If you’re running a delivery team, having efficient delivery processes allows you to reduce the time your drivers spend completing each route, as well as the amount of time your back office needs to plan routes and monitor the progress of deliveries.
In turn, this will save your business labor and fuel costs, while allowing you to complete more successful delivery stops in a day.
Those are significant wins for increasing the profitability of your delivery team, but in order to create these optimal delivery processes, you need to find the best delivery management software — or route planning software.
And it must be a tool that handles key areas of delivery operations, such as:
The challenge is finding delivery software that works for your unique needs and budget.
To help find the right solution for your business, we’re reviewing three different delivery software platforms — Circuit, Onfleet, and Bringg — that fulfill different requirements.
If you manage a team of delivery drivers and want a simple, cost-effective way to keep track of them (while making their routes more efficient), sign up for a free 7-day trial of Circuit.
Circuit started as route optimization software, built to help delivery drivers complete their routes in a shorter amount of time. Since then, and based on feedback from our customers, we have expanded our tool to offer key features that allow delivery teams to grow and maintain their profitability.
Here’s what using Circuit looks like, from route planning, to dispatching, to completing deliveries.
Where you get your delivery addresses from depends on what kind of business you’re running, and whether you’re using eCommerce tools like Shopify or on-demand delivery platforms. To make it easy to upload addresses into Circuit from multiple platforms, we use a simple CSV or Excel file uploading feature. Just download the orders from whatever platform you’re using, and upload them into Circuit.
We also let you manually add routes to Circuit, on your desktop at HQ or if you need a driver to add a stop themselves on their smartphone — which uses Google’s algorithm to auto-complete the address as they’re typing it in. This allows drivers to easily re-optimize the route based on unplanned changes.
Which brings us to our next feature.
Route optimization is the cornerstone of any successful delivery business, and it’s not something that can be done by just trying to create the shortest route possible in Google Maps. This is because creating the fastest route possible requires an advanced algorithm that factors in traffic patterns, distance, terrain, the number of delivery drivers, and several other factors.
With our route optimization tool, you can let Circuit optimize without any additional limitations (creating the fastest route possible) or you can set up specific parameters, such as:
Route optimization also gives you an accurate ETA of when you’re going to complete your route, which helps you know if you can scale up deliveries with your current staff — or if you need to add more drivers.
To get the most accurate ETA possible, we recommend setting an estimated time spent per stop.
This estimate adds time for your driver to park their vehicle, get out of their car, find the package, leave it at the customer’s front door, and document proof of delivery.
If you’re just starting out using Circuit, your time per stop is likely to decrease over time.
We’ve recently interviewed several Circuit customers, such as OK! Kombucha, a beverage wholesaler, on how using Circuit helped them reduce their time at each stop from an average of 7 minutes down to an average of 2 minutes per stop. For OK! Kombucha, those saved 5 minutes per stop translated to saving 12.5 hours a week in labor costs.
Once your routes are optimized, your drivers can start their deliveries. Drivers simply use the Circuit mobile app along with their preferred navigational tools, such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze.
When you’re managing delivery routes, it’s important you know where the drivers are at all times, because this allows you to make actionable decisions (such as assigning more stops to a driver) as well as providing a better customer experience when they call to inquire about the ETA of their package.
The problem with other route monitoring services is that they tell the dispatcher where the driver is geographically, such as Lincoln Avenue and 16th Street, without telling you where the driver is within the context of the route.
At Circuit, we know some routes change as they are in progress, so we let you know where your driver is, what stop they have just finished, and where they’re going next — with an updated ETA.
We also offer customer notifications. You can set Circuit up so customers get an SMS message or e-mail with a link to a tracking dashboard, where they can see real-time progress of the route.
As the driver gets closer to the customer’s stop, another notification is sent out, telling them a more accurate and narrow time-window — allowing the customer to leave any specific notes for the driver, such as a gate code or instructions not to knock or leave the package on the patio.
There are two ways to capture proof of delivery with Circuit.
Both photo and signature are then uploaded to the Circuit app for future reference. This is helpful in case a package is left on the side of the customer’s front door, or somewhere where it’s hard to see, and the customer calls your warehouse upset because they didn’t receive their package.
One of our customers experienced the costly downside of not collecting proof of delivery. Sanjhi Rasoi is a restaurant in Calgary that offers a food delivery service where they deliver ready-to-eat meals directly to the customer.
Before using Circuit, the restaurant had to re-deliver at least one meal per day because their customers called and said they were unable to find their food parcel.
