One of the main activities for those who work in the logistic management is to manage delivery drivers to be sure that material is correctly delivered in order to avoid any kind of inconvenience with the client. As a matter of fact, being able to deliver goods in time, without any damage and to get instant data about the delivery is quite important for a logistic company, since it represents efficiency, competence, and reliability which are essential values that contribute to offer a valid and solid brand reputation.
For this reason, in this article we want to focus on this aspect by giving a digital solution that can help manage delivery drivers and improve your business. Read on to find it out!
From Analogic to Digital: choose the right tools
Low-Code: simplify the app creation process
Functionalities for your Business
Workloads and Agenda to manage delivery drivers
From Analogic to Digital: choose the right tools
Digital transformation is impacting on any kind of business and companies have to adapt quickly if they don’t want to be left behind. Covid-19 pandemic has represented a big accelerator for the digitization of processes and the use of digital tools is nowadays considered to be the ordinary and not as some futuristic solutions.
Even in the logistic sector the adoption of digital tools can give a significant advantage for any company. If you entrust on the use of paper to manage delivery drivers, which means not having data in real time and receiving big amounts of paperwork, nowadays you will have more than a problem, such as disruptions and downtimes. Something that, as we said before, doesn’t help to have a good brand reputation which is fundamental to improve your business.
Nevertheless, digitization isn’t just limited to the adoption of digital tools. Creating forms for your logistic tasks with programs like Microsoft Office (which means Word, Excel and so on) or similar is possible, but it means that you’re adapting yourself. These programs are wonderful, but they’re very generic because they have to satisfy different kinds of necessity. Furthermore, a preliminary knowledge of the Office tools is required, and this means you have to train your employees.
Therefore, it’s fundamental to use the right tools that are specific for your logistic needs which can offer simple and immediate solutions to achieve your business goals.
Low-Code: simplify the apps creation process
On account of what we said, in order to manage delivery drivers, you need to provide them digital tools through which they can collect data and update the system in real time. To do so, you can entrust on low-code technology to significantly facilitate the apps creation process. If you’ve never heard about low-code, well it’s a technology that allows you to visually build apps without the need to have programming background knowledge.
This gives the chance to everyone to create applications, and this allows to have final users of these apps who become the developers, so they have a deep knowledge about the business needs. As a result of this, you have more specific and pertinent applications because they now collaborate with IT department. Moreover, low-code technology marks the entrance of citizen developers who can create much needed apps, thanks to a simpler development path.
Furthermore, low-code guarantees a rapid development of the apps, as Forrester research reports by saying that “the vast majority of companies reported that their low-code platforms helped them accelerate development by five to 10 times. […] Companies shared that visually configuring new applications using these platforms has helped speed up development and allowed the businesses to provide real-time feedback on the resulting applications’ functionality”.
TDox: your logistic partner
Through the use of TDox you can create apps with specific features for the logistic sector. In fact, it harnesses the power of low-code to simplify this process and it allows you to add various functionalities that can help your delivery drivers. Everything can be done by the editor mode that will appear like the picture below.
Here you can drag-and-drop all the features you see in the sidebar at the bottom of the page and rename all the steps according to your needs. Once you’ve built your apps, all of them can be found in the TDox super app.
In fact, TDox works as a repository of apps where you find all the apps that you’ve built before, in this way you won’t have a dispersive organization anymore, but your point of reference for your workforce applications will be TDox. This consents you to avoid downloading multiple apps for every specific task your workforce has to perform.
Functionalities for your Business
What are these functionalities you can add on your apps? Let’s see them:
- Camera integration. TDox is integrated with the camera of the mobile device, so operators can take pictures of the interventions or notify anomalies and damages. These pictures can be easily attached to the form and thanks to the time stamp, TDox is able to record the exact moment when the picture is taken. This integration also makes possible to read barcodes, a helpful tool that can support your warehouse workers for what concerns the picking activities.
- GPS Detection. With the GPS tool you can communicate to your operators the exact itinerary they have to follow which can be helpful, for instance, if you work in the logistics sector and you have to manage your transporters (read how Iren SPA took advantage of it).
- Checklists. Create your own checklists with the material you need to check. For instance, you may need a checklist to register the material that you picked up, a solution that makes this activity even faster and reduces human errors.
- Digital Signature. Certify your documentswith a digital signature, so you won’t have the problem to look for a pen anymore, you just need your finger!
- PDF Preview. A simple tool that allows to show a PDF preview to the client, so he’ll be aware of what he’s going to sign. This can be used by the transporter as soon as he/she unloads the material and a client’s signature is needed.
Add to this, TDox uses the optical character recognition to facilitate the way workers can collect data, so you just have to frame a piece of text with the camera of your smartphone and TDox will be able to identify the different text blocks (through the use of artificial intelligence) by updating in real time what the user can see as soon as he/she moves the hand on the framing. Once this will be done, the user will be able to choose some of them which will be connected, and they’ll give value to the form. Eventually, the user will have the possibility to modify the text if it’s necessary.
Workloads and Agenda to manage delivery drivers
After you’ve created the apps for your delivery drivers, then it’s time to manage them by assigning tasks and orders. To do so, we have to underline the fact that TDox is a multi-experience development platform (MXDP) which means that the apps that you build on the web app, then they’re available on various devices, such as smartphones, tablets, barcode driven devices, rugged devices, and even smart glasses (read the implementation of Augmented Reality in TDox here).
This multi-experience feature can be found in the TDox Agenda which allows to warn your workforce about urgencies, deadlines, or schedule changes or simply about the daily tasks to be performed. In fact, you can create a workload (read the full guide about TDox Workloads here) on webapp and then this is automatically sent to the delivery drivers who receive on their smartphone or tablet the task that has to be performed, so they can get rid of other dispersive communication tools like emails or instant messaging software, because they have all in one single platform.
A Native Offline feature
Eventually, we cannot omit the offline feature of TDox. As a matter of fact, its engine is native offline, that means it’s set on your mobile device. Consequently, if your delivery driver must deliver goods in places where connection is low, he/she can keep doing it without worrying about losing data or without speed complication. It will be enough synchronizing data as soon as he/she gets access to an internet connection.
All of these functions facilitate your logistic processes, and they allow you to manage delivery drivers in simpler way, without using paper, but entrusting on digital specific tools for your logistic needs.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us to know more about TDox and what it can do for you. Furthermore, if you are interested in seeing what TDox looks like in action, request a free demo, and discover a new world of opportunities.
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