Operations

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.

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

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.
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.
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.
SLA: Service-Level Agreement. The contracted performance threshold: on-time rate, delivery window, refund triggers. The thing operators are graded against.
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.