Delivery Management Archives - Argility Technology Group

Argility’s MultiTRAX curbing Black Friday mania through optimisation of delivery ecosystem

ajustus Oct 31, 2024 Black Friday, Delivery and Scheduling, Delivery App, Delivery Management, Last Mile Delivery, MultiTRAX, OCR, Optical Character Recognition, Route Planning

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.

MultiTRAX deployment provides control of deliveries for one of SA’s leading furniture retailers

mmanaka Nov 5, 2023 Delivery and Scheduling, Delivery App, Delivery Management, Last Mile Delivery, MultiTRAX

Argility, which positions itself as a leading innovator and implementer of software and data analytics solutions for retailers, part of the Data and Technology cluster of global enterprise Smollan, has implemented the MultiTRAX delivery management and scheduling solution to help a leading furniture retailer enhance management and control of deliveries.

About the customer:

As a proudly South African furniture retailer with over 76 stores and nine warehouses nationwide, this retailer has grown solidly over the past 30 years and has a tradition of harnessing digital technology for ongoing operational improvement.

Conquering the business challenge of growing complexity

With a footprint across South Africa, the retailer uses third-party delivery companies to facilitate the delivery of orders to its customers as quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, and this presented complications in logistics management, with each partner using a different delivery and logistics system.

To manage costs effectively and ensure deliveries lived up to the brand promise, the retailer wanted greater visibility over its delivery partners’ operations, drivers and the time and costs associated with deliveries.

Another challenge related to the often poorly demarcated streets and addresses impacting timely deliveries and to improve customer experience, the retailer needed to ensure that drivers could reach customers as quickly as possible, and that customers could track where their delivery drivers were.

Solution: MultiTRAX for smarter fulfilment

Eamon McCann, Executive at Argility Technology Group, says Argility has worked with this retailer for many years and has a deep understanding of their business.

A year ago, Argility noted the frustrations being experienced by its customer around their lack of real-time visibility into deliveries. “The company has been growing and its environment has become more complex. We proposed MultiTRAX as a solution to bring greater visibility and enhanced efficiency around customer deliveries,” he says.

Argility’s expert team implemented the solution, making this retailer the first Argility customer in this sector to harness MultiTRAX.

McCann notes that because the solution is cloud-based, implementation, integrations and training proceeded quickly and without any hitches. “The drivers simply downloaded the app, while management used the web portal, and with the system being intuitive, adoption was fairly easy,” he says.

The MultiTRAX cloud-based delivery management system offers organisations complete control over their entire delivery ecosystem, with intelligent route planning, driver scheduling, and with either order system integrations or AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) technology available to access data more accurately and process it faster.

MultiTRAX also overcomes the challenge of finding home addresses by allowing customers to validate their address against Google maps and sending the driver an accurate location pin identifying the physical location for a successful delivery. Drivers receive their day’s schedule and routes on their mobile app, creating more efficiency and reducing time spent trying to locate end customers.

MultiTRAX automatically receives and securely stores proof of delivery confirmations, unsuccessful deliveries and photographs of delivery sites, and makes all artefacts and data instantly available to the team.

With the MultiTRAX dashboard, drivers and vehicles can be monitored and scheduled for optimal route planning and cost savings.

Customer experience is also enhanced through pre-delivery notifications with estimated arrival times, allowing customers to track their delivery driver’s progress via a visualised route map with GPS tracking, and enabling them to accept and confirm delivery via their mobile devices. After delivery, the customer can give feedback on the experience.

MultiTRAX also features comprehensive dashboards, reports and data analytics for ongoing improvement.

The result/business benefits

MultiTRAX has brought about significant improvements for the customer, McCann says. “In the past, they had limited visibility into how long deliveries took and the costs associated with that. MultiTRAX gives them full visibility so they can manage their costs more effectively. MultiTRAX offers them a better experience all round – from planning to warehouse operations to the customer experience,” he concludes.

Source: IT Web