpinning your process, you can send options to the customer via text or email that are guaranteed to work within your existing capacity. If the set of options that you’ve sent out doesn’t work for the customer, the system can then generate a new set of equally-doable options—ad infinitum until the customer has options that work for them. 

This saves your team the trouble of calling customers one at a time and then trying to fit their preferred timeslots into existing schedules—and it makes life much easier for the customer. At the same time, you have to make sure your capacity per day, per truck, and per zone is configured in a way that makes it easy to wind up with an efficient route. 

Power up Your Route Planning with AI

If the kind of self scheduling scenario that we sketched out above sounds like it would be difficult to manage without extremely sophisticated routing software—you’re absolutely right. Dynamically arranging schedules, whether via forward scheduling or backward scheduling, as customer time window preferences are revealed, would take weeks to get right by hand. And even many legacy solutions can handle it in a timely way. 

That’s why effective forward scheduling (or backward scheduling) that still gives you the freedom you need to meet requests in a cost-effective way requires the use of AI-powered route optimization and scheduling. Simply put, this technology has reached the point where it can detangle all those complexities in a matter of minutes, while still producing efficient routes. 

In point fact, routing technology reached that point several years ago—the current cycle of AI hype notwithstanding. With a proven solution, you can cut through all the complexity of forward scheduling or backward scheduling in a matter of moments. Once your parameters are codified within the system, AI-based routing algorithms powered by scalable SaaS technology can generate efficient schedules and routes quickly enough to actually be practical. 

That last part is the key—your scheduling is only as effective as your ability to do it on a tight timeline. In years past, that was always a challenge, and the result was slower scheduling and all of the challenges that can result. What would your operations look like if you could move past those challenges with just a few clicks?