10 Last Mile Delivery Excellence Metrics

Account for 50% of the overall supply chain. Last mile delivery is filled long hours, complicated logistics and razor-thin margin. Delivery providers should analyze everything from the biggest to the smallest possible factors.

1. On-Time Deliveries

The rise of on-demand economy has set the bar high for deliveries. A delayed/missed delivery is such a pain in the ass and a stronger pain in the brain. When an expectation is created in your brain and it is followed by disappointment, such experiences undermine our balance and well-being. When we are having a bad experience, the levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin or dopamine decrease which is linked to negative emotions. You may think why I am talking about neurotransmitters in a blog about deliveries. Well, as a product manager at Kiffgo, I got to learn about emotional friction.

According to Sachin Rekhi, emotional friction refers to emotions your users/customers feel that prevent them from accomplishing their goal. These are often the most difficult to perceive and equally the most difficult to address. Delayed/missed deliveries are emotional roller-coasters that will leave a bad aftertaste in your customers' brain, which turns into a negative emotional connection to your brand. That's why It's need to be tracked in order to be solved.

2. Fuel Consumption Rate and Real-time Fuel Consumption Estimate

Today's map services such as Google Maps can estimate in real-time distance and time for each route, however it cannot provide predictive real-time fuel consumption and cost estimation. Wouldn't it be great to have an accurate fuel consumption and cost estimate at the time of planning the routes? Based on Qi Zhao, Qi Chen and Li Wang research, Kiffgo is developing a real-time fuel consumption algorithm that will help courier companies and self-employed driver/owner estimate the fuel cost of a delivery or a route.

3. Used vs Available Vehicle Capacity

In last mile logistics, the utilization of the van has a huge impact on profitability. Therefore, it is important to track the capacity utilized vs the available capacity, this metric can be calculated by dividing the available capacity by the total capacity of the van. In a low margin industry, it is essential to maximize the utilization of the driver and the vehicle. If you have excess available capacity you must consider improving loading procedure or consolidating routes.

4. Planned Versus Actual Mileage

Routing planning is essential in last mile delivery, however most of the time things don't go as planned on the road. The delivery operations team need a tool with the ability to compare the planned vs the actual mileage. Higher actual mileage reveals a route planning issue or unforeseen detour to the schedule and ends up costing more. When choosing a delivery management software, it is important to check if it offers automated mileage tracking capabilities per driver/per vehicle.

5. Driver Hours In-Motion and Stationary

It is also critical to measure driver performance in last mile delivery. Drive time and stops are necessary, and it is critical to distinguish them instead of measuring overall routes duration. Excess drive time or stationary hours can reveal issues in planning, driver performance or the lack of real-time support of drivers from the operations team.

6. Cost Per Item, Per Mile, and Per Vehicle

Last mile delivery companies need supporting technology to track the cost per item, per mile and per vehicle in a consistent way. Those KPIs are important for pricing and leading indicators of profitability.

7. Number of Stops

The number of stops per vehicle/per driver is another essential indicator in last mile delivery; connected to route duration it can reveal too much pressure on drivers and poor route optimization. Vehicles/drivers with higher number of stops should be re-evaluated and the delivery operations team should look for ways to improve route schedule.

8. Average Service Time

The service time is the time the driver spends at a customer location performing a loading/unloading operation or a task. It takes more time to unload and deliver a sofa to a room of choice than 4 chairs. Every retailer sells different types of goods and it is important to track this metric per customer and gain insight into profitability per customer. It can be daunting to calculate manually this metric; delivery companies when choosing a delivery management software should look into those automated capabilities to calculate these metrics.

9. Feedback Collection

Collecting feedback on platforms like Trustpilot can be great for brand awareness. However, in order to improve delivery operations and provide consistent analytics to the operations team, having a separate dataset somewhere unlinked to the rest of the data will fail to provide a holistic view of the delivery performance. Delivery companies should consistently collect customer feedback and analyze it in order to continuously improve service and delight the end-customer. Kiffgo’s Customer Feedback feature will surely help you improve in this area, once a customer has received their item, they are automatically sent an SMS linking to an HTML web-based app to rate the driver and overall delivery experience.

10. Damage Claims

Goods damage and loss claims can eat away at your profit margin. Last mile delivery companies need to consistently track which driver, which customer are the claims originated from. Consistent tracking will help to find out the root cause and shut down the problem at its origin.