Operations

Drop

A single delivery completion. The driver hands the package off and POD closes the order. Most last-mile teams measure first-attempt drop rate, the share of orders successfully delivered on the first try.

Where this fits

The day-to-day vocabulary of running deliveries. Routes, waves, drops, manifests, ETAs, SLAs. These are the units operators reason in, and the inputs every downstream model needs.

Related terms

Manifest: The driver's load list for a route: what's on the truck, in what order, going where. The source of truth for a tour.
POD: Proof of Delivery. The artifact (photo, signature, geolocation, notes) captured at the doorstep that proves the drop happened. Increasingly verified by AI rather than by human review.
Wave: A batch of orders released to dispatch together, usually on a clock (every 5 minutes, every hour). Smooths out demand and lets the dispatcher optimize across orders rather than one at a time.
ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival. The single most-checked field in any delivery operation. Quality of an ETA is a function of how live the data underneath it is.
Route: The ordered list of stops a driver runs in a single trip, with the path between them. Route optimization is the search problem of finding the best one given current constraints.