Last-mile delivery is one of the most expensive and complex aspects of logistics, accounting for nearly 53% of total shipping costs. With growing e-commerce demand and rising customer expectations, businesses must find ways to improve last-mile efficiency while reducing costs. In this blog, we’ll explore the biggest challenges in last-mile delivery, how AI and route optimization can help, and the key strategies for enhancing customer experience and operational efficiency.
The challenges of last-mile delivery
The final leg of delivery is often the most time-consuming and costly. It's the most complex part of the journey to plan, optimize, and execute. There's more room for unexpected delays due to traffic, weather, and construction. Idling in traffic and difficulties parking create fuel inefficiencies, and during all of this, customers want faster, cheaper deliveries.
With traditional delivery methods struggling to keep up, businesses need smart last-mile solutions to stay competitive.
Tools for route optimization
AI-powered route optimization
Route optimization is based in mathematics and data science. Adding AI finds more optimizations, faster.
Accounting for dynamic changes in predicatable factors like traffic and weather, as well as unpredictable factors like a failed delivery, is difficult whenit's happening at scale. If you have a hundred drivers out, and they all experience a delay, getting them back on track isn't easy. With AI and the right software, these changes to a route can beaddressed as they happen, quickly and efficiently.
One common inefficient routing method we see is where the output looks like the petals of a flower. The depot is at the centre, and each route extends from there. Adiona routes don't take this petal shape, as our optimizations focus on practicality, not mathematical perfection.
Parking optimizations
Reducing driver frustrations is a great way to improve the overall efficiency of your routes. After receiving driver feedback about the experience of making a delivery and following the route to the next delivery, only to find it's just down the street and they have to find parking on the same street.
Radius Routing solves for this, allowing route planners and drivers to set a radius within which parking will be consolidated.
Human optimizations
AI gives results that are great in theory. Sometimes there's real-world elements that make an AI-optimized route sub-optimal. Or, a dispatcher needs to adjust a route that's already dispatched send an updated route to the driver. Being able to easily make adjustments to a route is important. Adiona offers adjustments such as reversing a route, deleting or changing individual stops, and useful selection tools to easily group stops.
Defining "route optimization"
What one company calls optimization might not be optimized for another. Depending on your business goals, what it is you're trying to optimize will change. Adiona's routing choices allow our customers to be more specific. Is it fuel consumption or time on the road that matters more? Maybe reducing toll costs is a high priority, or the fleet includes EVs which have different factors to optimize for.
Whatever it is, flexibility is key. What you optimize for today might be different to what you optimize for tomorrow!
Optimization for customer experience
Happy customers are an indication of business health. Whether it's faster deliveries, real-time ETA updates, or route optimizations that account for customers' preferred delivery windows, optimizing for customer satisfaction cannot be overlooked.
Optimize routes for free
Access Adiona's full route optimization suite of tools and see if it works for you. Just click here to register for access.