Your supply chain starts from the moment the goods leave your warehouse or factory and continues all the way to the customer’s front door. At Millennium, we work with a range of partners to ensure our clients experience the very best in global freight transportation, giving us valuable insights into the problems that can occur in the last mile of delivery. 

For customer-facing businesses, getting the last mile right can be the difference between a happy customer and a scathing review. 

Join us as we explore the most visible part of the supply chain.

The Impact of the Last Mile

Your cargo can clock up a lot of miles in its lifetime, spending thousands of miles crossing oceans, flying through the sky, or trundling along tracks. But for most customers, all that is irrelevant, hidden behind the curtain of efficient global logistics. To them, the key moment happens right at the end, as they wait (im)patiently for the package to arrive on the doorstep.

Thanks to the surge in home delivery services over the past twenty years, your customers have learned to expect a lot – reliability, speed, and real-time tracking that lets them plan their day to within a few minutes.

This means the last mile is considered the most important part of the whole journey. Your shipment can move flawlessly from country to country, but if it arrives a few hours late to the doorstep, that’s what the customer remembers.

The Biggest Last Mile Delivery Problems

Last mile challenges that freight forwarders and our delivery partners need to consider are many and varied, but some of the more common and impactful include:

• High costs and inefficiency – The one-package to one-customer nature of that final leg of the journey means that the financial impact of the last mile is the greatest portion of the whole supply chain. Balancing costs is an important part of the overall planning.
• Failed deliveries – After you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting this far, a failed delivery is frustrating. Customer not home, a wrong address, or a confusing location where the delivery driver simply has to give up and turn around all increase costs and annoy customers.
• Traffic – With the urban road network a key component to last mile deliveries, unexpected traffic conditions often present a complicated challenge.
• Customer communication – Both automated updates and direct personal communication are important parts of the last mile delivery, requiring efficient systems and administration.
• Sustainability – Last mile deliveries are extremely reliant on road transportation, where environmental responsibility is key. The smooth phasing out of fossil-fuelled vehicles and change over to sustainable electric replacements is still ongoing and forms part of the modern difficulties for last mile couriers.
• Scalability – During peak periods, such as the Christmas season or Black Friday, the need to scale up services presents a significant problem for many last mile service providers. Staff onboarding and training, road congestion, administrative pressures and more all combine to increase scale complications.
• Security and reliability – Both theft and accidental damage can present expensive problems for delivery partners, resulting in unhappy customers, poor feedback, and expensive responses.

Strategies to Meet Challenges

When last mile delivery forms a key part of your supply chain, building a plan to anticipate and resolve expected issues is essential. Affected businesses can:

• Develop strong partnerships – Work with last mile carriers who have local expertise and a reliable track record. Maintain relationships for long-term reliability.
• Prioritise technologies – Efficient last mile logistics benefits from new technologies in multiple areas. GPS and blockchain tracking systems, AI-driven route optimisation, and cutting-edge administrative systems are all examples of solutions available to providers to keep end customers updated.
• Work with flexible delivery options – Partner with suppliers that offer lockers, centralised collection points, and timed delivery windows.
• Focus on sustainability – Prioritise working with couriers with a fleet of electric vehicles, with a focus on route efficiency and greener practices.

Millennium Cargo are here to help. Our network of partners includes premier last mile carriers who provide expertise and reliability throughout the UK.

Getting the Last Mile Right with Millennium Cargo

With our expertise in moving cargo efficiently across international borders, Millennium Cargo understands the difficult challenges faced by our last mile colleagues. As a freight forwarder, our role is to coordinate the process from start to finish, ensuring that the last mile is just as efficiently undertaken as every mile leading up to it.

Contact Millennium Cargo today to develop a comprehensive shipping plan that mitigates many of the difficulties in the last mile, ensuring a smooth cargo transit right around the world, right to your customer’s door.