Without obtaining proof of delivery, the owner of the restaurant couldn’t confirm whether or not the food had been delivered correctly. After using Circuit’s proof of delivery feature, the number of re-deliveries Sanjhi Rasoi has to do has dropped to zero.
Circuit offers three different pricing tiers. Each pricing tier works off a per driver basis, and doesn’t put any limits on how many stops or routes your team can make in a month.
Note: If you have some busier times than others (i.e. weekends or holiday periods), you can add or remove drivers throughout the month — meaning you have total flexibility and don’t need to pay for the whole month for every driver. This makes Circuit scalable, and adaptable to your workloads.
Our Dispatch plan comes with:
Our Recipient plan comes with:
Our Premium plan comes with:
If you manage a team of delivery drivers and want a simple, cost-effective way to keep track of them (while making their routes more efficient), sign up for a free 7-day trial of Circuit.
Onfleet has options for small businesses looking to add local delivery to their operations, and also for larger fleet-based enterprises.
However, Onfleet becomes an economical option when it’s used by large couriers with dozens (or even hundreds) of drivers that aren’t dealing with a high monthly order volume.
This is because of Onfleet’s flat-rate pricing tier, i.e. the more drivers using Onfleet, the less you’re paying per driver. But each tier comes with a limited number of tasks (stops or pick ups), which means you’ll want to make sure your delivery team won’t go over its allotted monthly tasks.
We go over the nitty-gritty details of Onfleet’s pricing structure below, but first let’s cover Onfleet’s main features.
Onfleet charges a flat rate per month, but also puts a limit on the number of tasks your driver can complete. This can work in your favor or against it, depending on the size of your delivery team and its monthly volume.
If you’re at the professional level, you’re paying $1,999 a month and getting 12,500 tasks a month. If your courier team consists of 150 drivers, then you’re only paying $13 per driver for all of Onfleet’s features, including priority support and brand customization. However, that’s assuming your drivers are not managing more than 625 deliveries a day (based on a 5-day work week in a 4 week month). If your team goes over that allotted amount before the end of the month, you’re charged an extra .18 per task.
Again, depending on the size of your team and your average monthly volume, this pricing structure may or may not be a deal-breaker.
Let’s say you’re a small courier company of seven bicycle couriers who mainly need route optimization. If you divide the flat rate by the number of couriers you have, you’re paying about $50 per driver. Plus, you’re limited to making 125 deliveries a day across all seven couriers, which equals less than 18 stops per driver.
Here are the four pricing tiers, with the features offered on each one:
Onfleet’s pricing structure can work in your delivery team’s favor if you have enough delivery drivers that the flat rate is worth it.
But, let’s say you have three couriers and need route optimization, then you’re paying $349 for three drivers, which breaks down to a little over $116 per driver. In that situation, Onfleet is significantly more expensive than the competition.
As a startup in 2017, Bringg raised $10 million to help big retail brands compete with delivery services from giants like Amazon and Uber. Currently, Bringg is mainly used for last-mile delivery (from warehouse to customer) and first-mile delivery (from supplier to delivery warehouse) and has been adopted for several industries, including retail and healthcare.
Bringg’s services are often used by healthcare companies because of the level of transparency and communication Bringg facilitates between drivers and customers. For example, if you’re a medical equipment supplier providing IV bags and oxygen tanks, communication is critical — because delay on a patient’s oxygen tank due to them not being home can have serious repercussions.
Bringg also works for large brands who integrate on-demand delivery with supply chain management, and separates itself into two components: backend operations and delivery operations.
For backend operations, Bringg offers its users:
For delivery operations, Bringg offers its users:
Bringg doesn’t offer transparent tiered pricing because their services are meant to be modified towards each company’s needs. On their site, you need to fill out a form, stating how many deliveries you’re making a month, with four different levels:
Note: Given the scope of Bringg’s delivery orchestration, it usually does take a few weeks to get this software integrated with your business.
When looking for the best delivery management software, there are several good options out there — including Onfleet, Bringg, and Circuit. Different tools tend to vary drastically in functionality and price, but they all aim to make processes smoother for dispatchers, delivery drivers, and recipients.
We built our delivery software, Circuit, based on direct feedback from our users. We want to give midsize delivery teams all the tools they need to maintain profitability, while scaling up delivery processes.
We did this by focusing on the four most critical parts of running a delivery team:
If you manage a team of delivery drivers and want a simple, cost-effective way to keep track of them (while making their routes more efficient), sign up for a free 7-day trial of Circuit.