A cozy tradition in logistics management is to blame the poor performance of deliveries on driver behavior, traffic conditions, or customer unavailability – all of which are real things, but none of which will explain the entire situation as on-time rates remain dismal and fuel costs continue to rise despite the difference in delivery volume not even matching. Australian delivery operations that are operating on software not actually designed to work in local geographic conditions impose an efficiency tax that manifests itself in all metrics at once, and the cause of that tax is hard to isolate without a person specifically enquiring as to whether the routing, dispatch coordination and customer communications tools are actually working or are merely technically operational. Find out more.
Optimization of routes that are tuned to the conditions in Australian suburban and regional areas yields significantly different results to routing logic based on generic routing logic. The outer-suburban routes of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth run much, much further than population-density comparisons with overseas markets would suggest – and those additional kilometers cost actual dollars at Australian fuel prices in terms of fleet work through five days a week. Software which processes real-time traffic feeds, delivery window requirements, vehicle load constraints and geographic stop clustering simultaneously generate route sequences that cannot be manually recreated by human planners under morning dispatch pressure, recovering operational costs that pay out in large annual savings in even small size fleets.
The large platform experiences have permanently recalibrated the customer expectations in Australian markets and the recalibration is equally relevant to all business delivery businesses irrespective of the size and the level of operational sophistication. The same set of customer expectations in communication with a supplier in South Australia and a large e-commerce operation in fulfilling operations in Sydney are the same expectations of live tracking, correctly set ETAs, and exceptional alert messages, since customers use the best experience they ever had in the country as the reference point to all other customer experiences. Delivery software that automates this communication layer based on GPS-triggered notifications as opposed to approximate time windows provides the accuracy that the Australian customers have come to consider the new norm that minimizes the number of contacts required in the support department and at the same time increases the repeat purchase rates that have been sustaining the long-term business performance.
The fact that proof of delivery documentation is actually complicated by the property diversity that Australian delivery runs have to face on a daily basis with little warning and preparation time. Ordinary suburban homes, apartment complexes with intercoms that could be switched on and off, rural homes with unclear boundaries in their deliveries and business premises with certain receiving conditions all create potential conflicts that are solved rapidly on objective facts with the help of GPS-registered photos, location position and time-stamped documents. This operational protection is real, not a theoretical one because of the consistency of documentation of all types of property, and not only the simplest ones.