Courier services are the invisible workhorses of last-mile delivery, saving time and money for businesses that need to deliver time-sensitive packages locally. Some of the most frequent users of courier services include e-commerce fulfillment, hospitals and doctors’ offices, labs, pharmacies, printing companies, manufacturing businesses, auto parts suppliers, law firms, and meal-preparation businesses. Regardless of what’s being delivered, the couriers’ job is to deliver products, paperwork, or pathology samples as efficiently as possible.

Couriers compete on the basis of performance and customer service, ensuring that customers’ packages are delivered on time and at a competitive price point. On the back end, the key for business success and growth is managing every package as efficiently as possible. It’s an enormously complex and challenging process that rests on the shoulders of the dispatchers and the processes and software they use.

Dispatchers build complex route plans for each driver’s shift and then when the driver’s day begins, they work off of that plan. But there are always changes to those plans, often driven by day-of or last-minute orders. When that happens, dispatchers carefully thread each one in among the hundreds or thousands of orders already in the plan. They evaluate a number of variables including each driver’s location, shift availability, capacity, and more, and manually assign each order. This highly precise and challenging task happens numerous times every day and is time-consuming for dispatchers while constraining business growth due to dispatching capacity limitations.

How Courier Fleets Can Rev Up Efficiency With Machine-Learning

So the question for most fleets is how to cost-effectively increase business capacity. The answer lies in automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to accommodate last-minute and on-demand orders. CXT Software and Wise Systems have partnered to offer Assisted Dispatch capabilities to CXT Software customers, bringing the power of Wise Systems’ AI-driven platform to CXT users. With this partnership, CXT will, in real time, automatically recommend the top five drivers to handle an on-demand shipment based on the fleet’s capacity and constraints.

Handling Day-Of Challenges For Last-Mile Delivery

When invoked from CXT, Wise Systems’ Dynamic Optimization Engine starts the process of determining the five best drivers for an on-demand shipment. The system evaluates a number of factors, including drivers on the road, drivers’ locations, as well as those who would be violating route constraints if they were to take the order, vehicle type, unit capacity, weight capacity, and maximum route duration. Wise Systems then prioritizes the remaining pool of drivers and lets you choose how the optimization engine picks the optimal driver. There are five options currently available:

• Total Time on Route
• Added Time on Route
• Total Delays on Route
• Added Delays on Route
• Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA)

Based on the metric selected, Wise Systems analyzes the data, ranks every driver from most efficient to least efficient to take the on-demand order, and returns recommendations of the top five drivers available. The recommended driver information is delivered to CXT Software and displayed in their dispatcher app. Although it’s a complex process, it is all executed rapidly, enabling on-demand orders to be dispatched almost immediately.

We’re delighted to partner with CXT and their customers to bring the power of Wise Systems to an even broader set of fleets who can further distance themselves from the competition with more responsive service and greater capacity