At any time, businesses must plan deliveries, schedule and track drivers, but Black Friday takes these pressures and multiplies them exponentially. This is according to the Argility Technology Group, part of the Data and Technology cluster arm of global enterprise, Smollan.

“While 29 November, this year’s Black Friday in SA, can present immense opportunities for businesses, it can also turn into a delivery nightmare. Argility’s MultiTRAX allows businesses to optimise their last mile and provide them with complete control over the entire delivery ecosystem. This simple and user-friendly technology solution aids efficient route planning, proactive customer notification, enhanced proof of delivery processing and maximises driver availability,” says Eamon McCann, Argility’s Managing Executive.

McCann confirms MultiTRAX enables businesses to plan each driver’s delivery and send the route plans directly to their smartphones. “You can monitor your drivers and vehicles on the move through the MultiTRAX dashboard – efficiently optimised for delivery speed and savings,” he says.

Intelligent delivery route planning software

McCann notes MultiTRAX facilitates ease of planning and management of multi-stop delivery routes plus driver schedules to enhance delivery efficiency. “Simply drag-and-drop deliveries on a central calendar to easily create schedules per driver with auto-updates to the driver’s MultiTRAX mobile app – ensuring that your team immediately knows where to go. Moreover, our dynamic routing ensures drivers use optimal routes and are always on track, saving your business time and money.

“MultiTRAX allows your customers to validate their addresses against Google Maps and sends drivers an accurate location pin, identifying physical locations, for a successful delivery. In this way, challenges are overcome, and delivery accuracy is improved for incorrect and undocumented delivery address capture or incomplete formal rural area addresses that hamper service delivery to customers.”

AI powered optical character recognition (OCR)

OCR makes it possible to scan and load delivery documents, enabling the capture of data more accurately and processing it faster. OCR facilitates the fast scanning of invoices and delivery notes to extract information such as account numbers, customer name, mobile number, etc. “This creates the required MultiTRAX template for processing of successful customer deliveries,” says McCann.

MultiTRAX has been expanded with an additional module for order driver delivery scheduling (DDS) and planning. This additional module is not only valuable for warehouse deliveries, but has the ability to schedule warehouse deliveries on behalf of stores or can be used directly within a store for management of own deliveries.

“Integration with current retail or warehouse management solutions is available – removing the need to rip and replace current solutions in order to move your business forward. MultiTRAX provides the ability to integrate proof of deliveries (POD) in real-time, speeding up POD processing time, and removes the need for POD data capture confirmation.”

According to McCann, in a nutshell, MultiTRAX is a comprehensive delivery system hosted in the cloud consisting of two modules that enables drivers to effectively execute on deliveries allocated to them through their smartphone, with real-time visibility on a management dashboard. “Central planners can then effectively plan and schedule deliveries. MultiTRAX is hosted in the cloud as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, allowing the business to focus on operational excellence while Argility looks after the technology that powers its performance,” concludes McCann.