What Are the Top Pitfalls in Last Mile Logistics Software Integration?

Lots of things that sound good in theory don’t work so well in practice—like New Year’s resolutions or big budget film sequels. New software solutions can also fall into that category for any number of reasons: the product you saw in the demo might not really reflect what’s in the platform, or what looked user-friendly at first turns out to be unworkable for your team, or it could turn out that your new solution simply doesn’t play nicely with the rest of your tech stack.

This last issue is one of the most common. That’s precisely why integration is top of mind for so many businesses that deal with last mile deliveries. The potential issues that can crop up from a failed integration can eat into the ROI of the new software deployment—and in some cases can even mean switching to a new provider before you’ve gotten off the ground with the software you intended to integrate. 

What Are the Top Pitfalls in Last Mile Logistics Software Integration?

There’s a lot that you’re looking out for when you select new last mile technology. You probably want something that can improve your routing performance, streamline your workflows, improve customer satisfaction, and ideally reduce delivery costs. 

Once you’ve chosen the right solution, the key to actually reaping those benefits is to avoid any of the potential pitfalls that can crop up along the way. Here’s how to spot them and avoid them.

SaaS vs. On-Prem 

Okay, first things first: the era of on-premise technology stacks is over. It’s over for most functional areas and businesses, anyway, and that certainly includes the last mile and related logistics processes. Cloud technology has proven itself over the past two decades or so as the more secure, flexible, and cost-effective choice for most businesses. 

Obviously, many of the businesses that rely on route optimization software to get their deliveries routed will have deployed their current software solutions before SaaS becomes a viable option. If you’re in that camp, it’s probably time to upgrade—and it’s definitely time to upgrade to the cloud. Why? Because SaaS software deployments help you future-proof your technology and ensure that future integrations won’t become unworkable.

Because the onus is on the provider to ensure software updates and ongoing compatibility, you can rest assured that data connections that work today will continue to work going forward. This positions you for future success and smoother integrations all around. 

Planning for Scale

For many businesses that deal with last mile delivery, ensuring software integrations that can deal with the required scale can be a challenge. Your software initiatives may be undertaken at the leadership level, but delivery execution is fundamentally local. That means that successful integration—including successful deployment and acceptance across multiple locations—depends on your ability to find the right solution for your entire operation. 

When you miss the mark on this, there’s a chance that you’ll wind up with different branches running shadow IT deployments to fill in gaps in their needs. If this happens, it can have serious consequences for your ability to carry out last mile delivery improvements. 

The way to avoid this is to make sure you’re leveraging technology that’s built to scale easily and designed for straightforward deployments across branches. This can be tough to ascertain from a demo, so the provider’s track record when it comes to scaling is going to be a helpful data point. 

<< Case study: learn how Ferguson Enterprises deployed DispatchTrack to 1,100 sales locations within just 3 months with 98% compliance. >>

Ill-Defined Requirements

Another reason that technology integrations fail is that the requirements for integration weren’t well defined. For instance, the sales team might not have provided a comprehensive enough brief for what kind of order information they needed to be able to see in their own tools. Or there may not have been enough specificity around how self-scheduled orders would interact with the last mile solution versus your company’s order management system. 

The potential issues that can crop up here are probably pretty obvious: you can wind up getting behind schedule on your implementation quite quickly, and you may even wind up in another situation where shadow IT crops up to fill in gaps that were left by the deployment. In any case, you run the risk that the data your teams need to do their jobs isn’t available to them when they need it. 

This is easier to get around if you’re working with experienced implementation partners. Frankly, there’s a reason that there are entire businesses that specialize in this part of the process (think CapGemini and similar businesses). It can be difficult to map out exactly what you need, but a provider who’s experienced in a wide variety of different last mile delivery use cases can help you define your requirements in a comprehensive way that avoids silos and other issues down the road.  

Right-Sizing

Some businesses might be performing centralized route optimization for their entire fleet, meaning that they need to be able to do a smooth cutover to a new technology solution all at once. Others might take a more phased approach, deploying a new piece of software to a few branches as a pilot program. These are both valid approaches, but will have wildly different requirements in terms of IT effort and project management. 

However you choose to approach integration, make sure you’re right-sizing your project plan to ensure success. You don’t want to find out months into the deployment and integration process that you haven’t devoted enough resources to the project to keep it on track. 

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, but generally speaking your provider should be able to guide you in terms of the project plan for the deployment, including ensuring that your last mile software integrates successfully with the rest of your technology stack.

Getting Provider Support for Your Last Mile Logistics Software Integration

If there’s a central theme running through this article at this point, it’s this: The ease or difficulty—and to some extent the success or failure—of a given software integration depends on more than just technical specs. It depends on the software provider. And not just the software provider’s ability to offer APIs or to ensure data streams are running the right way. 

The most effective technology deployments are the ones based on real partnerships between the user and the provider. Why? Because integration is rarely a one-and-done process. More likely than not, your needs and your technology stack are going to continue to evolve over time. That means your integrations are going to have to evolve as well, sometimes in ways that you couldn’t have foreseen when your partnership first started. 

If you’re working with a provider who’s committed to working with you and continuing to support you long after the initial deployment, you can set yourself up for smooth integrations now and in the future. By contrast, leveraging a solution provider who doesn't have a strong track record of attentive support can be one of the most serious software integration pitfalls out there. The trick is to make sure you’re partnering with someone who has the track record to back up their word on software integration.