The Logistics Hampers Behind Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is the second-busiest season of the year for logistics companies, behind the holiday season. Valentine's Day logistics, like the Christmas shipping season, emphasize the importance of a proper supply chain network in satisfying every end customer. Customers may have a rotten holiday if proper supply chains aren't in place. Having reliable suppliers and delivery services is crucial to a smooth Valentine's Day logistics operation.

In terms of annual output, the Netherlands is the Silicon Valley of the flower industry, responsible for 1.7 billion cut flowers. This accounts for nearly 60% of global trade. You don't have to wait until spring to appreciate Dutch flowers. Flowers are always in season around Valentine's Day, making it a great time to do business. The cold chain ensures that the temperature of the products is properly maintained during their entire route, starting with the truck journey from the logistics business to the end customer.

We will uncover four major logistical hampers behind Valentine's Day in order for you to understand the complexity of the planning and execution that goes into making it a success.

1. Logistics planning

The logistics plan puts management principles to work in order to ensure that workflow is optimized. It includes planning, implementing, and maintaining the efficiency of the warehousing, goods flow, services, information, routes, number of trucks, transportation, and fuel costs. The efficiency of the delivery process is typically the sole focus of logistics operations. Each logistics operational plan includes a timeline, costs for implementation, and an analysis of how these factors will impact other business functions.

2. Optimize truck capacity

As a logistics manager, one of your highest priorities should be to find an efficient way to make it easy to manage and monitor your vehicles and drivers. The conventional approach to optimizing truck capacity is to keep full truck utilization in mind during the execution phase of the logistics plan. This approach, however, results in an underutilization of trucks.

Keeping an eye on the weather is essential while planning a truck's route. Consider a route optimization solution to better plan your travels, re-route plans, or postpone your trip if bad weather forecasts call for strong winds, downpours, snow, ice, or even flooding. Check the forecast for your starting and ending locations.

3. Manage operation costs

The costs of a company's logistics operations include all of the expenses that the company must bear in order to properly manage its logistics. Achieving a competitive advantage requires understanding how to minimize these costs as much as possible. Logistics costs include costs for getting resources, distributing products, and other costs that are part of a company's production, sales, and delivery chain.

A business's efficient logistics operations deliver numerous advantages. It improves efficiency, cuts costs, speeds up the transportation of goods, and offers significant value to the business as a whole.

4. Delivery timing

Since customer satisfaction is now the highest priority in logistics, delivery times and support for those customers are intrinsically linked. This includes things like an optimized logistics process that makes sure products are delivered on time, in the best condition possible, and by trained professionals who know how to handle the type of product they are delivering.

How to enhance your delivery time on Valentine's Day

A) Plan your delivery routes, specify distribution networks, and consider transportation.

B) Design a process that anticipates customer purchases and deliveries.

C) Analyze demand and errors to help a company understand how much each part of its D) Identify supply chain costs and where inefficiencies are.

E) Detect late arrivals and consider delivery constraints.

Conclusion

Because Valentine's Day is one of the busiest holidays, logistics companies face a number of challenges, such as maintaining complete visibility over the packages at all times. In situations where a logistics company is incapable of handling these obstacles, it can form partnerships with companies that have the necessary expertise. When trying to solve problems or figure out what caused them along the supply chain, it can be helpful to have more than one party involved.

A logistics manager can automate processes in a single system, which gives all stakeholders a bird's-eye view of the organization's strategy, operations, and capabilities as a whole.

Norma LIVE uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time, dynamic live routing for express deliveries and fast-moving, frequently changing pickup and delivery operations. Moreover, Norma LIVE comes with a backbone optimizer connecting the entire transportation chain with the last mile to provide predictable and reliable deliveries with a live control tower that shows a comprehensive overview of the current state of the logistics operations process. It shows a train view of all routes in the best plan, showing which orders are done, in progress, or still assigned but not dispatched.

Download the white paper “Do’s and Don’ts When Choosing a Logistics Partner” to find out tips that help logistics managers choose the right logistics partner to save time, and manage their operations as they focus on growing other sectors of business.