Goods delivery (Retail Logistics)

Planning a good delivery routine helps to save time and effort!

When you are limited by manpower and vehicle, it is important to maximise your trip! Here, we identified a few tips you may adopt;

1) Dedicate a day for delivery

Instead of making delivery everyday to only one location, can you deliver to five locations within a day? With that, you can concentrate on other tasks since our performances are not only measured by delivery.

2) Plan your trip, know your road

i) Deliver during light traffic between 9am to 5pm and 7.30pm to 8.30pm ensures we are not caught in the rush hour. 

ii) It is advisable not to deliver during the evening time unless urgent since it incur overtime pay and the crowd in the outlet can be difficult for us to push the trolley. Some securities might stop us from delivery as well due to policies in the mall.

iii) Ensure you deliver items within the same area before moving on to the next nearest area 

iv) The first and last delivery should be the nearest to your warehouse

v) Check the "all traffic" box in google map to identify areas of congestion and avoid them

3) Know your parking spot

There are times when there is a limited parking slot for lorries, and we have to go around the area until there is a vacancy. This is time-consuming, and there is no queuing number where any lorries can enter if we are not just-in-time. What you can do is;

i) If you have someone following you, get the person to speak to the driver in the parking lot by asking them to call us when they are done

ii) Taking this chance, check with the driver in the parking lot if they can drive out for a moment and spare us the lot to quickly unload

iii) While driving in circles, you may consider following other delivery lorries and see if they might have some "secret spot" to park their vehicle

iv) Get the carpark security guard's mobile number and call them to reserve a lot 10 mins before you arrive. Some will be sporty enough to help!

4) Sign your invoices

During delivery to the respective stores and outlets, remind and ensure all relevant invoices are signed. Unless we revisit the place within a few days; otherwise, we will have to drive back to get the invoices signed for accounts processing.

5) Verify with the system

Depending on the company, we have to check our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to verify if relevant departments have updated the system. Otherwise, we will be held accountable for the stocks since they are under our warehouse's account, but the actual items aren't.