How to choose delivery management software

Start with your process, not with a feature list

The most common mistake is to compare products by the length of their feature list. The winner is not the system with more checkboxes, but the one that covers your process end to end: order intake, assignment to a field employee, the route, and proof that the job was actually done. So the work starts not with a market overview, but with a plain description of how your operation runs today and where it hurts.

Answer a few questions before you book the first demo:

• Segment. Courier delivery, field service (installation, repair, surveys, maintenance) or distribution with sales reps — the processes and requirements differ significantly.
• Team size. How many field employees work a shift now, and how many will in a year.
• Order sources. Where orders come from: your website, a CRM, an accounting system, Excel exports, the phone.
• The bottleneck. What actually burns time — manual dispatching, calling couriers, lost orders, or arguments about whether something was delivered.

Once the tasks are named in your own words, the choice stops being guesswork. You are no longer comparing vendors in the abstract — you are checking whether each one removes a problem you can point at.

Core criteria: what the system must cover

A delivery management system should cover the whole life of an order rather than one slice of it. If it only handles route building, or only the mobile part, you will end up gluing two or three tools together and reconciling them by hand. The baseline set of capabilities looks like this:

• Order intake and dispatch — orders land in one place and are assigned to field employees, so the dispatcher is not sorting rows in a spreadsheet.
• Live routes on a map — you can see where each courier is right now and how they are moving through their stops.
• Route optimization — a real engine that accounts for delivery windows and constraints, not an address list in the order it was typed.
• A mobile app for the field employee with photo reports and checklists.
• A customer portal with statuses, so the recipient stops calling the dispatcher for updates.
• On-site completion confirmation — a photo, a checklist, a marked result.

Check whether one system covers all of this natively. For example, Courier management in itlogist brings order intake and dispatch, map routes, the field mobile app with photo reports and real-time statuses into a single dispatcher screen, with route optimization built on an OR-Tools engine that respects delivery windows and constraints. That gives you a convenient single criterion when you compare options: how many separate tools does this one system replace?

Integrations: the system cannot live in a vacuum

Delivery software almost never works in isolation. Orders are born in a CRM or an online store, items and documents live in the accounting system, and part of the data still travels by spreadsheet. If the new system cannot exchange data with those tools, you have not automated anything — you have added one more window where somebody types the same records again.

That makes the integration list one of the decisive criteria rather than a nice-to-have. itlogist works out of the box with the sources most delivery teams already run on:

• 1C — exchanging orders and data with the accounting system.
• AmoCRM and Bitrix24 — orders arrive straight from your CRM.
• Excel — order upload by file, when the process has not moved into a CRM yet.

The practical test during a demo is simple: ask the vendor to show an order travelling from your source into the system, being assigned to a field employee, and returning its status back. If that full round trip happens without manual copy-paste, the integration is real. If any step requires someone to re-enter data, you will be paying for that step every single day.

The field mobile app decides whether your data is real

However polished the dispatcher screen is, the data that fills it comes from the courier in the field. If the mobile part is awkward, it simply will not be filled in — and within a month you are back to "where are you?" calls and a spreadsheet. So the field app deserves at least as much scrutiny as the dispatcher console, and ideally you should hand it to an actual courier during the pilot.

What to look at:

• Barrier to entry. In itlogist the field employee works through a mobile web interface, with no mandatory app install from a store. The courier opens a link and immediately sees their orders and route — which matters a lot when you onboard temporary staff or subcontractors.
• Photo reports and checklists at every stop, so completion is recorded by an image and a marked result rather than by a verbal message.
• Statuses updated as the work happens — accepted, in transit, delivered, rescheduled, refused — changed by the courier and visible to the dispatcher in real time.
• The route at hand — the sequence of stops and navigation without jumping between apps.

A simple rule: the fewer taps the app demands from a courier, the more complete and honest the data you later rely on for control, payroll and planning. Software that field staff quietly avoid produces a beautiful dashboard built on nothing.

Rollout time and total cost of ownership

A licence price is not the same thing as the cost of ownership. A long implementation, expensive configuration and months of training can outweigh any attractive subscription. So evaluate separately how quickly the system will actually run on your processes, and how tightly it locks you in if it turns out not to fit.

What to clarify before signing:

• Time to launch. itlogist is built for a fast start — launch in 7 days, with no long-term contracts — so you can test it on your own orders without a multi-month implementation project.
• Scale flexibility. The system should fit both a small team and a growing one: itlogist is designed for teams of 5 to 100 field employees.
• Commitments. The absence of long contracts lowers your risk — if the process does not suit you, you are not locked in for years.
• Who does the ongoing work. Adding a courier, changing a delivery window or a checklist should be routine admin work, not a paid vendor ticket.

One warning about a very common trap: do not pick a system based on the "percent savings" promised in a slide deck. The real effect depends on your route density, your delivery windows and your team's discipline, so the honest way to measure it is a pilot on your own data — compare a week of your real orders before and after, and let those numbers decide.

A checklist to take into the demo

Collect the criteria into a short list you can carry from one vendor call to the next and score consistently:

• Covers the full cycle — from order intake to on-site confirmation, not just one stage.
• Dispatch and routes — orders are assigned to field employees, routes are visible on a map and optimized with delivery windows and constraints in mind.
• A usable mobile interface — low barrier to entry, photo reports, checklists, live statuses.
• Integrations with your stack — 1C, CRM and Excel exchange data without manual entry.
• Transparency for the customer — a portal with statuses instead of calls to the dispatcher.
• Fast launch and flexible terms — a short start and no long-term lock-in.
• Fits your segment — courier delivery, field service or distribution, with the specifics each of them needs.

If a system passes these points on your real orders rather than on a demo dataset, it is the right choice for you. Everything else — interface details, branding, exotic features you will never open — is secondary. The only outcome that counts is whether the dispatcher and the couriers work faster in the system than they did with calls and spreadsheets.