How to improve delivery efficiency — and get buy-in for your initiative

Customers expect more each day from the ecommerce businesses they buy from. According to the Retail Industry Leaders Association, 90% of online shoppers believe two or three-day shipping should be the norm. These higher standards are pushing companies to continually improve their logistics, with delivery efficiency being one of the biggest factors influencing purchase decisions and customer experience. 

In this post, we uncover seven strategies on how to improve delivery efficiency and help you get executive support for those initiatives.

1. Enhance your carrier network

Optimizing your carrier network is one of the most important steps you can take toward shipping performance, as it directly impacts your cost and delivery speed. Building reliable partnerships requires consistent effort, but long-term savings and improved performance can make it worth the investment. Here’s how:

• Create strong business connections with partners: Improve your carrier contract management by monitoring data, forecasting trends, and maintaining transparent communication. Regularly review performance and align goals to ensure partners prioritize your business, providing resilience during high-demand periods.

• Negotiate volume-based rates and terms: Analyze your shipment patterns to negotiate better prices and terms with carriers for committing to specific volume thresholds. Review your agreements regularly to find better discount opportunities.

• Diversify carriers across regions: A varied network reduces the risk of partner constraints caused by macro-environmental changes, especially in niche markets or underserved geographies.

• Implement backup contingencies and risk management: Develop backup plans with secondary carriers and use predictive analytics systems to anticipate disruptions, ensuring continuity even during logistic challenges.

2. Optimize delivery routes

Sending packages across poorly planned routes might make your carriers travel more miles than necessary, leading to higher fuel costs and missed delivery windows. To facilitate delivery route optimization, you can leverage:

• Favorable delivery zones and density: Use geographic analytics to adjust and select the optimal routes and delivery zones for each truckload, ensuring balanced cargo across your network and shorter travel distances.

• AI-powered tools for traffic and load balancing: Static routes don’t adapt well to traffic or last-minute changes. The latest AI technology can guarantee optimized paths by analyzing real-time traffic, weather, and delivery density for overall shipping efficiency. Working with an end-to-end platform like Shipium, for example, allows you to leverage shipping technology designed to help you cut costs while maintaining efficiency across the chain. Our AI and machine learning time-in-transit models guarantee you make optimized delivery route decisions.

3. Automate shipping operations completely

Relying on manual processes limits your ability to respond quickly to logistic inefficiencies, slowing down delivery performance. Having connected systems across the supply chain automates repetitive tasks and provides real-time visibility, enabling more precise business decisions. Here are two ways to modernize your tech stack:

• Enable smart carrier selection and rate shopping: Manually gathering data from multiple sources and analyzing it for each shipment can slow you down, especially when managing high order volumes. That's why you should use smart technology, like Shipium’s Carrier Selection tool, to automatically compare prices and always select the best options.

• Streamline order processing and label creation: Automating tasks like label printing and order batching eliminates human errors and speeds up the fulfillment process. By integrating OMS and WMS systems, you synchronize inventory data, order statuses, and shipping requirements, making your processes flow with ease.

4. Leverage real-time analytics

Access to real-time data allows you to proactively address issues, optimize operations, and enhance delivery efficiency. 

• Monitor carrier performance and delivery status: Spot inefficiencies like late deliveries before they escalate. Identifying a carrier consistently failing SLAs, for example, lets you reallocate shipments to more reliable partners.

• Enable proactive issue resolution and alerts: Automated systems can flag problems like traffic delays or inventory misalignment, triggering immediate action. For instance, if a truck faces an issue, real-time alerts can prompt dynamic rerouting, keeping deliveries on schedule, and minimizing customer service work.

• Analyze shipping patterns to improve efficiency: Getting insights into delivery zones, peak order times, and carrier preferences helps businesses optimize costs and speed. Analyzing trends like urban delivery density might reveal opportunities to cluster stops more efficiently, reducing fuel consumption. By continuously reviewing patterns, logistics leaders can adapt operations to ensure consistent efficiency.

5. Optimize packaging efficiency

Poor packaging strategies lead to higher dimensional weight charges, wasted resources, and damaged goods. That’s why implementing smarter parcel practices directly impacts your shipping budget and overall performance. Here’s how to do it:

• Standardize sizes to reduce dimensional weight: Using the right-sized box for a small electronic device, for example, instead of a larger, generic one, can decrease shipping costs for thousands of parcels annually.

• Implement sustainable materials and practices: Eco-friendly packaging reduces environmental impact while aligning with conscious customer expectations. Effective steps could be switching to recyclable or biodegradable materials and minimizing the use of plastic void fill.

• Minimize void fill and wasted space: Optimized packaging design, such as snug-fitting inserts or modular systems, reduces void space and the risk of product damage during transit. 

Shipium’s tools enable efficient decisions by integrating package data, such as product dimensions and inventory locations, within our broader supply chain platform. By automating packaging selection, we ensure each order uses the optimal box sizes and materials. 

