Delivery Scheduling Software

Delivery scheduling software is critical for delivery-based businesses. These systems offer efficiency, accountability and critical insight for delivery scheduling and management. Properly designed schedules and driver monitoring tools help delivery organizations optimize routes, make deliveries on time and maximize fuel usage.

Many delivery scheduling software capabilities are often packaged into larger fleet management systems. These comprehensive systems provide tools for managing critical tasks besides delivery scheduling, including vehicle maintenance management, billing and invoicing and delivery dashboard management.

This Buyer's Guide highlights the delivery scheduling software market and pinpoints critical features to help you determine the best system for your needs.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Delivery Scheduling Software?
Common Features of Delivery Scheduling Software
Benefits of Delivery Scheduling Systems
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Market Trends to Understand

What Is Delivery Scheduling Software?

Delivery scheduling software supports calendar management for delivery schedules. The software also helps drivers and dispatchers manage delivery assignments. And due to the driving-intensive nature of these operations, delivery scheduling software also often includes route optimization that enables drivers to meet deliveries on time and lower fuel usage.

Delivery-based organizations have two primary options to choose from based on the breadth of capabilities they need. These two different types of software are:

• Stand-alone scheduling. There are plenty of scheduling-specific software options. These systems aren't necessarily built for managing delivery optimizations, but they might be the best option for start-ups or smaller businesses moving to software for the first time. Some of these scheduling-based systems might provide more advanced operational features, but their primary function is creating, organizing and managing calendars.
• Full delivery management suite. Formal fleet management systems are a great fit for supporting the day-to-day needs of delivery management. These systems offer numerous capabilities outside of just route planning, including managing maintenance, driver schedules, payroll and accounting and more.

 

Common Features of Delivery Scheduling Software

Regardless of which software you put on your schedule to checkout, be sure it offers these core features:

Scheduling	Make efficient schedules for drivers and vehicle inspections. Ensure that drivers have a mobile device that provides them the delivery instructions. It should also have RFID and barcode scanning to track products and deliveries, while GPS tracking in the vehicle will allow the office to track movements.
Route optimization	Use real-time GPS and traffic data to create the easiest and most fuel-efficient delivery routes. This will keep expenses low, reduce driver fatigue and ensure timely deliveries.
Inventory management	Digitize the manual process of tracking product inventory so that supplies don't run out.
Billing and invoicing	Use the billing and invoice creation feature as an independent solution or integrate it with your accounting system to accurately track all transactions.
Delivery dashboard	Get a snapshot of the status of all recent, open and scheduled deliveries. Drill down to specific driver deliveries to spot trends and get a holistic review of performance.
Delivery notifications	Notify customers upon completion of delivery. Mark the order complete on mobile site/app so that back office knows status of job.

Benefits of Delivery Scheduling Systems

One great benefit of delivery scheduling software systems (and most all modern fleet management software) is GPS tracking and the many newfound efficiencies and increased safety, productivity, and transparency it enables.

Our research found that telematics provides tons of positive benefits for fleet-based, driving-oriented organizations like delivery businesses. The benefits come from telematics systems recording and relaying real-time data about vehicle locations and driving metrics. This data can be analyzed and used to establish performance benchmarks for safe and efficient driving best practices.

Revenue-Boosting Benefits of Telematics-Enabled Software for Fleet Organizations

With real-time routing and optimized scheduling, delivery drivers are more likely to meet drop-off times and get more drops done in a day. And organizations can save on operational costs in the long run with reduced fuel costs via greater efficiency.

What Type of Buyer Are You?

There are a few primary types of buyers who are looking to adopt delivery scheduling software capabilities. These buyers include:

• Manufacturers delivering inventory to stores or selling products directly to consumers.
• Retailers looking to support delivery of products bought either in-store or online.
• Restaurants looking to support their own food delivery operation with software.
• Courier organizations selling delivery services.
• Third party logistics (3PL) operations completing shipping and/or order fulfillment for contracted businesses.

These different types of delivery scheduling software buyers have unique needs based on the nature of their operations.

Market Trends to Understand

While you might strictly be in the delivery management space, it's important for you to maintain a familiarity and understanding of technology developments and best practices in the general fleet management space. You never know when you might come across new software capabilities that will knock even more off your operational costs:

Environmental awareness and sustainability practices for fleet organizations. Awareness and support for environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral/positive operations continues to grow. And organizations of all shapes and sizes need to take notice. For delivery management businesses, employing fuel use-boosting scheduling and routing software will show favorably with potential clients and help you go a long way in pleasing constituents concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Individual/combined driver metrics and reporting dashboards. There aren't many fleet management systems on the market today that don't offer some level of in-depth reporting and analytics capabilities for quantifying driver performance. Valuable driving metrics like average speed (relative to local speed limits), acceleration and braking monitoring and severity of turning measurements enable safe driving monitoring. And keeping track of the average number of deliveries made on time helps delivery organizations determine efficiencies and create accountability for drivers.

Mobile devices. Pretty much every delivery driver in your organization has a mobile device. Whether that's a personal device or one issued to them by your business, these devices are critical in maximizing efficiency for all modern fleet organizations. For that reason, mobile applications have risen to offer strong value add-ons for fleet/delivery software. These apps enable drivers to stay in contact with dispatchers, communicate with other drivers and clients/customers and complete critical operations while in the field.

Similar software categories

• Food Delivery Software
• Fuel Delivery Software
• Third Party Logistics Software
• Fleet Maintenance Software