Delivery Software for Retail Home Delivery
With the continued growth in eCommerce and consumer desire for home delivery, retailers must take advantage of proven strategies to influence buyer behaviour through a positive customer experience.
The key lies in adopting proven technology and software that not only optimises your delivery routes and schedules for peak efficiency but also elevates the customer experience, providing the consumer with self-service delivery scheduling that offers the customer choice while maintaining your profitability.
These advancements offer an improved and highly effective supply chain and home delivery operation, creating a seamless journey from retailer to consumer.
Make Home Delivery Easy with Descartes
Descartes' delivery scheduling software will continuously analyse orders as they come in and consider the delivery resources and capacity available, as opposed to taking a batch of orders that are hoped to be delivered the next day or sometime in the future.
This ensures vehicles and delivery routes are optimised with the highest possible delivery density.
Optimising Deliveries
The system checks that the vehicles and drivers available are fully utilised and take precise routes, while not being over-committed outside of their normal working hours and legal drivers’ hours limits.
As a result, we are able to confidently predict short window delivery ETAs with automated notifications to the consumer.
Overcome Retail Distribution Challenges
Increasing customer expectations
Consumers no longer necessarily want deliveries the next day, but rather when they want them, on a day and time that suits them.
Competitive customer decision‑making
The number of abandoned carts on your website tells a story. Are consumers influenced by convenience and choice and buying from a competitor that offers a better delivery selection?
Complex deliveries
Selecting the best vehicles and calculating delivery schedules that maximise capacity while reducing costs and not just miles driven is time-consuming without the right software.
Seasonal fluctuations in demand
Ensuring you don’t over-commit to deliveries during peak times can be as important as maintaining fleet efficiency during periods of lower demand.
Cost-cutting in the supply chain
It might be difficult to reduce costs throughout your supply chains. However, when you adopt the correct solutions, cost reduction is feasible at every step of the supply chain, including last-mile delivery, warehouse management, transportation management, and more.
Becoming more sustainable
Retail distribution is significantly influenced by market trends. For instance, the consumer interest in sustainability. Reducing emissions is vital to keep in mind as you optimise your retail distribution network and home delivery operation and turn it into a competitive strength that consumers value.
Improve first-time delivery rates
Notify your customers with an accurate ETA for their delivery and allow them to message back with any special instructions
Reduce customer service calls
Enable customers to track their deliveries and avoid the “Where’s my delivery?” telephone calls with reliable delivery tracking apps.
Improve customer feedback
Capture customer feedback immediately after a delivery, by prompting them on their personal devices.
Distribution centre to store visibility
Leading retailers both large and small depend on Descartes technology to better manage their end-to-end processes involved in the transportation of goods from distribution centres to their stores.
Delivery Solutions for Retailers
Organisations are beginning to use the next generation of fleet optimisation technology to cut operating costs, boost productivity, and meet increased customer demands while guaranteeing product quality and security in order to succeed in the competitive retail market.
Learn more about our retail-specific logistics solutions
Customer Successes
“Working with Descartes, we’ve replaced manual, spreadsheet-based processes with automated route planning to optimise the volume of tiles being delivered at any given time, as well as the routes our vehicles are travelling. Descartes’ strategic route modelling capabilities are also enabling us to model delivery scenarios and make more informed strategic decisions, which would have been nearly impossible with traditional resource-intensive analytical methods.”
Simon Macdonald, National Transport Manager
Avg distance driven/delivery reduced 2%
Manual processes Replaced
Nationwide stores 300+
“The Descartes Reservations™ and Descartes Route Planner™ solutions were integral to our strategy of offering more extensive, but unified , delivery services. The advanced optimisation capabilities and architecture of the Descartes solutions were critical to bringing new delivery service options to our customers in an economically feasible way. ”
Andrew Gay - Systems Manager
Fulfilment costs reduced £1.8m
Increased delivery capacity 35%
Delivery windows provided at POS
“Working with Descartes, we’ve saved 13% on annual fuel costs, which equates to approximately 354,000 fewer miles driven.”
Lee Holmes, Transport and Logistics Director
Annual Fuel bill reduced 13%
Productivity improved 56%
Annual savings £2 million
“Descartes ePOD solution has unlocked considerable benefits for both our business and our customers. We have seen the number of requests for PoD decline dramatically and have received increasingly positive feedback from our customers.”
Peter Russell, IT Director, Carpet & Flooring
Customer POD requests reduced 80%
Successful 1st Time Deliveries Increased
Operations costs Reduced
“Redefining the Customer Experience in the Tyre Replacement Market”
Jobs/van/day increased 194%
Mileage reduced 13%
Fleet size 400+
“With Descartes, we can reduce planning to one hour with one employee, allowing us to significantly increase productivity and redeploy staff to wider strategic initiatives. The level of automation and digitisation we have already achieved using the solution has fundamentally transformed our logistics operations. This, combined with robust track-my-order functionality, means that customer experience has significantly improved.”
Chris Pullen, CEO
Daily planning time reduced 75%
Daily Deliveries 900
Fleet size 50
“In the past year since having the Descartes' system our jobs per route has improved by just short of 10%.”
Martin Alldritt - Planning & Optimisation Manager
Jobs per route has increased 9.9%
Average mileage between jobs reduced
Improved Customer Service