How Sellers Meet Delivery Deadlines

Do you ever ponder the many challenges involved in meeting precise delivery deadlines? For any company that sells goods and delivers them, the entire concept of timely arrival of shipments is one of the core missions for managers and owners.

Whether your business is new or old, large or small, local or international, it’s imperative to know the various ways your competitors deal with the ever-present demand to ship goods on time and meet specific scheduling milestones from order placement to final delivery.

Here are details about several of the most-used strategies for getting the job done and making certain that clients, both retail and wholesale, receive their orders in a timely fashion.

Reality-Based Planning

The good news for owners who operate under strict deadlines is that there are plenty of effective methods for making realistic plans to achieve on-time deliveries. One way to begin is by studying what larger competitors do, and it’s often possible to glean those strategies by studying their websites.

Many transport companies boast about doing dry runs during rush hour, conducting detailed traffic pattern studies, and building cushion time into schedules. The first step of any accurate route making effort involves reality-based planning. There’s no point in making promises to customers that you can’t keep. It’s often wiser to give buyers several hour windows of time during which their goods will arrive.

Advanced Fleet Management Solutions

Fleet management software and other sophisticated fleet solutions are essential tools for managers who want to operate an efficient routing process. For example, your company can take advantage of reefer monitoring to achieve full compliance and cost-effective control of refrigerated shipments around the clock. Features like constant temperature reporting take the worry out of long-haul transport of costly goods to valued customers.

Smart Inventory Management

It’s one thing to miss a deadline because of traffic delays or a slowdown on the loading dock. But, when you can’t get an item to a customer on time because you don’t have it in your warehouse, the feeling of frustration is magnified tenfold. In this scenario, the problem is inventory management or lack of it.

Merchants need to use automated inventory software so that online stores show not available when there aren’t enough items in stock. Customers might be unhappy at the prospect of having to wait for you to get more goods in, but at least they won’t be told that their purchase is on its way when it’s not even in stock.

Documentation

In any business, accurate documentation is a must. But, in transport and shipping, it’s the lifeblood of an efficient operation. In many cases, there’s no other way to prove you dropped a shipment on time and at the right location. A complete documentation package includes things like photos, signatures of recipients, bills of lading, driver checkpoint verification, time-stamped notices of delivery and more.

Fortunately, high-quality photos of drop off locations are becoming routine verification paperwork for every company that uses vehicles to ship cargo and consumer goods from point A to point B. But driver logs and other official forms are also part of the complete documentation set as well.