Transport software demonstrations love to flaunt an impressive dashboard filled with features and functions. But this is what happens after the sale: Most companies only use about one-third of what they pay for. The rest sits there, unused, because no time exists to figure it out or it does not align with how the company works in reality.
While it’s the flashiest features that capture attention, it’s often the less-than-glamorous ones that get opened first thing in the morning and never closed for the rest of the day because they address a recurring problem.
Dispatch and Job Assignment
It’s the one component that gets used over and over again. Every day, you start with who does what, and then throughout the day, things change. Someone finishes early; a customer calls for a last-minute pickup; another driver breaks down.
Good dispatch features allow you to see every driver available, where they currently are, where they need to be, and what they’re doing momentarily. You can drag and drop a job from one person to another, and voila – the driver’s notification goes off on their phone. No phone tag. No confusion about who is supposed to pick up or drop off where.
The basic form may simply offer a list of jobs and drivers. But the version companies appreciate shows ETA, takes traffic into consideration, factors in hourly restrictions and breaks for the drivers and notates potential conflicts before they become problems.
Real-Time Tracking and Updates
Tracking is useful, but it’s even more helpful to have answers when your customer calls – you know they’re going to. A million times a day.
Tracking that gets used repeatedly updates ETAs on its own, notifies when something has been delivered and serves as proof of delivery with a signature/photo/note attached right there, so billing can happen without chasing down paperwork.
Some companies think they can get away with GPS tracking from the drivers’ end; however, that creates as much work as it relieves. Someone still has to check where the trucks are and call customers to update them. Most businesses switching to comprehensive transportation management software note that automated customer updates save hours of phone time daily.
Route Planning and Optimization
Manually planning routes takes hours, and even then, you’ll never know if that was the most effective route planned. The software versions used daily do it in seconds while factoring in time windows for delivery, truck size, traffic patterns, and a myriad of other decisions that people would take hours to aggregate.
The caveat here is that route optimization is only as good as the data fed into it. Companies that master routing software keep customer locations accurate, consistently update time windows for delivery and note which locations have loading docks versus curbside drops. When all this data is updated consistently, the routes suggested by the system are much better than those a typical dispatcher would create manually.
The feature must accommodate changes last minute, too. A perfectly planned route at 7 AM may need reassessing at 10 AM when three new urgent jobs come in.
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Customer Portal and Communication
This is a surprising feature because it doesn’t feel part of transportation software. However, customer-facing features – tracking link, delivery notifications, proof-of-delivery access – eliminate tons of repetitive communication effort.
Instead of answering the call to “where’s my delivery,” that information automatically gets provided. Instead of sending an email with a signed delivery receipt, it can be downloaded straight from the portal. The time saved increases exponentially as the customer base grows.
The portals actually used are simple – customers don’t need to create accounts or remember passwords. A link to track their package or a page showing it’s in progress is usually enough.
Billing and Invoice Management
No one gets excited about billing features. This is how time is either saved or wasted. The burden of transportation billing comes down to making the matches with jobs completed versus rates, surcharges, credits and adjustments, all while generating invoices.
When billing connects to jobs completed automatically, it happens on its own. The system knows what’s been delivered and applies proper rates. Accurate invoices are created without manual input. For companies operating hundreds of deliveries each month, this transforms billing from a day-and-a-half-long process to one that takes hours.
But the initial setup needs to have rate structures determined correctly. Companies that rush through this step waste their time manually adjusting most invoices anyway; otherwise, they negate the point.
Driver Mobile App
Drivers need their interface separate from what’s showing up for dispatchers. The apps that get successfully used are clean-cut for drivers – they just need to see what’s on their docket for today, navigate to an address, mark something picked up/delivered and capture a signature.
Fancy features that let drivers optimize their routes via their own devices or view elaborate manifests go unused. Drivers just need something that they can glance at while working instead of stop-and-think material.
And their reliability matters most; if an app crashes or fails to connect, urgent operational issues arise. Drivers fallback on phone calls which puts everyone back in reactive mode instead of information flowing downstream seamlessly.
Reporting That Actually Helps
Transportation companies drown in data but still fail to answer basic business questions: How many deliveries did we do last week? What’s our average delivery time? What route is most profitable?
The reporting features that get used consistently are those that provide quick answers to these questions. Preconfigured reports for standard metrics exist alongside easy date-ranged filtering while exporting capabilities exist for deeper assessment.
Custom report builders seem great but often require so much configuration that they rarely get used after one attempt. Most companies would prefer five solid reports that come predetermined over fifty customizable options.
What Typically Goes Unused
Those features that sound so good in demos but take up virtual space without any use: Fine vehicle maintenance tracking (if you have an in-house fleet); complex automation features since rules need consistent updates, AI demand forecasting for smaller operations; integration with systems businesses do not use.
Not that these features are bad; they’re just not daily drivers for most transportation operations. Unfortunately, the space between what the system can do and what companies need it to do often factors in more than what vendors will admit.
