Drivers Face Several Challenges

Route driving time only constitutes a small portion of the total delivery time. At a typical stop, up to 15 minutes are often spent servicing the location. If the driver is a recent hire, the service time can be even longer.

What makes delivering goods so time consuming?

Traditional delivery methods require drivers to spend a lot of time finding the correct delivery address, parking, and recipient. A study showed that in downtown Seattle, commercial drivers spend about 28% of their time driving around looking for parking spots.

Drivers often lack detailed information about delivery sites, which in turn lead to poor planning and unnecessary delays. Location details can even be incorrect because customers, drivers, and dispatchers forget to update relevant information about the delivery site.

Poor handling of returns of cargo carriers, containers, or packaging is both costly and time consuming. Assets such as ifco and euro pallets often go missing, due to the reason that drivers do not know the balance on each site or where these assets are located.

When addresses are inaccurate or incomplete, 41% of deliveries are delayed, and 39% simply fail. The latter statistic alone is eye-watering: fulfilment failure is costly.

(Loqate GBG, fixing failed deliveries, 2022, p. 5)

But how does delivery companies like Oda and Porterbuddy manage to deliver up to 40 deliveries in a workday with completely new drivers who have never been to the delivery location before?

Right Information at the Right Time

When booking an order, both the customer and the dispatcher can input specific instructions regarding the delivery location, which are then instantly updated and displayed in the driver's app. This seamless integration of information ensures that drivers have immediate access to vital details for each stop, facilitating efficient planning and execution of deliveries.

Communication Between Dispatcher and Recipient

Through track & trace messages sent to the customer, customers can provide additional information about, for example:

• Entrance name
• Floor
• Delivery instructions
• Photos
• Call the driver

This eliminates the need for customers to contact the dispatcher, who would otherwise have to relay new information to the driver.

Acknowledging the Driver's Expertise

The driver can also update location details through the driver application, here the driver can include information about, for example:

• Opening hours
• Photos
• Contact person with phone number
• Address
• Vehicle dimensions
• Geo-tag of parking space

In the latter case of geo-tagging the parking stop, the driver is navigated to the parking space instead of the address for the next delivery.

A Continuous Optimization Process

Through accurate location details, drivers become more efficient at each stop, which in turn lowers the average time per location - a continuous optimisation process.

It is, therefore, of great importance to store and make this information available to future drivers, especially for substitutes or new hires, to improve delivery quality and reduce service time at stops.