How Roofing Distributors Can Save Money on Their Last Mile Deliveries

National roofing week may have been a couple of months ago in June, but the importance of the roofing supply industry is undiminished the remaining 51 weeks of the year. In one survey, 78% of roofing industry professionals said they anticipate sales to improve in 2024, and that suggests an industry that continues to be important to commercial and residential construction projects around the country.

When you’re delivering something so crucial to building sites, the ability to roll out efficient last mile deliveries only becomes more important. When it comes to getting the right materials to the right delivery site at the right time, the stakes can be high, and your ability to retain customers could easily depend on your ability to get it right. 

One way to approach this challenge is to include buffer time into your routes to ensure on-time deliveries and otherwise trade capacity utilization for wiggle room. The problem with this approach is that it can increase your costs—even when demand for roofing material is high, this can cut deeper into your margins than you’re comfortable with. 

Luckily, this isn’t the only way to ensure on-time deliveries. In fact, many of the techniques that you can use to help ensure smooth last mile delivery performance can actually decrease your overall delivery costs. The trick is to adopt the right best practices—and leverage the right technology. 

Reducing Last Mile Delivery Costs for Roofing Distributors

When you make your last mile deliveries more efficient, you can do more than just reduce costs—you ensure smooth operation from end to end. This includes arriving on time more consistently, creating a clearer audit trail, and ensuring greater customer satisfaction. 

Here’s how to get started. 

Evaluate Your IT Stack

Over the course of this article, we’re going to talk about a lot of specific capabilities that effective roofing supply distributors should have to ensure cost-efficient last mile deliveries. Many of those capabilities can be enhanced by the right technology—but figuring out exactly what “the right technology” means will depend on your operation. 

Broadly speaking, distributors will need ways to:

• Process customer orders
• Track inventory
• Schedule deliveries
• Route deliveries
• Communicate with customers
• Track and manage drivers/assets
• Track deliveries
• Capture proof of delivery
• Bill clients and pay out drivers

This isn’t a complete list, but it should give you a sense of the scope we’re talking about. All of these capabilities need to interact with one another, and data visibility across functions is an absolute must. 

Ask yourself: How effectively is my current IT stack at keeping these functions going efficiently? How much am I spending on different solutions? Are there areas where I need stronger capabilities? Areas where I could consolidate my IT spend by getting a solution that combines more of this functionality? 

Again, there won’t be a one-size-fits all tech stack—but when it comes to the last mile, most businesses can save money by consolidating different functions into a single, highly-connected cloud last mile delivery software solution. 

<< "DispatchTrack’s pallet scanning makes a faster, more efficient delivery process." Learn how by reading the Building Materials Distributor case study >>

Optimize Your Routes 

Specifically, optimize your routes with an AI-powered solution that can ensure total ETA accuracy. If you’re still using pen and paper to plan your routes, upgrading to a modern route optimization solution is going to offer a host of immediate cost benefits. You’ll be able to plan more efficient routes than a human planner could realistically achieve at scale, and you’ll be able to do it more quickly.

Right off the bat, this helps you save money in crucial areas. When your routes are optimal, you spend less money on fuel (since you drive fewer miles per stop), you save on driver pay (drivers can complete their routes more quickly), and even save router and dispatcher time (since the system speeds up their jobs). More than that, you can smooth out operational processes and decrease wastage by ensuring consistently accurate delivery ETAs—this means fewer unplanned returns and other costly exceptions. 

Of course, to really operationalize these benefits, the route optimization platform you choose needs to be fast and flexible. It should be able to handle a host of different use cases—e.g. Matching the right personnel to the right deliveries or routing based on skill level—and it should be able to ensure extremely accurate ETAs using AI and machine learning. This way, you take the guesswork out of processes that are foundational to both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Improve Your Proof of Delivery

It’s hard to overstate the impact that improving your proof of delivery can have on your bottom line. When you’re able to definitively show that the right order arrived at the right site at the right time, you can get paid more quickly, you can resolve payments disputes more quickly, and you can prevent the confusion and rework that comes from a messy audit trail. 

The trick here is to empower your drivers to capture timestamped and geostamped photos, as well as signatures and notes, for each and every delivery along their routes. This information should be made instantly visible to dispatchers, managers, customer service reps, and even sales personnel as soon as it’s captured—so that these teams can manage exceptions in real time. 

To make that happen, you’ll want a highly-connected driver mobile app that’s easy to use and promotes data visibility across the entire operation. 

Decrease Unplanned Returns

We alluded to this briefly in the route optimization section, but the importance of reducing unplanned warrants its own section. Sure, customers will overorder in many circumstances and you’ll be stuck hauling product back to the warehouse, but you can seriously cut down on incorrect orders, failed deliveries, and other sources of this issue by upping your customer experience game. 

Like we said above, this starts with delivering on time. When your drivers arrive when they say they’re going to, customers are more likely to be at the delivery site and prepared to receive the delivery. By the same token, when customers have multiple opportunities to confirm their orders and their scheduled delivery dates and times, you’re much more likely to turn up cancellations before you load goods into the truck—this means less damage and lower costs overall. 

As an added bonus, improving customer communications in this way can help improve customer satisfaction more broadly—resulting in a stronger brand reputation and more repeat business.  

Speed up Back-Office Processes

With route optimization software for roofing distributors, you can speed up the amount of time it takes to route your deliveries. With the right driver mobile app, you eliminate the labor and time that goes into printing out route manifests and distributing them to your drivers—the routes just go straight to the app. 

There are numerous other ways that the right roofing delivery management software can help save time across your entire operation. Improved delivery data visibility can enable faster exception responses when things go awry in the field. Centralized delivery data and proof of delivery can speed up the invoicing process.

Ultimately, it all comes down to finding the right technology that can cover your needs across the entire last mile delivery process. When you can do that, you can boost delivery customer satisfaction, improve delivery planning and execution, and reduce delivery costs at the same time.