How to Automate Deliveright

Heavy goods arrive with a crew, not a courier

A parcel carrier leaves a box on the porch. That is not what happens when a sectional sofa or a king bed arrives: two people carry it up a staircase, unwrap it in the room the customer picked, put it together and take the packaging away.

Deliveright is a first through final mile delivery company for goods like those, working with furniture retailers, designers, manufacturers and e-commerce brands across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Its platform is Grasshopper, a patented system that folds order management, warehouse management and transportation management into one place.

So one order lives its whole life in a single system. It is received at a hub, scanned onto a shelf, scheduled with the consignee, routed onto a truck by Deliveright's patented OrchesTruck technology, delivered at whatever service level the retailer bought, from curbside to full white glove, and closed out with a signature.

The retailer watches all of that. The person waiting at home watches too.

Proof of delivery is only proof once somebody sends it

Everything above happens on the truck. The work that piles up happens afterwards, at a desk.

A retailer opens a claim because a customer says the console table arrived scratched. The photograph exists: a crew took it on the doorstep. Finding it, writing the covering note and attaching it to that retailer's own claim form is twenty minutes and three logins. Multiply that by the day's damages.

The same shape repeats all week. Each route's manifest has to be checked against what came off the truck, because a piece left at the hub is a shortfall nobody notices until the customer calls. Refused deliveries need a return authorization from the retailer before anything moves. Completed white glove installs need confirming to the account, order by order, in whatever format that account insists on. Consignees have to be reached the day before, and again half an hour out.

None of it is difficult. All of it is somebody's afternoon.

Grasshopper was built for the delivery, not for the claim

The platform already carries a great deal, and none of it wants replacing.

Orders are entered and delivery slots scheduled in minutes. Warehouse work runs off mobile apps: receiving, loading, relocating, scanning, finding an order on a shelf. OrchesTruck generates routes automatically from volume, density, account profile and service level rather than from a planner's memory of which crew likes which county. Real time tracking runs from the point of origin to the customer's front door, and the shipper and the consumer can both follow it. Invoicing and collections sit in the same platform, so receiving and billing agree with each other.

Look at what that list has in common. Every item concerns moving the goods, and every item happens on ground Deliveright controls.

The claim form belongs to the retailer, on the retailer's website. A return authorization has to be asked for by email and waited on. The consignee is a mobile number, not an app. The photograph sits in Grasshopper and the claim needs it somewhere else. Each is a login the office already has, and no amount of routing intelligence reaches across one.

Damage photos can reach the claim without a coordinator

Picture the evening after a route comes back in.

The manifest is compared against what was actually delivered, and the two pieces still sitting at the hub appear on a shortfall list before anyone has gone home. Every completed install is written up order by order, the proof packet assembled from the signature, the photographs and the crew's notes, with the covering email to the retailer drafted and waiting. The day's damages and refusals are tallied into a scoreboard by agent, retailer and product.

The next morning starts the same way. Refused deliveries are gathered into one queue with the return authorization request already written against each retailer. Tomorrow's two person stops are grouped into a run that does not cross town twice and dropped on a planner's calendar as a proposal. Every consignee due a delivery has a confirmation drafted against the window they chose, and a thirty minute heads up drafted against the live ETA.

Hold the line at the front door. Reading Grasshopper, reconciling a manifest and filing a photograph can run unattended all night. A text to somebody sitting in their living room, or an email telling a retailer their sofa was refused, is drafted and read first.

The write-up never really needed a person

Photographs, signatures and manifests do not need an opinion. They need fetching, matching and filing, every evening, without one being missed.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Grasshopper, reads the orders, the proofs and the exceptions, and puts what it finds where your business already looks: a sheet, a Drive folder, a claims channel or a drafted email.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything a retailer or a consignee would see is drafted and waits for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it signs into.