3 ways to schedule and track deliveries within your MIS

If you’re a print business that operates your own delivery fleet, did you know that you can schedule and track your deliveries, all from within your MIS? Different MIS providers will deal with this process in different ways, but we’re going to look at 3 ways you can do it using Tharstern.

Option 1 – JobWatch

The first option involves our integration with JobWatch from BigChange, a solution that lets you book deliveries using your own fleet vehicles and receive delivery updates that you can pass on to your customers.

To schedule a delivery, you just need to open an existing delivery note within your MIS, select your own fleet as the Service type (in this example, we’ve named it ‘Own Van’) and hit ‘Request Label’ which is the automation trigger to send the delivery instructions into the JobWatch application.

You can now go into the web based JobWatch application and see a list of your unscheduled jobs down the left-hand side, which you can drag and drop into the delivery schedules of your drivers. Using a handheld device, the driver can now access all the information about the job e.g. traveling time required, delivery address, contact name, job number and quantity. They’re also able to update the delivery status as they go.

Collecting feedback into Tharstern

There are several touchpoints where information from JobWatch is passed back into Tharstern for users to access:

1. Once the delivery job has been passed to JobWatch, it will pass back the consignment number into Tharstern.
   
   
2. The courier status is updated at various milestones, including: ‘scheduled’, ‘started’ and ‘complete’ statuses.
   
   
3. Once delivery is complete, the name of the person who signed for it is passed back into Tharstern, along with the date and time it was signed for. Users can also see a photo of the signature in the attachments area.

Covid-friendly deliveries

People might be cautious about using the driver’s handheld device when signing for their delivery due to Covid-19, but JobWatch has this covered! There’s now a touch free option where an electronic signature request is sent to the customer, who signs on their own device, and then the signature is sent back into JobWatch and Tharstern.

Option 2 – Using an API

You can also make use of our API to integrate your MIS with other fleet management solutions such as JobWatch. In fact, this is how our integration with JobWatch actually works, along with our other connections to third-party courier solutions such as UPS, FedEx and EasyPost. So if you already use a different fleet management solution, or wanted to create your own custom solution, this could be the option for you.

Option 3 – Shop Floor Data Capture

You could also use Tharstern’s Shop Floor Data Capture module to track your deliveries. This module is actually designed to track operations on your production floor, but we’ve seen customers use it for other things too, including the tracking of deliveries using their own drivers.

To do this, your drivers would need a mobile device that has connectivity to your internal network and access to the Shop Floor Data Capture module. They can then notify the MIS when the delivery has started or finished and take photos of the goods at the door or the signature on the delivery note, and upload them into the MIS while out on the road.