Importance of Automating Payments for Last Mile Delivery Operations

Automating your processes is important because it can help you to save time and money. Automation can also help you to be more efficient and organised, which can improve your overall productivity. Additionally, automation can help to ensure accuracy and consistency in your work.

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The processes that can be automated include payments, invoicing, order processing, and tracking. Automating these processes can save you time and money, while also ensuring accuracy and consistency in your work.

Why do we need automation in Last-Mile delivery operations?

The main reason we need Automation is to improve the efficiency of our payments process. Automation can help ensure that payments are made accurately and on time, every time. Robust Automation software can also handle a variety of different payment types, making it a valuable tool for any business.

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Many last-mile delivery workers are paid by the hour, so their payouts are calculated based on the number of hours they worked. Automation can help to ensure that payouts are accurate and timely, which can be helpful for both the workers and the business. Automation can also help to automate the process of paying workers, making it simpler and more efficient.

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Companies use several metrics to monitor the performance of their delivery workers, some of these focus on how efficient the workers are and some focus on the quality of customer service provided by them. Often, these metrics are used to calculate earnings or provide extra monetary incentives to the workers.

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A few metrics commonly used in the market:

1. Deliveries per hour
2. Deliveries per day
3. Time-taken per delivery
4. Travel speed
5. Average customer rating

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When all these metrics are used to calculate the payouts, doing this manually is time-consuming and is prone to human errors. Most companies use Excel to do all these calculations, once a simple formula error can result in changes to the payouts done to the delivery workers, this will then have a domino effect where the delivery workers get upset over the mistake and their efficiency is hampered. Hence Automating this process helps a company in more ways than one like:

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• Real-time visibility of costs:

Having an automated payment system for Last-Mile delivery helps can give you several advantages. First, it can help you to identify and resolve any issues quickly. Second, it can help you to make better decisions based on accurate information. Third, it can help you to improve your productivity.

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• Gamification possibilities :

Having an automated payment system will enable you to take advantage of gamification features where you can run leader boards, give badges, provide level-ups and so on, this kind of features help motivate the workers to compete against each other and achieve a social status among their peers when they get a badge upon hitting a certain payment threshold.

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• Transparency:

A last mile-delivery operation is dependent on your workforce and being transparent with your workers on how you calculate the payouts is very necessary to gain their trust. This not only improves the trust but also gives the workers a sense of relief that they can see how much they have earned and how their hard work gets translated into monetary benefits.

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• Robustness:

Having the automated payments system gives you an edge to quickly implement a new Bonus incentive when you see a surge in order volume. You can quickly modify the payout rates for a few days/hours to handle the demand or run a new Bonus Monetary incentive for workers to complete the surge in deliveries.

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• Control on Costs:

When you get to calculate your payments for last mile delivery in real-time with an automated system, it enables you to pro-actively act on the costs and helps you to optimize your operations quickly to control the costs. If this was done manually, then you would have to wait until the payouts happened and then react to the data where it might have become too late already.

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How to Automate your Last-Mile delivery payments?

1. First, you need data to automate your Last-Mile delivery operations. All your deliveries need to be monitored and tracked so that you have enough data on the metrics mentioned above to design and automate a payment solution. Last-mile delivery companies usually build apps internally to get this implemented, but for a fast-moving startup with limited funds, this will be a little far from reality. You could leverage No-code solutions to build apps that will help your operations. One such No-Code App builder specific to operations is Zorp.
2. You need to start analyzing the data captured from the app during deliveries, metrics like time taken per delivery, deliveries done per day, time spent in travel, customer feedback, Number of hours worked per day etc. All these metrics are important to design the incentive plan.
3. After you have a few reports built over the metrics, it's time to define your incentives based on your preferred criteria that benefit the company. This can be as simple as a Goal-based payment based on Deliveries per day or something complex like Deliveries done in an hour within X minutes.
4. After you have devised an incentive plan, we need to digitize these calculations using an automation system that would listen to the Data provided by the Zorp App. This could be a Google-Spreadsheet that gets data from Zorp and calculates payments based on Formula or a custom Incentive calculation engine built for your specific use case. Either way, you can use Zorp to send data to any system using its REST API Capabilities.
5. Now that the data is sent and Incentives are calculated, you need to show the delivery workers the same in real-time. Well, Zorp can be leveraged here too by connecting the Incentive system to Zorp App via APIs and showing their Earnings Live.
6. Once the payment cycle dates are reached you can send the payments also in an automated manner with any of the new-age Neo Banking facilities available right now. One such example is Razorpay, they provide you with APIs to automate sending out payments to your workers.

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This way your whole operations monitoring and payments are fully automated. You can focus on important issues and activities for the company without having to worry about human errors or payment mistakes.

Boost your efficiency in Final Mile Delivery with our Comprehensive Guide! 🚚📦 Dive into key strategies, technology insights, and best practices to elevate your delivery game. Read more: Boosting Efficiency in Final Mile Delivery: A Comprehensive Guide