How to Speed Up Delivery Processes and How Your Data Can Help

Every restaurant is looking to speed up delivery operations without impacting the quality of food or customer service.

Faster deliveries lead to:

• Happier customers – because they can chow down on hot, fresh food while it’s at its best

• More repeat business – happier customers mean more positive reviews and returning customers

• More revenue – you can take more orders at peak times without compromising customer experience

• Happier delivery drivers – they can make more by doing more deliveries

• Better ranking on delivery apps – delivery providers reward speedy deliveries with a better position on the customer’s feed

But speeding up deliveries is easier said than done.

Below we’ll cover the biggest causes of slower deliveries and how to increase delivery speed without impacting the quality of your food and service.

Then we’ll take a look at the role of operations data and business intelligence insights play in increasing delivery speed in the long term.

What Slows Down Delivery Operations?

Food delivery is a complex business with a number of moving parts – orders coming in from different delivery partners, chefs working on multiple orders from different sources, and managers selecting the right delivery partner, or if delivery is in-house, managing driver dispatch.

As a result, shaving a few seconds off each step and streamlining the interactions between different parts of the process can make a huge impact on the overall speed. Especially, when multiplied by hundreds of orders across a busy service.

Here are the key bottlenecks to a speedy delivery service:

• Ordering errors – if an order is taken wrongly or is incomplete, it might not be discovered until it is delivered. Food is wasted, the customer is unhappy, and you have to remake the order which slows the whole process down.

• Kitchen confusion – unclear tickets, missing items, chaotic order management, and unprepared chefs can grind the entire production process to a halt.

• Poor Communication – This can occur at any point but is typically a problem between the restaurant and the delivery driver or the customer. Drivers need accurate times for pick-up and clear information on how to reach the customer.

Delivery Speed Metrics 

Now that we’ve covered the main sticking points preventing speedy deliveries, let’s look at how to overcome them and get orders flowing faster. We’ll look at a number of practical ways to increase delivery speed, but first, you need a way to quantify your results as a measure of success. 

Here are the key metrics that will tell you how well you’re doing:

• Total Delivery Time

This is an average of the time it takes for a customer to receive an order from the moment it’s placed to the point it is handed to the customer. It gives you a big-picture overview of your delivery speed.

• Driver Waiting Time

The average time a driver is waiting to pick up a meal is useful to track in order to assess where you can speed things up. If your overall delivery speed is falling behind, you can look at your driver wait times to get a close look at where things are going wrong. Is the kitchen too slow? Or is the communication with the drivers the problem?

• Time From Order Accepted to Driver Pick-up

Alongside the total delivery time, this metric helps you see what can be improved on the kitchen operations side of things. If this measure is looking good but deliveries are being delayed, you can look at your delivery operations to diagnose the problem.

• Time From Order Placed to Ticket Printed

This simple measure can make a huge difference if your ordering system is slowing down the delivery process from the start. As soon as the customer places their order, the clock is ticking, so you want your kitchen team to have it as soon as possible.

• Order Accuracy

Errors hold up orders and full-on mistakes can lead to remaking food which has a huge impact on speed. Tracking order accuracy is beneficial in many ways, but it also impacts the overall speed of operations.

• Online Review Ratings

Speedy orders are one thing. But you mustn’t compromise the customer experience for the sake of speed. Keep an eye on your online ratings from customers to make sure the quality stays high. 

How to Increase Delivery Speed

There are many more metrics that will help you gauge your delivery speed success, but these core measures are useful to keep in mind as you start to implement improvements into your delivery operations.

Now let’s look at what you can do with the insights these metrics give you to make practical improvements. Here are the best ways to improve delivery speed without compromising on quality.

Streamline Your Ordering System

The delivery process starts as soon as the customer places the order. Once they’ve received the order confirmation, the clock is ticking. That means the time it takes for the customer’s order to get it into your system and through to the kitchen is crucial. 

In the past, most restaurants took orders over the phone, online, and through delivery apps. Front-of-house staff would have to manage multiple devices, phone lines, and in-house customers, and manually process orders into the POS system. 

Thankfully, those days are becoming a thing of the past, with new tech systems streamlining the ordering process. Systems like Deliverect’s order management platform take all your orders – online orders from your web form or app, click-and-collect, tableside apps, and from third-party delivery apps – and send them directly into your POS in a consistent format.

