Same-day within the supply chain
For emergencies and every day
Same-day delivery isn’t a novel idea. Businesses routinely need an item that’s critically important, right away – not tomorrow, not next week, but within hours. Take the retailer who runs out of stock of a hot-selling, highly profitable item, and needs to restock immediately while demand is still high. Or the factory where a broken pump has shut down an assembly line – costing the company thousands of dollars an hour – and needs to get a replacement pump as soon as possible.
As e-commerce growth continues to fuel demand for urgent delivery, same-day at scale has to operate with fail-safe reliability within the entire supply chain ecosystem.
But same-day delivery at scale is. The entire buying experience has been transformed by the “Amazoning” of the customer journey, and delivery is no exception. Not so long ago, consumers were satisfied with next-day, or even second-day, delivery. But thanks to Amazon, consumers now crave speed, simplicity and optionality when it comes to delivery. Consumers want what they want, when they want it: whether it’s two-day, same-day, or even Amazon’s latest offering, “Choose Your Day.”
The traditional same-day process for emergency use cases is highly manual and inefficient because they are one-offs in the larger logistics picture. It’s okay to be sub-optimized when the cost of failure is your relationship with a key customer. But as e-commerce growth continues to fuel demand for urgent delivery, same-day at scale has to operate – and do so with fail-safe reliability – within the entire supply chain ecosystem.
Preparing your supply chain for same-day means taking a holistic approach to inventory visibility, management, customer experience and last-mile.
Successful same-day programs go beyond identifying a delivery partner for each market. Same-day affects multiple components of the supply chain. Preparing your supply chain for same-day means taking a holistic approach to inventory visibility, management, customer experience and last-mile. This guide is to help you map out the new processes or changes that need to happen before you can consider selecting a provider. And when you’re ready to start evaluating same-day delivery companies, we can help you out.
