Supply chain management tool to scale delivery efficiency & profits

Businesses today are running on a tight rope. More than ever, today supply chain stakeholders are posed with an imminent challenge--balancing scalability, costs, and customer experience. Savvy customers expect their favorite brands to make online deliveries faster, cheaper and more convenient. The question is how do enterprises scale operations to meet these growing customer demands and stay profitable at the same time?

Over the past 10 years, Julia was quite successfully running a pizzeria in Boston. The success behind her growing sales was a secret sauce. The recipe for that sauce was passed on to her by her grandfather. Customers loved it. As years passed by, it was a very common sight to see boxes printed 'Julia’s Pizzeria' lying on dining tables of the neighborhood in Boston, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. As online food ordering caught momentum in Boston, people couldn’t resist the temptation of having good food in the comfort of their own homes.

Julia is a smart businesswoman. She wanted to get the most out of this opportunity. Julia’s Pizzeria soon had its own delivery fleet. But as demand increased, managing deliveries became complex. Her margins were becoming thinner and scaling operations seemed a herculean task. The complexities were mainly driven by factors like lack of visibility of delivery drivers, poor and expensive resource planning, inefficient collaboration between delivery managers and executives, low productivity and inability to accurately benchmark KPIs.

Julia realized that the best way to address these challenges was to digitalize core delivery operations by embracing advanced supply chain management tools. In other words, just like her pizzas, digitalization was her secret sauce to scaling delivery efficiency and ensuring profitability.

Julia invested in an advanced delivery management platform to optimize her business’ delivery operations. Some of the key features of the platform include real-time intelligence, instant alerts, automatic task allocation, milestone tracking, crowdsourcing and more. Let’s quickly glance through each of these features and understand how it helped Julia scale operations and boost profitability.

The platform’s real-time intelligence capabilities allow Julia to track and trace her delivery drivers in real-time by just using a simple mobile application. This ensures that her manager is aware of any delays and diversions that are taking place while executing deliveries. In case of unnecessary diversions, the platform can quickly raise a ticket to the manager asking for corrective measures. Real-time intelligence also helps Julia’s manager understand if a vehicle is kept idling, this ensures that unnecessary fuel consumption is avoided and thereby reducing delivery expenses.

Instant gratification is key in this consumer-driven world. Julia’s customer wants to know how long it’s taking to get their pizza prepared, where is it, when will it reach them and if there are delays. The platform empowers Julia’s Pizzeria to inform customers in real-time how long will it take to prepare their orders, the exact ETA of the delivery and send automatic notifications in case of delays.

The platform provides Julia with a single pane of glass view for all delivery KPIs. Through simple yet intuitive graphical representations, she can instantly figure out how many orders were delivered on time, how many were not, how many are still pending, what are the customer ratings for a particular delivery and more. This significantly helped Julia improve KPI benchmarking. She can now directly connect incentives programs with the already set KPI by leveraging the advanced delivery management platform. This feature particularly has also empowered Julia to improve the productivity of her delivery personnel. Delivery personnel can also track their own performance by using a user-friendly mobile application.

Through crowdsourcing, Julia's Pizzeria easily meets elastic demands without affecting profitability and the bottom-line. This paves the way for an efficient and viable means to run her driver operations. She can quickly onboard drivers using a mobile application. The easy-to-use app allows her to execute things like registration, to uploading identity proofs, to status tracking. The platform onboards drivers from the available markets based on proximity, productivity records, cost and more. A major advantage is the platform's ability to centrally manage all driver operations from a single window. This is of special significance for delivery stakeholders in terms of both visibility and control.