One sheet, one situation, one line of reasoning to practise.
Intended for logistics and international trade courses, and teams discovering transport operations.
Transport is the most visible and least understood link in the supply chain. It is judged on price, although it is determined by time, evidence and commitments.
Sheet 1 — What is purchased when buying transport
The situation
A shipper consults three carriers for the same lane. It receives three prices and chooses the lowest.
Six months later, it changes carrier. Not because the price increased, but because ‘things are not working’. It will struggle to say exactly what.
The reasoning
A transport price is comparable only for an identical scope, and that scope includes at least six dimensions that price alone does not reveal:
Lead time. Is delivery within 24 hours, 48 hours or ‘during the week’? The same journey can sell for twice as much depending on the commitment.
Consistency. A carrier that delivers within 48 hours nine times out of ten and in five days the tenth does not offer the same service as one that consistently delivers within 72 hours. For many recipients, predictability is worth more than speed.
Delivery method. Delivery to dock, with a tail lift, including unloading, upstairs or by appointment. Each variation has a cost, and they are easily confused when reading a quote.
Traceability. Does the carrier provide information during the journey, or only afterwards? Can it provide proof of delivery quickly, or must people wait for the driver to return?
Exception handling. What happens in the event of a delay, absent recipient or damage? The answer to this question distinguishes two providers far more reliably than their rates.
Liability. Compensation limits, claim deadlines and exclusions. These are contractual terms that almost no one reads before needing them.
Buying transport on price alone means comparing six different offers on just one of their parameters.
Common mistakes
Comparing a price ‘per kilo’ without examining taxable-weight calculation rules — conversion between volume and weight can double the bill for light, bulky goods.
Ignoring additional charges: waiting at loading, second delivery attempt, out-of-area delivery and peak-demand periods.
Confusing a carrier, which owns vehicles, with a freight forwarder, which organises transport using other companies’ vehicles. Both are legitimate businesses; their responsibilities differ.
Negotiating a price without describing actual volumes, including their irregularity.
Exercise
Write a six-line description of a transport requirement, one for each dimension above, for a flow you know or imagine.
Then ask yourself: for which of these six lines would you accept paying more? The answer defines your true requirement, and it should structure your consultation.
Sheet 2 — The transport plan: a trade-off, not a calculation
The situation
Twenty-five deliveries to make tomorrow, with four vehicles available. How many ways are there to organise them?
Many. And none is optimal on every criterion at once.
The reasoning
Building a transport plan means trading off conflicting objectives:
Cost favours filling vehicles and minimising kilometres.
Service favours meeting promised time slots, even if that means travelling half-empty.
Regulations impose driving times, rest periods and working-day limits.
Physical constraints — weight, volume, height and compatibility between goods — limit consolidation.
Access constraints — city centres, customer receiving hours and permitted vehicle size — rule out combinations.
A plan is therefore always a compromise, and that compromise depends on what the company considers a priority. Two companies with the same deliveries and vehicles will produce different plans, and both will be right.
A plan built on distances alone is therefore a false plan — and this is the most common mistake among people new to the exercise.
Common mistakes
Planning with theoretical durations rather than actual observed durations. Actual durations cannot be invented: they must be measured.
Forgetting the return to the depot, or the driver’s end-of-shift location.
Building a plan with no margin. The first unexpected event of the day causes a cascading collapse.
Treating planning as a pure optimisation problem when it is first a problem of well-described constraints. An optimal plan based on false constraints cannot be executed.
Exercise
Take eight delivery points on a map, each with a time window, unloading duration and weight.
Build two plans: one minimising kilometres, the other guaranteeing every time slot.
Compare them. The difference between the two is the price of your service commitment — and exactly the conversation an operations manager must have with the sales team.
Sheet 3 — Execution: the driver is the only witness
The situation
The plan is ready and the vehicles leave. The office can no longer see anything.
For the company, what happens between departure and return exists only to the extent that the driver reports it.
The reasoning
This is what distinguishes transport from the warehouse: execution takes place outside the organisation’s field of view. All information must come back from a single witness who is also driving, delivering and managing the customer relationship.
Three categories of information must come back, and they do not have the same urgency:
Statuses — arrived, loaded, en route, delivered. They are used to inform the customer and react. They must be reported in real time or they are useless.
Evidence — signature, photo, reading. It is used to invoice and defend a claim. It must be linked to the job, dated and available quickly.
Exceptions — waiting, impossible access, absent recipient, damaged goods. They are used to invoice contractual extras and handle disputes. They must be declared when they occur or they will be forgotten.
The difficulty is human, not technical: every piece of information requested from the driver is additional work in an already demanding role. This is the main reason reporting systems fail — not refusal, but overload.
Hence a design rule that applies beyond transport: if an entry takes more than a few seconds, it will not be made on difficult days, which are precisely the days when the information matters most.
Common mistakes
Designing a reporting tool around office needs without giving the driver anything in return. The driver will do the minimum.
Requesting free-text fields rather than short lists. Free text takes time to enter and cannot be used statistically.
Accepting unlinked evidence: a photo in a messaging app is not evidence; it is a memory.
Making no provision for subcontracting. A job entrusted to a subcontracted carrier disappears from view, although the end customer sees no difference.
Exercise
List everything you would like to know about a delivery route. You will obtain around fifteen items.
Now impose a constraint: the driver can perform only three actions at each stop. What do you keep?
This exercise in letting go is exactly what an operations manager does when deploying a mobility tool. What remains reveals what truly matters to the business.
Sheet 4 — Where profitability is hidden
The situation
A transport company generates reasonable revenue and a low margin. Management looks to reduce costs: fuel, maintenance and headcount.
It is probably looking in the wrong place.
The reasoning
In transport, margin is rarely lost on major cost items, which are monitored. It is lost through four discreet leaks.
The empty return. A vehicle returning empty has travelled half its distance without revenue. This is the first improvement opportunity in most operations, and it is addressed not through internal optimisation but by finding return freight — a commercial task.
Uninvoiced non-driving time. A three-hour wait at loading can almost always be invoiced under the contract. It is almost never invoiced, because it is not documented anywhere when it happens.
Exceptional services. A second delivery attempt, unplanned unloading, an out-of-slot delivery. Same causes, same effects.
The invoicing delay. An invoice issued three weeks after the service because a document has not returned means three weeks of working capital across the entire operation, permanently.
These four leaks share one feature: they are not cost problems, but information problems. The service was performed. It was simply not recorded when it happened.
That is what makes this business distinctive: profitability can be improved without reducing any expense, simply by documenting more accurately what is already being done.
Common mistakes
Looking for profitability in the fuel purchase price rather than the fill rate.
Not knowing profitability by lane, customer or vehicle. A company average always hides loss-making contracts.
Choosing not to invoice extras to preserve the customer relationship — without even knowing how much that represents. The commercial decision is legitimate; ignorance is not.
Treating proof of delivery as an administrative matter when it determines cash flow.
Exercise
Take one route. Reconstruct its entire day: departure time, driving time, waiting time, unloading time, return time and empty kilometres.
Then calculate the share of the day that generates revenue.
The resulting figure is almost always surprising. It explains why the largest transport gains are not found in driving, but in everything around it.
Going further
These four sheets present transport from the organiser’s perspective. Two other perspectives should be studied next: the shipper that buys it and the recipient that experiences it.
The three have partly conflicting interests, and most sector difficulties arise from that conflict rather than a failure by any one party.
This series is freely available for educational purposes. It may be reproduced in a training context with acknowledgement of the source.
