When industry consolidation and competition heat up, it’s time to seek out new ways of making your business more efficient and cost-effective. One of the fastest ways to achieve that is to give your employees new tools that boost their productivity. By going digital, you can free them up to work more efficiently. In turn, that will help you reduce costs by streamlining your operations.
In the logistics world, even seemingly minor inefficiencies can become a significant burden on the productivity of drivers and fleet managers. That’s especially the case if you still rely on manual processes for what’s becoming an increasingly mobile workforce.
Automating in-truck, in-field processes through a mobile device helps you eliminate paper processes and improve the way your drivers work while on the road. This approach gives you a better way to manage the entire workflow—from reconciliation to ticketing and invoicing—through step-by-step processes designed to maximize efficiency.
By simplifying processes and improving efficiencies on the road, you can also create a positive domino effect across your entire organization, improving your daily business management. Start with these steps.
Cut Your Operating Costs
The first step is to remove paper from your in-truck, in-field processes to reduce the ongoing costs associated with fleet management. This will remove the cost of the actual paper, as well as other costs such as:
- Postage and handling: You’ll no longer need to mail a physical invoice to your customers. When a delivery is completed, customers are automatically emailed proof of delivery and an invoice through the automated system.
- Administrative costs: Your administrative team will no longer need to enter data or manage queries manually. All data will be transferred directly from mobile devices in the field to your back-office system. As a result, you can repurpose staff to more strategic tasks.
- Time utilization: With time the most valuable resource, eliminating the need for your drivers to hand-deliver tickets to the office gives them more time to focus on deliveries.
Increase the Number of Deliveries
Any manual process within the truck costs you money by impacting your drivers’ efficiency. And with the industry continuing to deal with a driver shortage, it’s even more critical to reduce your team’s paperwork burden.
With mobile-focused processes that replace manual work, drivers can quickly and efficiently capture any necessary information, complete their order, email a delivery ticket or invoice, and move on to the next delivery.
Stepped processes create a simple-to-follow workflow that guides drivers through deliveries and tracks product totals to automatically generate an accurate ticket when the delivery is completed.
Improve Data Accuracy
One of the most significant problems with manual tickets is that they’re handwritten and manually calculated. Managing data and customer information in this manner lends itself to mistakes. With paper tickets, there are typically at least three people who handle that piece of paper—the driver, who writes it down; the dispatcher, who verifies it at the end of the day; and someone on the administrative team, who enters the data into your accounting system.
Enabling a driver to enter all field information into a mobile device—which automatically calculates and delivers the information to your back office—eliminates the potential for error and allows for a seamless data transfer to each back-office system.
Clean, accurate data is a fundamental part of operating a profitable business in a technologically advanced world. And, having the ability to access that data in near-real-time will help improve efficiency across your organization.
Introduce Cloud-Based Solutions
It has never been easier or more cost-effective to adopt workforce automation solutions. With the introduction of SaaS and cloud-based solutions, advanced mobility and automation are no longer limited to those with large fleets and large budgets. With significantly reduced costs, the cloud gives smaller fleets an opportunity to leverage the benefits gained through automated field processes.
The benefits of these solutions are undeniable, and your ability to modernize with them can help you compete with larger competitors and satisfy your customers.
As your customers grow more tech-savvy by the day, they expect their vendors to keep up. That’s why it’s so important to take a step forward to mobile and leave your paper trail behind.
When you’re ready, start with PDI logistics solutions.