The holiday season is high-stakes for last-mile and courier delivery fleets. That’s true for the retailers and customers who depend on them, the drivers who make deliveries possible, and the fleet managers who oversee it all.
Even the slightest operational inefficiency can lead to cascading disruptions. Idle vehicles create missed delivery windows, and missed delivery windows create frustrated customers, a feeling of chaos at the head office, and return delivery attempts. To keep the holidays happy for everyone involved, managers overseeing Last Mile Delivery (LMD) fleets should navigate this surge (accounting for over 20% of the yearly sales for many retailers) by marrying technology, route optimization, integrated data, and operational discipline.
There are two foundational strategies that fleet managers should employ to ensure operational excellence during the holiday season:
Overcoming Silos
Many LMD fleets conducting deliveries have legacy systems that function in isolation. Reservation systems, maintenance orders, telematics, and routing engines are often kept separate from each other. This results in information silos that impede coordination and slow decision-making, especially when fleet capacity is strained and demand surges.
To break down these silos, and allow routes to be truly optimized and consider capacity, urgency, special requests, and more, fleet managers and planners should implement solutions that know how to work well together. That includes real-time visibility into both active and out-of-service vehicles. When you’re operating at or near maximum capacity, knowing vehicle availability and condition has compounding effects in assignment, routing, and utilization.
This also allows standardized processes to be automated across key workflows, including ordering, maintenance, repairs, cleaning, and inspections. Automating these workflows enables proactive vehicle upkeep, quicker turnaround times, and higher uptime.
Improving Governance
Particularly during periods of peak demand, such as the holidays, you must keep control, and strong governance is critical. Without it, the risk of errors, misallocations, and compliance failures increases significantly.
Some solutions are just common sense, such as scheduling check-ups or replacing tires before the high season across the LMD fleet. But improving governance requires real-time reporting and transparency. Through live dashboards, both internal and external stakeholders can monitor task completion, arrival time, utilization, and vehicle status. This transparency enables proactive decisions and rapid response when unexpected issues arise.
As many delivery fleets increase capacity for the holiday season, implementing automated vehicle reservation controls ensures that governance over temporary vehicle inventory as well, ensuring only eligible vehicles are rented and deployed, and adhering to established contractual parameters.
Governance improvements immediately reduce errors and improve compliance, and they feed into lasting fleet optimizations. Beyond eligibility controls, real-time data, combined with a powerful routing engine, also leads to flexibility. If a driver calls in sick or a vehicle goes offline, routes can be reoptimized on the fly. This flexibility is especially critical during high-volume periods, where every minute of delay has a ripple effect.
Resilience is Built Through Data-Driven Operations
The holiday season is a proving ground for LMD fleet managers. The fleets that emerge the strongest are those grounded in technology-driven governance and integrated and real-time operational insight. By prioritizing systems that eliminate silos, enable automated workflows, and support full visibility, managers can deliver a smoother, more reliable experience for drivers, operations teams, and customers alike.
Managing how you reserve, monitor, and manage your vehicles doesn’t just optimize operations. It allows you to deliver – literally – at scale, when the stakes are the highest.
