How Is Lumber Delivery Evolving in 2024?

Statistics show that the lumber market is down slightly in 2024 so far, but with interest rates changing and economic volatility playing out in unexpected ways it can be difficult to predict what’s next for lumber distributors. One thing’s for certain, though: last mile delivery will continue to be an important part of lumber distributors’ operations. On some level, this has always been the case—after all, getting pallets of lumber to the end customer is the entire business model. But in recent years the concept of last mile delivery has become more of a focal point across industries that have historically not been the focus of technology providers in that area. B2B customers—e.g. contractors or construction firms—expect something much closer to a typical B2C delivery experience, and lumber distributors have an opportunity to boost their brands and retain their customers more effectively by providing that. 

That means that lumber delivery is evolving quickly—both in terms of the expectations that it needs to meet and the tools, technologies, and techniques that distributors are using to manage their delivery operations. 

Challenges in the Lumber Market

The lumber market has long been tied to housing and construction—meaning that macroeconomic factors like interest rates have a huge impact on the lumber market. At the same time, the industry has weathered shortages, supply chain issues, and other challenges over the course of the past few years. 

All of this makes predicting both supply and demand difficult, and it has been putting pressure on margins. For smaller and mid-sized players, this means you have to get creative in order to compete with larger lumber distributors who can more easily weather storms. Luckily, technology is evolving at least as fast as the market, and the result is that there are more tools available than ever before for finding ways to optimize existing processes. 

Digitization is a huge force for this kind of increased efficiency—and it’s usually powered by SaaS technology solutions that offer capabilities that would have been difficult to implement even a handful of years ago. In this way, lumber distributors across the board have the potential to become more agile, connected, and intelligent, and reduce delivery costs significantly in the process. 

How Last Mile Delivery Impacts Lumber

In order to turn smarter last mile delivery practices into cost savings and improved customer satisfaction in lumber distribution, there’s a handful of best practices that can be impactful:

• Optimize your routes with machine learning: You don’t want to jump on a technology bandwagon just because it’s trendy, but machine learning is a tried-and-true technology for improving the accuracy of your routes. In this way, you can boost your on-time delivery rates and avoid all of the hassle, rework, and frustration that comes from late deliveries. Many of the orders you fulfill are going to be last-minute, so the ability to get those at the door quickly and at the right time is another major benefit of fast, accurate route optimization.
• Match the right equipment to the right jobs—without losing out on efficiency: This is something else the right route optimization can help you with. Sure, your routers probably have all the information they need in their heads in order to figure out that a particular kind of vehicle goes with a particular kind of order, but if you can codify that information you more easily account for it at the route optimization stage without losing out on efficiency. 
• Communicate early and often: Modern delivery customers want to have delivery information at their fingertips at all times. They don’t especially want phone calls, and they certainly don’t want to have to call you. That’s why sending out automated delivery notifications and alerts via text and email is so crucial to ensuring a strong customer experience. Ideally, you’ll send a live tracking widget where customers can see the location of the truck, and you’ll give a heads up whenever the delivery ETA changes. 
• Empower drivers to document deliveries: Once the delivery is finished, you want to get paid as quickly as possible. The only way to do that is with clear, thorough delivery documentation. Empower your drivers to collect signatures and photographs via mobile app at each job site, and make sure those photos are timestamped and geostamped so that they offer complete proof of delivery for successful deliveries and delivery attempts. 
• Leverage pallet scanning across the board: The faster you can scan items on and off the truck, the faster you can complete deliveries—meaning you can fulfill more orders per day and reduce cost-per-delivery. Increasing the speed at which you load and unload can also help you get priority over other vendors in competitive situations. How do you make that happen? By making sure you have the ability to scan entire pallets and have the scans reflected in both your ERP and your last mile platform. 

<< Learn how BMD partnered with DispatchTrack to roll out integrated pallet scanning for faster, more efficient deliveries. Read the case study! >>

What to Expect in 2025

No one knows what the coming year is going to bring, but there’s a lot that lumber distributors can do right now to make sure they’re prepared for whatever comes their way. For instance, the tide of SaaS software for last mile delivery and other logistics processes isn’t going to ebb any time soon—and by taking advantage of the opportunities that these solutions provide, lumber distributors can take greater control of their last mile delivery costs. 

These technology solutions can be especially powerful when they’re built for seamless integration and deployment. More and more, we expect to see lumber distributors turning towards trusted vendors who are able to demonstrate a proven track record of getting their customer up and running quickly without lengthy implementation delays. Likewise, distributors will need to look for vendors who can offer software that’s built to play nicely with the rest of the technology stack—whether that includes ERP, PoS, WMS, telematics, or all of the above.

This is easier to achieve with SaaS technology, which is yet another reason we expect that to increase in adoption. But not all SaaS solutions are created equal—as businesses in the lumber distribution industry begin to think more about their technology in terms of an ecosystem, they’ll continue to prioritize software that gels with their larger IT goals. 

In the building supplies space more broadly, there’s also increasing pressure to offer greener building materials, greener HVAC supplies (such as heat pumps), and other alternatives to the traditional way of doing things. In lumber, you’ll have to be able to support projects that may be evolving rapidly—which means baking in the ability to be agile and responsive as customer needs change. 

At the end of the day, there’s no surefire way to predict what the lumber market is going to do in the next year. The best thing that distributors can do is to ensure that they’re prepared for whatever gets thrown at them. That means ramping up capabilities that make it easier to turn delivery orders around quickly and accurately while controlling costs across the board. Easier said than done—but the right technology can be a huge help.