Door-to-door routing with signature capture, fail-and-retry handling, and peak-hour density planning.
Courier work is the cleanest expression of last-mile: pickup at A, deliver at B, signature on receipt. The complication is that 8–12% of attempted door-to-door deliveries fail on first attempt — wrong address, customer absent, gate closed — and the retry loop is where most courier fleets quietly bleed margin. SortDrops handles fail-and-retry as a first-class workflow, signature capture as a proof-of-delivery primitive, and peak-hour density planning so a 12:00 pickup spike doesn't break the afternoon delivery promise.
Courier work is bidirectional in a way food delivery is not. Many runs are 'pickup AND deliver' on the same loop — collect from a sender at one address, drop at a recipient at another, repeat. SortDrops treats pickups and dropoffs as the same primitive (a stop with a type) so the optimizer correctly orders a mixed pickup-deliver loop without the dispatcher having to plan it manually.
Signature-on-receipt is the de-facto proof-of-delivery for B2B courier work and for any high-value parcel. SortDrops Team includes signature capture (drawn on the driver-link) and timestamped photo capture, both stored against the stop record and available in the dispatch session export. This is the same proof-of-delivery primitive courier companies built with on-premise hardware ten years ago, but in a browser.
Fail-and-retry: when a delivery attempt fails, the driver marks the stop as failed with a reason code (recipient absent, wrong address, gate closed, refused). The dispatcher then decides — retry today, retry tomorrow, return to sender. SortDrops surfaces failed stops as a separate queue and supports re-injecting them into a future route with one click.
A typical mid-sized courier day: dispatcher arrives 07:30, imports the day's pickup roster from a customer CRM (60–120 stops), runs SortDrops dispatch mode to split across 6–10 drivers using k-means geographic clustering, and drivers start collecting at 08:30. Pickups dominate the morning (08:30–12:00), drops dominate the afternoon (13:00–18:00), with the natural peak around 11:00–12:00 when senders try to clear the morning desk before lunch.
Peak-hour density is the structural challenge. A courier driver can comfortably handle 3–4 stops per hour in a city like Dubai. Push above that and dwell time at each stop (parking, sign-in, signature) starts compressing — you go from 4 minutes per stop to 2 minutes, mistakes happen, and the failure rate creeps up. SortDrops respects this by letting dispatchers cap per-driver stops per hour, and the optimizer balances density across the fleet rather than overloading the closest driver.
End of day is reconciliation: the dispatcher reviews the failed stops, contacts the affected senders or recipients, and re-injects retries into tomorrow's route. SortDrops dispatch session history makes this a 5-minute review, not a 45-minute spreadsheet exercise.
Signature capture in SortDrops Team renders a touch-drawable signature pad on the driver-link, stores it against the stop, and timestamps it. Photo capture uses the device camera and stores a low-resolution copy server-side (high-resolution can be enabled per dispatcher policy). Both are exported as part of the dispatch session CSV/PDF.
For courier companies with KYC or controlled-substance handover requirements, the dispatch session export can be filtered to show only stops with a signature and photo, suitable for audit by a compliance officer or insurance adjuster.
Yes. The driver-link runs in any mobile browser (iOS Safari, Android Chrome) and renders a touch-drawable signature pad. No app store install required — the dispatcher just shares a URL with each driver.
Driver marks the stop as failed with a reason code (recipient absent, wrong address, gate closed, refused, other). The stop drops out of the active route, the dispatcher sees it in the failed-stops queue, and can re-inject it into a future route with one click.
We support Excel/CSV import-export, which works with most CRM and carrier-management tooling. Direct API integration is available on the Team plan with custom setup; contact us for the integration scope.
Two ways. First, the per-driver stops-per-hour cap prevents the dispatcher from accidentally overloading a single driver. Second, mid-shift re-balance lets the dispatcher add a temporary driver mid-day, and the optimizer redistributes load in real time without breaking in-flight routes.