Last-mile visibility has become something of a buzzword in recent years. On one level, this makes sense. It’s a hugely important concept, one that impacts efficiency at every level of delivery operations, but it’s also one that can be difficult to define. Oftentimes, it feels like visibility is synonymous with GPS tracking and the ability to see a truck or van moving on a map. But as anyone who’s ever waited an hour and a half past the original ETA for a food delivery order can tell you, just being able to see that something is running massively late with no explanation doesn’t actually offer much value.

For a more precise idea of what visibility is, we need to turn toward the group that ultimately decides whether a delivery is successful or not: the end customers. In DispatchTrack’s 2022 Big and Bulky Home Delivery Report, we found that nearly all consumers (90%) wanted the ability to track their orders. At the same time, more than two-thirds said that the best part of a good delivery experience was that the delivery was on time. In other words, order tracking is important, but it doesn’t make for great deliveries all on its own. Instead, it’s critical to deliver at the right time, every time. 

When this concept is framed in terms of customer needs, it becomes obvious that visibility needs to be thought of in terms of how it will provide “right-time” deliveries. That’s why it’s time to start talking about visibility in terms of clarity and control.

Visibility Needs to Be Synonymous With Clarity

Imagine that you’re managing a host of deliveries for a given day. What data do you need at what time to achieve visibility? The obvious answer might be that you need as much information as you can get, whenever you can get it. But this has its pitfalls. You might be receiving a feed of everything from miles driven to items delivered to the exact time and geo-stamps for each completed last-mile delivery, plus data about driver application usage, idling, hours of service and a dozen other things.

To be sure, all of this information is important. All of it needs to be collected in real time and made available to the team as needed. But depending on how that information is being presented, it’s easy to imagine getting completely overwhelmed by it — so much so that you actually have no idea what’s happening with your deliveries. You can answer a million questions that will be important to you later, but if this data is presented in an unstructured or chaotic way, you probably can’t answer the questions you most care about — for example, are any deliveries running late, and is there anything I can do to ensure that they stay on track?

Visibility isn’t just about having as much data as possible as quickly as possible. It’s about presenting that data in such a way as to make it clear what’s actually happening with deliveries. Instead of drowning under a mountain of information, it’s important to be able to absorb information at a glance, and quickly visualize what’s going right, versus what might require some additional work to stay on track.

This, in a nutshell, is what clarity is. It looks different at different stages in the delivery process (post-delivery clarity might look more like easy-to-navigate reports, while clarity during a delivery run means that the right information is front and center at all times), but the key is that what’s happening with deliveries needs to be clear from the presentation of data available. It’s not about having data that you can dig through to get to an answer. It’s about making the answer obvious from a single glance.

Using Visibility for Delivery Control

The value of visibility comes from the ability to use it to improve customer satisfaction and ensure success. With the right data at the right time, presented in a way that makes it easy to gain clarity into deliveries, it’s easy to turn that clarity into concrete actions.

For instance, if you have live status reports coming in from drivers for each stop on their routes, and those live updates are checked against ETA promises to see whether you’re still on pace to deliver at the right time, and the control tower or dashboard is designed to flag exceptions at a glance, you can spot problem deliveries without even trying. When you see that a truck is running late with a particular delivery, you can proactively call the customer to let them know that the delivery won’t arrive at the original time. If the new time works for them, you get points for transparency. If it doesn’t, you can start finding a way to reroute the driver to the delivery site at a time that actually works.

This is just one example of how clarity into deliveries via visibility offers better control of the last mile. But it’s not hard to find other examples across the entire delivery process. On a more strategic level, full clarity and visibility into fulfillment strategies can help with understanding whether there’s actual capacity to meet customer demand, so the strategy can be optimized to ensure that assets are being deployed at full capacity. By the same token, when a partial or incomplete delivery has taken place, follow-up can happen immediately. As a result, customers become more confident in the brand and are more willing to offer the chance to make things right. And it helps the deliverer to stay efficient and keep inventory moving. 

Turning Visibility Into Delivery Success

With true visibility — up-to-the-minute data presented at each stage of the delivery process — it’s easy to gain a clear view of deliveries and take control over what’s happening in the field. What that looks like in practice will be different for different businesses, but there are a few best practices that should work across the board:

• Offer customers visibility into flawless deliveries. Again, order tracking and visibility don’t help customers if the deliveries are going wildly off track. The goal is to provide visibility into a process that’s already working. This way, you can build trust and improve confidence that the delivery will show up at the right time.  
• Define visibility for each stage of the delivery process. When it comes to managers and dispatchers on the day of delivery, visibility might mean a real-time dashboard that gives a bird’s eye view of every truck and route. For higher-ups, visibility might come in the form of reports. Visibility before the day of delivery might mean seamless integration between the warehouse management system (WMS), point of sale (POS), and delivery-management systems. But at each stage, the right visibility is needed for the right people and processes.
• Centralize delivery data. Things move quickly when it comes to the last mile. By the time you’ve hunted through a few screens to find the right data, the information is out of date. That’s why having the right data in the right place at the right time means centralizing data into a single solution, so that your delivery management platform, for instance, works as one source of truth for making informed decisions in a timely way.
• Use predictive insights. On the day of delivery, this might mean utilizing artificial intelligence to predict ETAs based on the latest status updates, and doing the same to model the likely effects of any changes to the plan. Ultimately, visibility should extend into the near future, so the right decision can be made with confidence. 

These best practices are just the tip of the iceberg. True visibility makes an entire operation easy to understand at a glance, and helps reach the right decision more quickly. This results in better control of operations, keeping customers happy and improving the bottom line.

Shailu Satish is co-founder and chief operating officer of DispatchTrack, a provider of delivery-management software.