HomeSet Deliveries Case Study

The Challenge

Twenty failed deliveries a day. That was the number Ravi Patel stared at every Friday afternoon when he ran HomeSet Deliveries’ weekly performance report. Each one cost the company $85 in reattempt logistics: a second truck dispatch, reshuffled routes, and a customer who now had to take another half-day off work to be home. At 20 failures per day, HomeSet was losing $1,700 daily. Over a month, that added up to more than $36,000 in preventable costs.

The root cause wasn’t driver error or equipment problems. It was communication. When a retail partner submitted a delivery order, the customer received a vague confirmation: “Your furniture delivery is scheduled for Tuesday.” No time window. No tracking link. No way to know whether the truck would arrive at 9 am or 4 pm.

Customers did what anyone would do with an all-day window. They ran errands, picked up kids from school, or assumed the delivery wouldn’t come until the afternoon. When a HomeSet truck pulled up at 10:30 am at an empty house, the driver documented a failed attempt and moved on. The customer came home to a door tag and called the office, frustrated.

The communication gap created a cascade of problems:

• Driver phone calls from personal numbers: Drivers tried calling customers 10-15 minutes before arrival, but many customers didn’t answer unknown numbers. Others had phones on silent. The calls added 5-10 minutes per stop and rarely solved the problem.
• Office phone overload: Without any tracking visibility, customers called HomeSet’s office repeatedly, asking for updates. The three-person office team fielded dozens of “where’s my delivery?” calls per day, pulling them away from scheduling, invoicing, and partner coordination.
• Retail partner pressure: HomeSet’s retail partners received the complaints first. Two partners had already issued formal warnings about delivery failure rates. A third scheduled a quarterly review specifically to discuss “delivery reliability concerns.”
• Route planning bottleneck: Every morning, Ravi spent three hours building routes for 20 trucks in Excel, manually cross-referencing each truck’s weight and volume limits against the items scheduled for delivery. A single couch-and-dining-set order could consume half a truck’s capacity, and Ravi had to account for that while also respecting customer time windows. The process was slow and error-prone.

The breaking point came when HomeSet’s largest retail partner, a furniture chain accounting for 30% of their volume, requested delivery tracking as a contract renewal condition. They wanted every customer to receive an ETA, a tracking link, and a photo confirmation of the delivered furniture placed in the home. Ravi’s Excel spreadsheets couldn’t deliver any of it.

The Solution

Ravi started evaluating delivery software with a specific checklist: it had to handle vehicle capacity constraints (weight and volume per truck), support time windows, send automated customer notifications, and manage 20 drivers without requiring a logistics degree to operate. He tested three platforms during a two-week evaluation period.

Upper was the only platform that handled all four requirements out of the box. Ravi ran a pilot with five trucks during the first week. The morning route-building process that typically consumed three hours took 25 minutes. He imported the delivery schedule via CSV, set each truck’s weight and volume limits, defined the 30-minute service time per stop, and let the optimizer build the routes.

Capacity-Aware Optimization Across 20 Trucks

Furniture delivery isn’t like parcel delivery. A single stop might involve a king-size bed frame, two nightstands, and a dresser. Another stop might be a single accent chair. The optimizer needed to understand that Truck #7 was already at 85% volume capacity after six stops and couldn’t take a sectional sofa, even if the address was on the way.

Upper’s capacity optimization lets Ravi configure each truck’s weight limit (typically 3,500 lbs) and volume capacity. When the optimizer built routes, it distributed stops across the fleet while respecting those constraints. Ravi no longer needed to manually calculate whether a dining table and hutch would fit alongside the day’s other deliveries. The system handled it automatically.

The impact was immediate. Before Upper, Ravi occasionally overloaded a truck, which meant a driver had to return to the warehouse mid-route to offload items for a second run. That happened two to three times per week and added 45-60 minutes to the affected route. After switching to Upper, mid-route warehouse returns dropped to zero.

Keeping Customers Home with Automated Notifications

The 22% failed delivery rate was a communication problem, so the most important fix was communication. Upper’s customer notification system sent two automated messages to every customer on delivery day.

The first went out in the morning: “Your furniture delivery is scheduled today between 10 am and 12 pm. Track your delivery live here: [link].” The second fired automatically when the driver completed the previous stop: “Your driver is on the way. Estimated arrival in approximately 20 minutes.”

The effect was dramatic. Customers who previously had no information now had a specific two-hour window and a live tracking link. They stayed home. They cleared their entryway. Some even texted back to confirm they were ready. The failed delivery rate dropped from 22% to 5.5% within the first full month.

Photo Documentation That Retail Partners Trust

HomeSet’s retail partners needed proof that furniture was delivered, placed correctly, and accepted by the customer. Before Upper, drivers scribbled signatures on paper forms that got lost, smudged, or disputed. One retail partner had escalated three delivery disputes in a single month because HomeSet couldn’t produce documentation.

Upper’s proof of delivery feature replaced the paper forms entirely. Drivers captured a photo of the furniture placed in the customer’s home, collected a digital signature on their phone, and added any notes about the delivery. For the rare failed attempt, drivers photographed the front door with a timestamp to document that they arrived on schedule and no one was home.

The retail partners received same-day delivery reports with photos of every completed delivery. The furniture chain that had demanded tracking as a contract condition renewed for two additional years.

The Impact

Within 90 days of full deployment across all 20 trucks, HomeSet’s delivery operation looked fundamentally different. The office team, freed from fielding tracking calls all day, refocused on partner coordination and growth. Ravi’s mornings shifted from a three-hour Excel grind to a 25-minute optimization session followed by dispatch. Drivers, running tighter routes with fewer reattempts, consistently finished on schedule.

The financial impact was the clearest indicator. Failed deliveries dropped from roughly 20 per day to 5 or fewer. At $85 per reattempt, that translates to approximately $1,200 in daily savings, or $36,000 per month. Driver overtime, which had been climbing as Ravi tried to squeeze reattempts into afternoon schedules, dropped 30%.

But the outcome Ravi talks about most isn’t a cost figure. It’s the ninth retail partner.

A regional furniture retailer in St. Paul had been evaluating delivery providers for six months. They’d heard about HomeSet’s tracking capabilities from a shared vendor and reached out. After a two-week trial period, they signed a contract. The delivery tracking and photo proof of delivery were specifically cited as differentiators. HomeSet went from defending its existing partnerships to winning new ones.

Performance Metrics