Learn how to optimize cartonization with Shipium’s packaging planner API.

6. Enhance warehouse operations

Poorly managed workflows, excessive handling times, and disorganized warehouse inventory lead to poor shipping efficiency. See how to get it right:

• Implement cross-docking and inventory optimization: Improving stock positioning reduces operational delays by avoiding unnecessary transfers or out-of-stock issues. For example, high-demand items can bypass warehouse shelving and go directly to shipment, saving time and resources in a practice known as cross-docking. 

• Reduce handling time through smart workflows: Streamline tasks like picking, packing, and sorting with automation. Using conveyor belt systems and barcode scanners, for instance, cuts the time it takes to process an order, allowing you to handle higher volumes with the same resources.

• Enable flexible fulfillment options: Enabling alternative processes like ship-from-store or buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) can reduce strain on central warehouses while enhancing customer convenience.

7. Streamline last mile delivery

Last mile delivery is often the only point in the fulfillment process where the customer directly interacts with your brand and the carrier’s brand, making it a crucial step in your supply chain. But it’s not just about the buyer’s experience: last mile delivery also represents a large expense, roughly 41% of all supply chain costs, according to Capgemini Research Institute.

Without an efficient strategy for this step, businesses may repeatedly face challenges like missed deliveries and frustrated customers. Implement these smarter practices for your last mile:

• Reduce failed deliveries through better communication: Real-time updates ensure customers are prepared to receive their packages. Providing a live tracking link with an accurate delivery window minimizes the chances of failed delivery attempts and improves the overall customer experience.

• Optimize final-mile carrier partnerships: Contract regional companies as they often specialize in specific areas, offering faster and more affordable delivery solutions. Analyze performance metrics, such as on-time rates and customer feedback, to help you identify the best carriers for high-density zones.

Our best ideas to secure executive support for efficient delivery investments

Getting executive buy-in for efficient delivery initiatives shouldn’t have to be an obstacle to modernizing delivery operations. To build a compelling case, focus on demonstrating measurable value and connecting logistics improvements to the bottom-line business objectives. 

1. Demonstrate cost savings of improved shipping performance

Executives prioritize return on investment (ROI), so it’s critical to showcase industry benchmarks or calculate the precise potential savings of your ideas.

Break down the possible expense economy into categories, such as reduced fuel costs through implementing route optimization software or packaging efficiency. Be sure to highlight how the investment cuts down overall operation costs.

Shipium, for instance, reduces parcel spending by 10%, according to a Nucleus Report. Organizations interviewed in the study cited a $5M decrease in costs annually after deploying Shipium.

2. Showcase strategic logistics solutions

Propose solutions to leverage technology and eliminate the manual work from your supply chain, like:

• A multi-carrier shipping software
• AI-powered route optimization tools
• API integrations through the whole supply chain 

Emphasize how these tools streamline workflows, reduce manual errors, and enable faster decision-making. You can use data available in published case studies, such as Shipium’s success stories, for example. According to a Gartner report, reading reviews prior to purchase is important for 98% of buyers and 66% prefer reviews verified by a third party.

Learn the top mistakes businesses make when selecting shipping technology. 

3. Address the risks of your current practices

Identify vulnerabilities in your process, such as lack of backup carriers or poor visibility into data for shipping delivery performance. Propose solutions like diversifying your carrier network and adopting compliance-focused tools. 

With Shipium’s pre-integrated carrier network, for example, you simplify diversification by giving you access to multiple carriers seamlessly and enabling dynamic switches during disruptions or peak demand. 

4. Align your ecommerce delivery process with business objectives

Connect the idea of efficient delivery to broader organizational objectives to properly highlight its significance. For example, use these arguments:

• Efficient shipping helps maintain customer loyalty: Faster and reliable deliveries ensure better client retention. According to Ipsos, 85% of buyers would not order from an online store again due to a poor delivery experience.

• Parcels delivered on time get you competitive market positioning: Offering precise delivery promises positions your business as a market leader and differentiates your brand from slower competitors.

Optimize your delivery performance with the Shipium platform

Shipium’s end-to-end platform simplifies logistics and empowers businesses to achieve shipping efficiency without overhauling their existing systems. Here’s what our tools bring to the table:

• Carrier Selection: Dynamically choose the best carriers in real time, ensuring precise delivery promises and reducing shipping costs.

• Fulfillment Engine: Optimize delivery routes, intelligently select the best fulfillment center for each order, and streamline the entire order-to-delivery workflow.

• Predictive analytics: Shipium’s Simulation tool uses data-driven insights to forecast demand and identify potential bottlenecks to avoid disruptions in your shipping process.

• Inventory Placement: Strategically position products in the best locations across your network to guarantee stock availability for customer demand.

Book a demo today and discover how Shipium can help drive your delivery efficiency strategy.