With much of the world in some form of lockdown, it’s the delivery people and the courier companies that are proving their worth. By transporting food and goods to people who are remaining inside their homes during the COVID-19 crisis, delivery companies are becoming more important than ever before. For perhaps the first time, the complex inter-lapping system of companies that deliver to our doors are receiving the credit and recognition they deserve. Your delivery system may be working in overdrive at the moment, which means this is an excellent time to modernize, considering the tips below that show you how to change your fleet for the better.
This guide will aim to help you consider the ways in which you can reduce your overheads and improve your service as a modern-day delivery company.
Measure and Make Notes
One of the best starting points, when modernizing your delivery system, is to make detailed notes about every stage of every journey your fleet makes. It’s in this way that you’ll accumulate enough information and data to understand where you might be incurring delays, and where you may be leaving customers unhappy with your service. Furthermore, this is the time to measure your overheads – like staff pay and fuel allowance – to see how much you’re spending, per mile driven, across the course of the week. These are measures you’ll want to bring down.
Improving Service
When you’re looking to modernize your delivery system, one of the key measures of success in the changes you make will be how many customers you’re leaving happy, and how many are left without their package at a given time. You need to target pain points in particular, and use modern technology to get drivers the information they need to prioritize certain deliveries on their route. By using digital signing tablets, your drivers will spend less time at customers’ doors, too, which grants them more time on the road.
High Management
One update that you should be bringing to your logistics company should be the type of software you are using. This should be the finest software on the market that helps delivery companies measure and alter their services. By using fleet management software, for example, you’ll be able to keep track of all the elements mentioned above, and more, simply by logging into your company system. You can also track drivers, and send messages to specific individuals, on jobs across the country, to help them prioritize certain jobs over others. Such systems are your centralized, easy-to-access monitoring help – and they’ll help you drive down your overheads by setting ever-more ambitious targets.
Reducing Fuel Use
While there are many ways to measure and reduce the amount of fuel that your company uses in getting packages to their destinations, one of the best ways is to simply change your drivers’ behavior. You’re going to need to make some behavioral changes to the way in which they drive, and give them a target which they can aim at, which represents good fuel efficiency across their working week. If they’re able to concentrate on economical driving, you’ll find that you save thousands of dollars in gas each and every month of the year.
