What Do Home Deliveries Cost You?

Vehicle payments, registration, insurance, fuel, repairs, and salaries for drivers and dispatchers—these are just a few of the expenses that must be calculated into the cost of delivering home medical equipment from your loading dock to a customer's front door.

We don't have to tell you how costly it is to provide necessary equipment to patients' homes; if you offer delivery, we know you're well aware. But, what we can tell you is how technology can help turn your business into a leaner, more efficient delivery machine with better route planning and accountability tools that can help you lower your fleet, fuel, and overtime expenses.

Reduce your fleet size. With better route planning using TIMS Scheduler you can create a more efficient delivery schedule that maximizes driver productivity by optimizing delivery routes and verifying addresses in advance. That means you can get more done with fewer vehicles. And don't forget, a smaller fleet also means fewer vehicle payments to keep up with, fewer vehicle registrations, a decrease in insurance costs, less maintenance, and lower personnel costs.

Lower your fuel consumption. Why pay for gas to sit in traffic or zig zag across town? The same route planning efficiency that can help you reduce your fleet size can also lower your fuel consumption. Route mapping and turn-by-turn directions on a mobile device will help your drivers avoid heavy traffic and stay on course. TIMS Delivery can also eliminate the need to make an extra trip when patients request changes, because drivers can adjust and update orders on the fly.

Decrease driver overtime. Improve accountability by assigning break times, capturing delivery location arrival and departure times, and limiting the re-sequencing of deliveries. Streamline delivery efforts by giving drivers the ability to securely access patient information, stay on task with delivery prompts and checklists, check inventory and pricing, and submit electronic forms onsite through the TIMS Delivery mobile application.

Does it seem too good to be true? Let us show you how it has been done before! Download our newly released case study to read how one HME provider used TIMS Delivery to reduce their fleet costs by 20 percent, decrease their fuel consumption by 34 percent, and lower vehicle maintenance costs by 28 percent—all while increasing their efficiency to handle 17 percent more deliveries.

"TIMS Delivery was instrumental in helping us exceed our savings goals. We have a complex delivery model and we have saved more than 4.9 million dollars annually since full implementation." — Oscar De Los Monteros, Corporate Director of Logistics and Clinical Operations, Preferred Homecare 

There's more to this story. Next week, in Part 2, we'll deep dive into how TIMS Delivery can help you do more with less and drastically impact your labor needs—from dispatchers to drivers to back office staff—giving you the opportunity to grow without having to hire. Stay tuned!

This article was originally written by Patty Harrison of Computers Unlimited. Published 2018-11-28. Modified 2018-11-28.