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For enterprises that deal with large delivery network, getting your technology stack right is a delicate balancing act—you need to build in capabilities that enable your teams to do their jobs effectively across a host of different functions, but you also need enough clarity, usability, and visibility that processes and information don’t become completely chaotic.
This is especially true for businesses like beer distributors who deal with a huge amount of complexity on a daily basis. Where some industries can get by on rolling out new, dynamically-generated routes every day to meet customer demand, food and beverage distributors usually need to keep the same customers on the same routes at the same times each week, which increases the level of routing complexity exponentially. This increase in complexity has a cascade effect across the entire delivery process: routes are harder to create, which makes last minute adjustments harder to perform, which makes accurate ETAs and reliable delivery costing more challenging.
And it’s not uncommon to see these challenges impact systems beyond delivery management—and vice versa. As a result, one of the biggest topics in delivery management for food and beverage distributors right now is IT consolidation. But what does IT consolidation look like in practice, and how should distributors and wholesalers think about it?
It might seem like more data is better when it comes to complicated processes—but that’s not the full story. Imagine you’re trying to execute on a delivery plan on a given day, when all of a sudden you get a phone call from one of your mid-tier customers asking what happened to your delivery driver. If you have to hunt through multiple different screens on multiple different applications to figure out why the driver didn’t show up at the right time, the customer on the phone isn’t going to feel a lot of confidence in your ability to get things back on track.
Conversely, when you have the ability to visualize that delivery run and see all the relevant data pertaining to it within a single app, you can answer your customer’s question quickly—maybe there was an unexpected street closure that made the route impossible—and work with them to find a resolution. They may not be thrilled, but they’ll get their delivery as quickly as you can manage and, hopefully, appreciate how quickly you were able to resolve the situation.
This is just one example of how IT consolidation can provide real value for food and beverage distributors. Many of the other examples revolve less around handling customer calls and more around internal strategic planning processes—e.g. the ability to plan routes, estimate related costs, and execute those plans without hopping between innumerable different platforms. But in any given example, you’re going to see the same themes cropping up over and over again:
Okay, we’ve established that consolidating IT can benefit food and beverage distributors, but how do you actually approach IT consolidation from a practical perspective? Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you think about yourfood and beverage technology stack and consider making changes or adopting new platforms and tools.
Here, it’s best not to be hemmed in by thinking about what your technology is currently capable of. Route planning, for instance, is a huge stumbling block for many distributors, requiring weeks of work and outside specialists to come in. Dream big and imagine a world where routes can be planned in seconds—then work from there in sketching out your ideal technology setup.
Of course, every beer distribution outfit is different—and your technology stack is going to be unique to the particulars of your business. At the same time, there are a handful of best practices that will typically apply for consolidating your IT:
What might delivery technology selected with these questions in mind look like in practice? For routing and delivery management technology, it might mean adopting an application designed to easily import orders from your PoS or ERP systems, leverage AI and scalable cloud-based architecture to generate efficient routes in minutes, and automatically dispatch those routes to drivers via a highly-connected mobile app.
As deliveries got underway, it would offer a single-pane-of-glass view where planners, dispatchers, and customer service reps could easily track deliveries and spot exceptions. After the fact, it would be easy to see which stops were profitable and leverage that information throughout other processes. More broadly, planning and delivery data would be instantly available across functions so that processes like sales, merchandising, etc. could coordinate their efforts. When market conditions changed—maybe because a top client wants to increase their delivery frequency—you could adjust plans quickly and easily and give visibility into those updates to both internal staff and customers.
IT consolidation is more than just a buzzword—and it’s more than just a cost-cutting tactic. Approached with the right mindset, it can pave the way for smarter processes across the board and even position you to provide better service to your customers.
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