Carriers and distributors: how to optimize and digitize your delivery planning?
- Elise Dejour
- 22 hours ago
- 2 min read
Shorter delivery times, increased traceability requirements, and rising operational costs are becoming the norm. Is the moment to digitize your delivery planning.
In this context, manual planning and tracking of delivery routes are reaching their limits: risk of errors, lack of visibility, and low responsiveness to unforeseen events… Meanwhile, your customers expect faster, more reliable, and more transparent service.
The solution? Digitize and connect your transport management to boost performance and customer satisfaction.
The Main Logistics Challenges Facing SMEs Today
Before investing in transport management software, it’s important to identify the most common operational obstacles:
1. Lack of Visibility on Ongoing Deliveries
Without real-time tracking tools, it’s impossible to know where your trucks are, which delays are occurring, or which packages still need to be delivered.
Consequence: repeated customer calls requesting information and overloaded internal teams.
The AlmaTrack advantage: visualize your trucks on a map.
2. Challenges in Optimizing Delivery Routes
Order assignment to trucks is still too often done by phone or on a whiteboard. The result: poorly optimized routes, inefficient fleet usage, and rising logistics costs.
3. Billing and Administrative Tracking Issues
When delivery information isn’t connected to your management system (ERP, billing, etc.), the risk of omissions, duplicates, or billing errors increases.
The advantage: with our AlmaTrack application, your existing internal software is connected to your delivery app.
Difficulty scheduling the maintenance and repairs of your vehicles
Managing vehicle maintenance and repairs can be complicated. Between tight schedules, unexpected events on the road and manual maintenance follow-up, the risk of unanticipated breakdowns or immobilized vehicles in full tour is high. Result: additional costs, delivery delays and customer dissatisfaction that can impact your reputation.
With AlmaTrack, you can manage and track your repairs
Why Digitizing Delivery Planning Makes All the Difference
Digitalization is not just about installing software—it’s a lever to rethink... your entire delivery process and strengthen your customer relationships.
1. Enhanced Responsiveness to Unexpected Events
A customer requests a last-minute change? A driver becomes unavailable? Thanks to centralized and visual planning, you can adjust your routes in real time.
The advantage: With our AlmaTrack app, you can view your deliveries by day, week, or month.
2. Real-Time Tracking and Improved Customer Communication
By providing your teams and customers with real-time information on delivery status, you increase transparency and reduce the number of complaints.
Concrete example: automatically sending an SMS or email to the customer when the delivery is approaching.
3. Improved Profitability Through Resource Optimization
Fewer empty trips, better vehicle utilization, intelligent driver assignment—every kilometer traveled becomes more profitable.
4. Digitize your delivery planning : Automation of Administrative Tasks
Once the delivery is completed, data is automatically fed into your ERP system to generate invoices, track costs, and update inventory if needed.
Logistics Digitalization: A Competitive Advantage for Your Customers Too
By modernizing your processes, you also help your own customers better manage their operations:
More reliable deadline compliance
Visibility of incoming flows for distributors
More accurate planning of their receipt and storage
In short: their own supply chain becomes smoother.
How to Get Started? An Example of a Connected Solution: AlmaTrack
To support this transformation, there are now solutions tailored for SMEs. AlmaTrack, for example, is a transport management application connected to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
✔️ Visual route planning
✔️ Real-time delivery tracking
✔️ Complete fleet and driver management
✔️ Automation of invoicing and reporting
All fully customizable to fit your business processes.
Almakom: Your Partner for Connecting ERP and Transport Management
At Almakom, we are both an ERP integrator (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) and a developer of business applications like AlmaTrack. This enables us to offer tailor-made solutions adapted to your operational challenges.
✔️ Agile methodology
✔️ Expertise in transport, logistics, and distribution
✔️ End-to-end support: assessment, configuration, deployment, training
✔️ Compliance with Swiss (nLPD) and European (GDPR) regulations
Take Action: Optimize Your Logistics Now
Want to identify optimization opportunities in your transport organization?
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