Two trucks, six drops. What did that run cost you?

Delivery is a service most produce and farm supply businesses provide and few measure.

The orders come in through the week. Someone works out what can go on which truck. The run gets written on a whiteboard, or in a notebook, or in a spreadsheet that only one person understands. The truck goes out. The paperwork comes back. And the question of whether that run made money never gets asked, because answering it would take an afternoon.

Meanwhile fuel, wages and the vehicle itself are all costing you, and delivery is often being given away because it always has been.

Dispatch management is included in our produce software. You can manage multiple trucks and multiple deliveries per vehicle. Orders are allocated, the run is built in the system rather than on the wall, and what went where is recorded against the customer.

For businesses running a serious fleet, we integrate with Allotrac, which is a purpose-built dispatch platform. That is the right answer for operators who have outgrown a whiteboard but do not want their POS pretending to be a logistics system.

The reason to care is not tidiness. It is pricing.

Once the run is in the system, you can see which customers are cheap to serve and which are not. You can see the drop that is always out of the way. You can see whether your minimum order for free delivery is set at the right level, or whether it was set in 2019 and never revisited.

Most retailers who do this work end up making one of three changes. They lift the free-delivery threshold. They put a fee on the outlying runs. Or they consolidate a day, which takes a truck off the road for a shift without losing a customer. Any one of those is worth real money over a year.

Delivery is not a favour. It is a service with a cost, and it should be priced with the cost known.

If you deliver and you cannot say what a run costs, tell me how you organise it today and we will tell you honestly whether we can help. If we cannot, we will say so.

…

Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.