The question before the conclusion.
- Lens
- transport
- Journey
- 7 decision points
- Reading
- 7 min
A customer disputes a delivery. They say they never received two of the six pallets announced. You are certain otherwise: the driver remembers it, delivered early in the morning, and someone signed.
Where is the delivery note? In the truck. The truck has left on another run. It will return on Friday. By Friday, the note will be crumpled, the signature illegible and the dispute eight days old.
You will make a commercial concession. Not because you are wrong, but because you cannot prove that you are right.
Transport is paid on evidence, not facts
That is the harsh peculiarity of this business. The service is real: the kilometres were driven, the goods were delivered and the driver worked. But between the fact and payment lies a document.
As long as that document travels physically in a cab, three things happen as a matter of course:
Invoicing waits. You do not invoice what you do not have in hand. The time between delivery and invoice is not an administrative delay; it is a cash-flow delay, affecting every mission, all the time.
Disputes are lost. A dispute is won in the following days, with a legible document and a reservation recorded at the right time. After two weeks, it is settled commercially.
Exceptions are never reported. A three-hour wait at loading, an inaccessible site, a customer absent at the appointment: in most contracts, these are chargeable extra costs. They are never invoiced because they are not documented when they occur.
What happens in the cab
The driver is the only witness to execution. Everything the company knows about the mission is what the driver transmits—and the way they are asked to transmit it determines what the company receives.
Ask drivers to call operations: they will call about serious problems, not twenty minutes of waiting. Ask them to complete a sheet at the end of the day: they will rely on memory, and memory rounds things off. Ask them to photograph a damaged pallet on a personal phone and send it to a messaging group: you will have the photo, with no indication of which mission it belongs to, and it will disappear in the conversation thread.
The common feature of these three situations is that the information exists; it is simply attached to nothing.
Useful evidence has four attributes: it is automatically dated, geolocated if necessary, attached to an identified mission, and immediately available to those who need it. A photograph without those four attributes is not evidence; it is a memory.
The issue no one discusses: the driver’s cognitive load
The driver drives. Delivers. Manages the customer relationship on arrival. They have neither the time nor the desire to enter data.
That is the main reason mobility tools fail. Drivers are given an application requiring eight actions at every step, no one uses it after a month, and the conclusion is that ‘drivers are resistant’.
They are not resistant. They are busy.
Second rule: the tool must help the driver, not only operations. Today’s missions, the exact address, the on-site contact and the customer’s instructions. If it provides only more work, the driver will do the minimum.
Subcontracting: the blind spot that costs the most
Almost every carrier subcontracts part of its activity, either at peaks or permanently.
And for that part, the level of information collapses. The subcontractor performs the work with its own resources, documents and reporting pace. The company ends up with two operations: its own, which is tracked, and that of its subcontractors, which is opaque.
The consequences are concrete: it is impossible to give the final customer a status for a subcontracted mission, impossible to reconcile the subcontractor’s invoice with what was actually performed, and impossible to measure service quality by provider.
What can be required contractually—and is rarely written down—is the format and deadline for returning evidence, the reporting of exceptions, and the channel through which it all arrives. The issue is contractual before it is technical.
What changed our minds
We used to advise starting by equipping planning: building routes, assigning resources and optimising.
We now almost always begin with execution—field reporting, statuses and evidence.
The reason is simple: even imperfect planning produces a usable plan. Untracked execution produces nothing at all. More importantly, execution data is what will later make sound planning possible: actual times by route, loading durations and deviations between planned and actual. Planning without that data means optimising estimated durations—in other words, assumptions.
Three indicators to introduce, in this order
The time between delivery and evidence becoming available. This is the leading indicator. It determines invoicing, disputes and customer satisfaction. It can be measured today, even manually.
The share of missions with no exception declared. Beware the trap: a perfect rate does not mean that everything is fine; it means nothing is being declared. A rate that increases when a mobility tool is deployed is a good sign, not a bad one.
The gap between planned and actual—in time, kilometres and sequence of stops. This is what will later make it possible to plan from reality.
A final observation
Proof of delivery is often treated as an administrative issue and left to the invoicing department.
In reality, it is where cash flow, customer relationships and service quality meet. Evidence captured at the required frequency can shorten invoicing cycles, document disputes more clearly and make the service easier for customers to understand. These effects should be measured in each organisation.
