Francesco Tribuni

1st of all collect a full picture of your logistic flow, end to end. Depending on your financial goals design improvements and changes that you want to achieve. List all activities and teams involved with a Gantt, but before to start remember to engage all people that will be in charge to lead each activity. If they believe, the project will fly.

"What is not measured, cannot be improved", Lord Kelvin. Plan in advance to introduce an Analytics tool to monitor your internal (order process, end to end) and external performances (Eg : Carriers). 1st will let you collect data and make a post mortem in January, from 2nd year you'll start planning everything in advance and to simulate the unpredictable and maybe avoiding post mortem. Do it with all your teams : shipping an order is not only a matter of the warehouse guys, it's and end to end process that start from procurement, continues to the website and go straight to logistic. It involves 100% of the company, involving people you'll get tons of Solutions. Never stop collecting data, the more you have, the more you can improve.

Having multiple Carriers can balance the risk, but how to deal with them as each one will have only a piece of the cake? With Data. Make a full detailed analysis of your shipments, it'll help you to play as equals at the bargaining table : Zones of destination, weight ranges, mono/multi parcels, measures, items shipped, volumes per period, ... this is the key to engage the right Carrier and have a backup all the time. Technology plays a pivotal role. A MultiCarrier Solution will act as a layer between your ERP/TMS/WMS and Carriers, decreasing integration and maintenance costs, speeding your go to market, to add/change Carriers in a quick, KPI & Performances, have a unique API for label creation and tracking updates for all Carriers.

Data, Data, Data. Cross past years with current growth, find out how Carrier are performing per macro and micro area, so to be able to balance orders peak per Carrier and Area too. What you need is a tool that can collect daily all your orders' tracking updates, by that you can build a scalable report and plan the best peak season with your internal team and supplier, Carriers for first. Historical data can also help you to deal with new carriers that you want to add, and with rates increases from old carriers. Having +1 Carrier can protect your business from suppliers down, bad weather conditions, unexpected rates increase before of the peak season, ... add to your tech stack a MultiCarrier Solution so to add/change Carriers in a quick.

People @ & 📞 are full of tracking updates, and most of the time Carriers make their job properly by delivering on time. Even if you send delivery updates about potential delays, the goose is cooked, what I would suggest is to prevent this potential exceptions by offering more efficient delivery options at Checkout. It could be like offering both Home and Out Of Home delivery, with a PUDO map of all your available Carriers. Anyway, as you're dealing with +1 Carrier, it's absolutely mandatory to standardize the acquisition of all Tracking Updates (every Carrier has its own language), and by that plan triggers to recipients. That's for instance what we do at ShippyPro, with Notifications that can be branded and with upsell links.

Dynamic Routing is for sure the way to optimize workload, cut time and improve CX, from my pov it should be applied in 2 ways : - cross new orders (zipcode, city, country) with historical data of your last mile carriers, depending on their performances balance which one to ship with - connect drivers with recipients through inflight options that can help (or push) them to choose the best delivery window or the nearest Pudo or Locker Send tracking @ to all recipients pushing them to download last mile carrier APP, this will connect them to drivers and to local Out Of Home Network.