Scaling Operations: The Role of Technology in Managing Logistics Growth

Are you looking to scale your logistics operations but failing to do so?

Are you overwhelmed with the growing complexities of your delivery management?

If yes, it’s because you are stuck with outdated methods, making it hard to cope with ever-advancing technologies transforming delivery businesses across the globe. 

So, you must move to advanced tech solutions to scale your logistics operations and stay relevant and competitive. 

However, if you are wondering how you can use technology to achieve scalability, we are here to help. 

We’ve put in hours of hard work to compile this whitepaper to help you out with that. It discusses how you can make technology your partner and not a contender to support your growing delivery operations. 

We’ll also discuss how Upper can help amplify your efforts to adopt the latest technology to streamline your different delivery business aspects.

5 Top Ways to Use Technology for Scaling Your Logistics Operations

While experts may have varying opinions, we’ve narrowed down the five main ways you can utilize technology to manage your fast-growing logistics needs.

1. Automate route planning

Manual route planning is tedious and prone to errors, such as miscalculated distances, failure to consider drivers’ working hours, or aligning delivery times with customers’ availability. So, it might fail to meet delivery routing requirements as your business expands.

To avoid this, you can implement route planning and optimization software to create optimal routes, considering drivers’ shift hours, time windows, priority, and vehicle capacity specifics. This can help you optimize routes even when your delivery radius expands from a handful of stops to many stops, facilitating scalability.

Wishlist.Delivery increased their daily orders by 200% and reduced the time taken to plan routes by 83% after integrating Upper.

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Upper’s edge

Upper features advanced AI-powered route optimization algorithms that let you create multi-stop routes based on constraints, including customers’ preferred delivery windows, drivers’ working hours, or priority. It uses predictive analytics to evaluate your historical patterns and forecast future traffic or road conditions to plan future routes. 

This automation helps prevent you from the hassle of planning routes manually and empowers you to handle increased delivery volumes. It also gives you more time to focus on business-critical areas required to support your business growth.

2. Improve timeliness and real-time adaptability

As a delivery business owner, you must aim for timely and accurate deliveries to enhance customer satisfaction. Creating optimal routes that reduce delivery distances and maximize the number of stops covered per journey can help you achieve it.

Making edits to in-transit routes can also help handle last-minute orders or unforeseen situations like traffic congestion, vehicle issues, or emergencies is imperative to keep deliveries uninterrupted. It lets you maximize your routing efficiency to complete more jobs with fewer trips, enabling you to handle more daily orders and facilitating scalability. 

Upper’s edge

Upper allows you to optimize delivery routes that save your drivers’ time and money on the road. This helps you complete more delivery tasks in less time and reduce return trips, allowing you to handle more orders daily.

Moreover, Upper’s dynamic routing capabilities let you add or delete stops to accommodate last-minute or urgent orders, cancellations, and priority shifts. This ability to adjust your routes in progress can help you handle increased delivery loads effortlessly, contributing to scalability.

3. Prioritize customer communication and satisfaction 

When customers know where their orders are, it helps enhance their trust and loyalty. Hence, you must use a solution that tracks deliveries and updates customers with delivery status. These notifications may contain accurate ETAs and a tracking link for customers to open and view drivers’ real-time movements.

Moreover, for customers opting for contactless delivery, you can collect photos of items delivered and customers’ e-signatures digitally to eliminate paperwork. Thus, meeting your customers’ specific delivery preferences helps your brand reputation, increasing sales and growth.

EcoMedical, a leading medical supplier, used Upper to achieve 100% digitization in its delivery process. Are you interested in learning how you can do the same?

Click here to unlock 100% digitization

Upper’s edge

Upper real-time tracking software provides GPS-based tracking, enabling you to track your vehicles in real-time. It also lets you share delivery notifications with your customers at every delivery stage. You can create and customize status update messages like ‘Out for Delivery,’ ‘Driver is On Your Way,’ or ‘Order Delivered Successfully.’ 

If a start is delayed or a driver gets stuck mid-route, you can send a bulk SMS to all the customers along that route to convey the specific reason for the delay. These measures help build transparency and trust in customers, increasing retention and repeat sales and attracting new customers to scale your delivery areas and operations.

Here’s what one of Upper’s clients has to say:

Northern Clearways, a leading landscaping and snow removal service, based in Minnesota managed to reduce communication gaps by up to 90%.

Click here to learn their full story!

4. Use real-time data and analytics

Real-time data and analytics are key to identifying and eliminating operational inefficiencies to ensure optimal logistics operations. Therefore, you should invest in a solution that provides real-time visibility into your last-mile delivery metrics. 

Comprehensive reporting tools offer valuable data on key performance indicators, including route efficiency, mileage, and the time to complete a route. It helps identify operational inefficiencies that prevent you from growing your business. Accordingly, you can make informed decisions to eliminate them and scale your operations rapidly.

Upper’s edge

Upper features advanced analytics and comprehensive reporting capabilities. It provides a summary and detailed route summary reports that show details, including the number of stops covered, missed, or pending per route or driver. 

This delivery information helps you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your delivery operations to achieve continuous growth and scalability.

5. Focus on customizability 

Different delivery businesses have unique delivery requirements, ranging from industry-specific routing regulations to specialized vehicle requirements or types of delivery services. So, you must look for a solution that lets you customize functionality to meet your specific needs.

As your business grows, you may need different solutions, including eCommerce stores, CRM, ERP, inventory management software, payment processing apps, or survey forms. Implementing a solution that integrates with these platforms can help manage your different business aspects centrally and efficiently, supporting scalability initiatives.

Upper’s edge

Upper provides an easy-to-integrate and customizable route planning API that helps meet your unique delivery requirements. It allows you to add custom fields for contacts, stops, or drivers to cater to your unique business needs, depending on your industry or customer types. 

Integrating this API into your existing systems, including CRM or inventory software, eliminates the need for extensive system overhauls or restructuring. It can help you manage increasing order volumes seamlessly while keeping performance intact.

Upper: Your Key to Scaling Your Logistics Operations

Scaling logistics operations may seem overwhelming unless you have the right practices and technology stack. 

You can support scaling business operations by using analytics, automating route planning, sticking to timelines, adjusting to real-time changes on the go, and implementing a solution that lets you customize it to suit specific routing needs.

Upper can be your logistics partner that lets you scale your logistics business operations by providing you with everything you need. If you also want to see Upper in action and experience how it can transform your logistics operations, you can sign up for the 7 days free trial now.