Last-Mile Marathon: 5 Winning Strategies for Efficient Deliveries

Do you find it challenging to control the ever-rising costs of last-mile delivery?

Is it overwhelming to meet your customers’ demands for faster and more reliable deliveries?

If so, you are not alone.

As e-commerce continues to grow and customer expectations evolve, delivery businesses are struggling to reduce last-mile delivery costs and maintain quality service.

If you are also stuck with finding a way to streamline your last-mile deliveries, we are here to help. At Upper, we understand the pain points and challenges involved in the final leg of the delivery. This is why we’ve developed a powerful route management software solution to help you overcome your last-mile delivery issues.

5 Prominent Challenges in Last Mile Delivery

From traffic congestion to sustainability concerns, last-mile challenges are varied, making last-mile optimization complex. Let’s understand the significant challenges involved.

1. High delivery costs

Delivery drivers in urban areas often face traffic congestion, leading them to slow down and causing delays. In some cases, unforeseen road closures cause them to take longer detours to reach the assigned destinations, increasing their fuel consumption. 

Additionally, you may find it difficult to handle unforeseen situations, such as vehicle breakdowns, emergencies, or last-minute priority changes. This may cause a failure to meet tight delivery time windows, resulting in missed deliveries and unwanted redelivery costs that hamper your profit margins. 

2. Failed deliveries

If your customer is unavailable to accept their order at the predesignated time, it can cause a failed delivery. In some cases, your customers may end up providing inaccurate addresses with wrong street numbers or incorrect zip codes. This may lead your drivers to reach the wrong addresses, leading to delivery exceptions. 

Sometimes, uploading delivery addresses manually can also lead to human errors, like duplication or typing mistakes. Planning routes for such addresses causes inaccurate mapping and route planning, causing delays and missed deliveries.

3. Sustainability concerns

Delivery businesses that have traditional vehicles like cars, vans, and trucks that rely on fossil fuels like gasoline are witnessing an ever-growing demand for sustainable delivery practices. Thus, they are increasingly adopting environment-friendly alternatives, such as electric vehicles, bicycles, and sustainable packaging to fulfill sustainability demands. 

However, electric vehicles are expensive and may fail to match the mileage and speed that traditional gasoline-fueled vehicles provide. This can make the transition hard and infeasible, especially for small businesses with budget constraints.

4. Rising demand for real-time delivery progress

Customers these days expect real-time visibility into their order status, right from when it leaves a warehouse till it reaches their hands.
They may want to know key details, such as: 

• The current physical location of their package
• The stage of the delivery, like ‘Picked Up’, ‘In Transit’, ‘Out for Delivery’, ‘Delivery Attempted’, and ‘Delivered’
• Estimated date and time of arrival 

This may require a significant investment in implementing real-time tracking software, equipping vehicles with GPS trackers, and integrating software for data collection and analysis. This may cause upfront costs to rise, making it economically challenging for small businesses.

5. Accuracy and security of deliveries

Last-mile delivery businesses find it daunting to ensure the accuracy and security of packages due to various reasons, such as:

• Inaccurate addresses: Incomplete or wrongly typed customer addresses result in the orders being delivered to the wrong addresses.
• Human errors: Selecting the wrong item during picking or mislabeling a package can lead to sending the wrong order to your customer.
• Package theft: Also known as ‘porch piracy’, i.e. theft of packages left unattended at a customer’s doorsteps, aggravating security concerns.

Now that you know all the challenges, let’s understand how to overcome them.

5 Strategies to Overcome Last-Mile Delivery Challenges and How Upper Can Help Implement Them

1. Plan and optimize your routes

Route planning and optimization is one of the most effective strategies to optimize your final-mile delivery. Investing in delivery route management software that uses advanced route optimization algorithms can help you create optimal routes.

This helps minimize your drivers’ time and distance on the road, cover more stops per route, and increase your route efficiency. It, thus, reduces the number of delivery journeys to cover the assigned stops, reducing associated fuel and maintenance costs.

How Can Upper Help?

Upper’s AI-powered route optimization software can help businesses plan the most efficient routes, considering real-time traffic conditions, vehicle capacities, and customers’ preferences. 

These delivery routes help prevent congestion, minimize fuel consumption, and meet delivery time windows, reducing unwanted miles and redelivery costs.

2. Track your deliveries and make quick adjustments

Implementing real-time GPS tracking software can help provide complete visibility into the location of your in-transit drivers and assigned orders. This helps you stay abreast of your real-time delivery progress to ensure timeliness. 

If needed, you must readjust your routes and schedules to handle unforeseen events like road closure, traffic, emergency, or vehicle breakdowns to keep deliveries on track.

How Can Upper Help?

Upper’s GPS tracking allows you to track your orders in real time. In case of last-minute orders or cancellations, this software enables you to add or delete stops to accommodate them.

Moreover, Upper lets you handle unprecedented changes, including vehicle breakdowns, drivers’ illnesses, or congestion by editing the sequence of stops or reassigning them to another available driver, as required.

3. Ensure consistent communication with customers

Sending delivery status notifications and precise ETAs to your customers is essential to maintaining communication, enhancing last-mile visibility, and ensuring they trust your brand. 

If you make adjustments to delivery schedules, make sure your customer is notified of the updated estimated times of arrival.

How Can Upper Help?

Upper’s GPS tracking helps send real-time delivery notifications, like ‘Out for delivery’ or ‘Delivered’, to enhance their delivery experience. 

It also lets you convey the most accurate ETAs based on route edits to ensure they stay available, reducing failed or missed deliveries.

4. Define vehicle capacity constraints for optimal load planning

Configuring the type of vehicle and the total capacity in weight, volume, or number of parcels is crucial to plan and dispatch loads accordingly. 

It helps them send each driver on a route with all the stops matching vehicle capacity constraints to maximize utilization.

How Can Upper Help?

Upper’s route planning software allows you to configure the type of vehicle, speed limit, and vehicle capacity specifics, including volume, weight, or number of parcels, based on your unique delivery requirements. 

It also considers these factors while planning routes to optimize the use of each vehicle’s available space and capacity and reduce delivery journeys, increasing cost savings.

5. Document your deliveries and analyze drivers’ performance

Maintain a digital record of every successful delivery by collecting photos of parcels delivered and customers’ e-signatures and adding specific delivery notes. 

This is your future reference and helps you safeguard your business against false ‘undelivered’ claims.

How Can Upper Help?

Upper’s proof of delivery feature allows drivers to capture electronic signatures, photos, and delivery notes for additional information. This record is verifiable for future reference and protects you against legal disputes.

Optimize Your Last Mile Deliveries and Win Your Last-Mile Marathon

Last-mile delivery marathon presents numerous challenges, including soaring delivery costs, the inability to track deliveries in real time, and a lack of communication with customers. 

Nevertheless, you can optimize your routes, track their progress in real time, communicate delivery notifications with customers, and collect proof of delivery to overcome them all. 

Upper’s routing software can take the complexity out of last-mile delivery. It can help you plan efficient routes, track deliveries in real time, keep customers informed, optimize vehicle capacity, and document deliveries. 

So, are you ready to streamline your deliveries and conquer the last-mile marathon? Sign up for a free Upper trial today!