With the food delivery market growing at an explosive rate, the attention ought to be turned toward delivery optimization. It might sound like an overstatement, but delivery optimization can be the first step toward a restaurant conquering most of the supply chain challenges. How can a restaurant work towards this? Let’s find out.

The actual ultimate test of a meal delivery service is successful last-mile delivery. It is the final stage of the supply chain in which a restaurant communicates with the client. If the delivery is even slightly off, it might irritate a valuable customer and harm the company's brand image. The food delivery supply chain is often hyperlocal and time-sensitive in nature. A restaurant's distribution supply chain is often short-lived, lasting between 30 to 60 minutes from the time an order is placed to the time it arrives at the customer's door. A variety of elements come into play in such a short period. The meal must be prepared, packed, and delivered by a delivery executive. It must then go to the customer's location in the best possible shape and be delivered far ahead of schedule.

The Challenges of a Restaurant Supply Chain

Food delivery, on the one hand, is no easy task. A lot may go wrong in such a short time. There may be a delay in allocating instructions to delivery partners, as well as traffic congestion and other real-world restrictions that may influence last-mile delivery.

On the other hand, good delivery service dictates a massive portion of customer satisfaction, so with every delivery, the restaurant’s reputation is at stake. Within a myriad of challenges that they might face, there are some more important than the others.

Quality Maintenance: Traveling over an extended period often renders the meals inedible and unappealing. Not every meal travels as well as it tastes at a restaurant, which is why maintaining the optimal quality of the food throughout transport is a big risk in the restaurant food delivery company. Another major issue is ensuring that delivery personnel do not tamper with the food. In these difficult circumstances, it is also critical to guarantee that the food is processed and delivered with the highest sanitary standards, such as zero-touch delivery procedures and sanitation measures for the packaging and the delivery personnel.

Time allocation: There have never been so many eateries that provide delivery and takeaway. As a result, it's critical to distinguish them apart, and one sure-fire method to do so is with a delivery-proof menu that's simple, appealing, and adaptable. Creating and maintaining online menus on various third-party platforms might consume countless hours of your valuable time. You must create separate menus for every delivery channel. If you operate many branches and/or ghost kitchens, which are all featured on three to four online delivery systems, you can only fathom how much effort and time you'd have to put into simply menu administration.
Resource Management: The delivery service supply chain is driven by dynamic needs that must be met in a relatively short period of time. Inadequate on-the-ground resources and ineptitude in resource management are important causes of worry for food delivery businesses. This is especially true during a pandemic, when personnel is scarcer than ever. At the same time, distributing duties and properly using vehicles is tough with human memory and intelligence alone. This takes an even worse turn as many companies manually manage these, and this makes the process prone to errors and mishaps. Manual management disables the scope of dynamic updates that are synced between the delivery personnel and the inventory managers.
Logistics Speeds: It's all about pace and quality when it comes to food delivery. Conventional transportation systems are incapable of intelligently calculating delivery routes, arriving at correct ETAs, and taking into account real-time restrictions such as traffic, demography, and the distance between restaurants and consumer locations. The inability to monitor on-the-ground delivery processes and raise red flags in the event of an emergency is further limited by the availability of supply chain visibility. Due to diverse geographies and sluggish adoption of logistics technology in many areas, ensuring speedy completion of food shipments is even more difficult.
Meeting high demands: In a wide range of areas, the restaurant delivery supply chain is structured by a predictable demand pattern known as the weekend impact. Order volumes normally increase beginning at the beginning of weekends and peaking on the final day, followed by a large decline in orders in the earlier times of the week. Food delivery requests have increased considerably since lockdowns were imposed across the country owing to the COVID-19 outbreak. Restaurants frequently find it hard to cope with such high amounts of orders and end up upsetting the customers. After all, the customers look for their own convenience, and demand is something that a restaurant is expected to be accustomed to.

How can a Delivery Optimization Software help?

Technology is rapidly taking over the food delivery sector throughout the world, allowing for cost-effective quick deliveries. Automated Route Optimization systems aid in the best plan of on-demand delivery routes with the lowest fuel use while taking into consideration real-time traffic congestions. Routing software also reliably determines the Expected Time of Arrival (ETA), allowing food delivery firms to maintain open lines of contact with their clients by incorporating with your point-of-sale system. Although your tablets must remain online, you can arrange them in a panel and manage the complete delivery flow with a single central device. It just takes a smooth connectivity between your e-commerce portals and your retail outlet to alleviate the pain of managing the overflow of information. When you connect all of your online delivery channels to your point of sale, you'll be able to monitor all of your sales data in real-time on one screen.

Manually replenishing your inventory might be a difficult task if your stock is not updated automatically in your restaurant's inventory management software once an online purchase is placed. Many current Delivery Optimization Systems currently contain stock management, but for restaurants to sync with their online sales systems, an active integration is required. The only method to ensure accurate availability of products and eliminate out-of-stock items is to use real-time inventory data.

With all these challenges coming at once to your restaurant’s doorstep, the way you can choose to help your business out is by integrating a top of the line delivery optimization system, provided by Nuport. Nuport brings out the full potential of your supply chain management with dynamic updates, route optimization, AI and machine learning integrated ETA, a clean and powerful management system and a lot more for your restaurant to step up the supply chain management and delivery optimization game. Schedule a demo today!

Overcoming Restaurant Supply Chain Challenges with Delivery Optimization Software