Once the order is accepted, it is sent straight through to the kitchen on a ticket that clearly states the source of the order. That means as soon as the customer gets confirmation, the chefs are receiving the order and can get to work.

Implementing a smart ordering system reduces errors from re-punching orders and also increases the overall speed of each order from the very beginning.

Better Kitchen Management Tech

Food production takes approximately half to two-thirds of the total delivery time. So optimizing order flow through your kitchen can make a huge difference to the total time. Having the tickets sent straight through with clear information immediately saves time and helps your chefs prioritize tasks by the type of order.

Then comes the incremental improvements achieved with the design of the production line and the use of a kitchen display system. Many restaurants that offer dine-in and delivery at the same time might split the line in two. Or they may find it more efficient to use the same line but create a separate packing area for delivery orders. 

Whichever operational model suits your operation, a kitchen display system with screens at every production station keeps everything running smoothly. Each cook can see the order in progress and know what they should be working on. 

Driver Assignment & Tracking Tech

Outsourcing delivery to third parties saves you the hassle of running your own delivery service. However, it also means losing out on profit and not having control over a crucial part of the customer experience – the point at which they receive the food.

You’re also reliant on third parties in terms of delivery speed. Although they are generally fast and efficient, if you really want to take control of your delivery operations, you’ll want to be able to make improvements at the delivery stage as well. 

Running your own delivery operations may not be as daunting as it sounds. Deliverect has developed a set of tools to optimize driver management, efficient dispatch, and overall delivery admin, all of which connect to your ordering and kitchen management systems. 

Deliverect Dispatch allows you to auto-assign orders to delivery services, or manually assign them to your own drivers, within your existing ordering and restaurant system. You can also track orders in real-time so that you can keep your customers informed and communicate well with all parties.

How Does Business Intelligence Help?

What do these solutions have in common? They all involve streamlining your operations with automation and technology. And with streamlined tech systems comes actionable data.

This is not a minor point. The data gathered while running real-world operations is crucial in optimizing and improving your delivery processes going forward. Let’s take a look at the specific ways business intelligence can help you speed up delivery operations.

Keep Track of Delivery Times 

When your order management, POS, kitchen display, and delivery dispatch systems are all talking to each other in the same language, you can get accurate insights into what’s really going on – order by order.

That enables you to keep track of timings per order across different processes and by different delivery providers. As we discussed above, these times can be analyzed to pinpoint exactly where orders are being slowed down so that you can take corrective action.

Assess Driver Performance

One of the greatest benefits of managing your own delivery operations is that you own the data and you can use it to pinpoint issues and optimize. When you have a tech platform in place to manage driver dispatch, you can keep an eye on average delivery times, customer satisfaction, and driver waiting times to assess which drivers are performing best, and which need more training.

Not only will this improve performance, it will also make your drivers feel supported as an important part of the team. Especially if you share insights with them to motivate them to perform better for the good of the business.

Optimize Routes

Your delivery tech and data insights are also important in determining the most efficient navigation to and from delivery addresses. First, the tech enables drivers to add notes to guide future deliveries to addresses that are hard to find, and it can improve communication with drivers and customers to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on. It's essential to have everything in one place with the convenience of unified communications.

More importantly, you will be able to use the data to build a map of the best routes to take for each delivery, and drivers will be able to make deliveries more efficiently without as much stress.

Predict Demand For Maximum Efficiency

One of the biggest advantages of being able to gain business intelligence insights is in the projections you can make. The more accurately you can predict demand at peak and slower times, the better you can prepare. 

This includes: 

• Purchasing the right amount of stock

• Ensuring the optimum staffing levels

• Managing customer expectations in terms of waiting times

All of these factors can help to maintain the quality levels you require while also helping you ramp up the speed of operations. 

Gain Better Insights to Speed Up Your Delivery Operations

Using business intelligence insights from your delivery data, you can continually optimize operations to speed up deliveries to maximal efficiency without compromising on quality or customer experience.

Deliverect Insights is the ultimate platform for restaurants that are integrating online orders into their restaurant systems to get the big data insights they need. It ensures you don’t waste time gathering data from multiple delivery partners, internal systems, or even paper records. 

All your data from your partners, to your sales data, to your delivery performance numbers are fed into the data engine, which then spits out actionable insights on one single screen. This allows easy and accurate comparisons of between the different channels, platforms, and brands you are managing. 

If you’re struggling to see where gains can be made in your delivery operations, book a demo today to see how Deliverect Insights makes things clearer.