Two in the afternoon, and a driver is out of time
The phone goes. A driver is sitting in a lay-by forty miles short of the delivery point, and he is right: he does not have the hours left to finish today. The customer was promised a morning delivery. The planner has to find someone else, reload or recover the trailer, and ring the customer to explain, while the rest of tomorrow's plan waits.
Nobody planned it that way deliberately. When the load was allocated at six in the morning, the planner saw a driver with a truck and a trailer free, and a delivery that looked reachable. Nobody saw that he had done long days on Monday and Tuesday.
The information exists, just not in the plan
Every hour a driver works is recorded. The data sits in the tachograph files, the analysis service and often in the telematics system as well. The planner's screen, whether it is a transport management system, a whiteboard or a spreadsheet, shows loads and vehicles. The two never meet at the moment the decision is made.
- Hours data arrives after the fact, in reports read by the transport manager, not by the planner.
- Journey times in the plan are guesses based on distance, not on the roads and the time of day.
- Waiting time at collection and delivery points is not in the estimate at all.
- Weekly and fortnightly totals are harder to keep in your head than daily ones.
- Night planners and day planners hand over without a shared view of who is running low.
The cost of finding out at two o'clock
A load that cannot be completed costs you twice. There is the recovery: another driver, another truck, another run to where the trailer is parked. Then there is the customer who was promised a slot, missed it, and now has to rebook with their goods-in team. Drivers feel it too. Being planned into a corner and then having to stop short is one of the things that makes good drivers look elsewhere.
There is also a slower cost. When planners do not trust the hours picture, they build in slack everywhere, and the fleet does less work than it could.
The planning view we build
- We pull recorded driving and duty time per driver from the source you already have: tachograph analysis exports, a telematics API, or driver card data.
- Your transport manager sets the limits and buffers the planner should work to. We hold them as settings and do not interpret the regulations ourselves.
- For each load, the system estimates the time needed using route times for that time of day, plus your own average waiting time at that customer's site, learned from past visits.
- When the planner puts a load against a driver, the view shows hours available against hours needed, and flags anything that is tight or does not fit.
- Where a load does not fit, it suggests other drivers with enough time who are near the collection point.
- During the day, live progress from telematics updates the picture, so the afternoon planner sees who is running behind before the phone rings.
| Decision | Now | With the planning view |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets the load | Whoever is free | Whoever is free and has the time |
| Journey time | Distance and experience | Route time for that hour plus site waiting |
| Weekly position | Remembered, sometimes | Shown beside the driver's name |
| Handover | Notes and phone calls | Same view for day and night planners |
If you run a transport management system, the view can sit inside it or alongside it. We do not ask you to move planning to a new system for the sake of it.
How planning changes
Planners still make the decisions. What changes is that they make them with the hours picture in front of them. Tight loads are visible at six in the morning, when there are still options, rather than at two in the afternoon. The transport manager spends less time explaining after the event and more time on the drivers who genuinely need a conversation. Customers get fewer apologetic phone calls.
Is this happening in your planning office?
- Drivers ring in to say they cannot finish a run.
- Loads are recovered or handed over mid-route more than you would like.
- Planners ask drivers how many hours they have left.
- Hours reports are read by the transport manager, not used by planners.
- Your planners pad every plan because they do not trust the estimate.