Fuel saving tip
Discussion
We drivers have it constantly drummed into us that the cost of fuel is crippling the industry etc. etc. Our consumption is constantly monitored, & the heavy-footed ones are shown how to drive 'properly'. We have hump-backed trailers, which apparently create less drag. Manufacturers spend millions developing leaner & cleaner engines, tyres, gearboxes, all in the name of fuel efficiency...
Here's a radical diesel-saving suggestion for all transport bosses: employ route planners who actually know what they're doing!
I do multi-drop (6-12 per day), and without fail every day I find myself changing my route around to avoid wasted time & miles. On today's modest run (100-odd miles) I probably saved a couple of gallons of fuel by doing it properly. Multiply that by five, & I alone am saving the company over £60 a week, not to mention creating fewer emissions. And yet firms like mine will keep the faith in pen-pushers who have never even done a driving job, and have little or no geographical knowledge other than that great big dog-eared Great Britain 1987 map sellotaped to the wall.
Here's a radical diesel-saving suggestion for all transport bosses: employ route planners who actually know what they're doing!
I do multi-drop (6-12 per day), and without fail every day I find myself changing my route around to avoid wasted time & miles. On today's modest run (100-odd miles) I probably saved a couple of gallons of fuel by doing it properly. Multiply that by five, & I alone am saving the company over £60 a week, not to mention creating fewer emissions. And yet firms like mine will keep the faith in pen-pushers who have never even done a driving job, and have little or no geographical knowledge other than that great big dog-eared Great Britain 1987 map sellotaped to the wall.
' similes.. As a shopping delivery driver, I know what you mean. At my old Work, used to get a run sheet and jiggle it most days as there was no real order. At my new work the system is slightly better, though still ridiculous sometimes. Had all my deliveries in Nottingham once, then my very last delivery at RAF Cottesmoor. Then back to base in Notts. Also, e.g, lots of deliverys in Derby, one other side of Notts then back to Derby for the rest. Plain ridiculous. But I prefer the driving to the doorstep Work, so suits me just fine.
When common sense prevails ill start going easy on company vehicles (different case if its my own)
like taking a box of little milk pots (UHT things) worth £3 8 miles each way off a route, in a 7.5tonner?..
or the firm who used to send 3 packs of bottled water from Tamworth to London, in a van on its own, £120+ when the water was about £10 a case...
like taking a box of little milk pots (UHT things) worth £3 8 miles each way off a route, in a 7.5tonner?..
or the firm who used to send 3 packs of bottled water from Tamworth to London, in a van on its own, £120+ when the water was about £10 a case...
Plastic chicken said:
Oh, and not forgetting the driver who's been told to hitch up to trailer A, drives from Glasgow to Bolton, only to discover that his load is in fact in trailer B, and trailer A is empty...
I thought it was pulling up them hills well........... I and another driver at my place have given up with the planner,
1, he doesn't even hold a licence.
2, no matter how much you tell him, what ever his poxy computer routing system knows best.
Example he gave me a route the other day and showed it me on the computer.
Start at the yard round wales and back, route idiots screen was showing 8hrs 58 mins.
I asked him how I was ment to plan break stops at 4hrs 29 both times?
His reply, oh yes computer says you can do it.
Que me walking off shaking head.
I work for a well known NATIONal access plant co. We are constantly being told where to fuel up and to go gentle on the pedal.
Shame they don't tell the dicks that route us, not to send two artics to the same site when you could get both bits of kit on one truck and one truck to deliver to site A and another truck to collect from site A, same customer.
Guess that's why we haven't had a pay rise.
Shame they don't tell the dicks that route us, not to send two artics to the same site when you could get both bits of kit on one truck and one truck to deliver to site A and another truck to collect from site A, same customer.
Guess that's why we haven't had a pay rise.
Plastic chicken said:
Oh, and not forgetting the driver who's been told to hitch up to trailer A, drives from Glasgow to Bolton, only to discover that his load is in fact in trailer B, and trailer A is empty...
Once worked for Unigate chilled distribution and a driver rang from Manchester to say the warehouse had loaded Southamptons order on the wrong trailer...But it was pulling away with the tail lift down that got him the sack
Reminds me of a couple of months ago, we had a few pallets of carpet tiles delivered for our office refurb. Driver had to offload 6 pallets of motorbike parts first into the road (in the middle of rush hour) to get to our pallets as "the office changed me route". The 6 pallets were for the triumph dealer barely 2 miles away.
agent006 said:
Reminds me of a couple of months ago, we had a few pallets of carpet tiles delivered for our office refurb. Driver had to offload 6 pallets of motorbike parts first into the road (in the middle of rush hour) to get to our pallets as "the office changed me route". The 6 pallets were for the triumph dealer barely 2 miles away.
I can beat thatWhilst working as a stores/partsman at Fruehauf Tamworth a driver arrived late afternoon with two York axles, he lived in Hinckley, he had collected the axles from Market Harborough (When York had a factory there..............he came in complaining he had been out "all day"
MH-Tamworth....all day?
"er yeah, the (York) paperwork said DELIVER to Tamworth, but also said INVOICE to Fruehauf Dereham"
So he had been to MH then to Dereham, then back to Tamworth....
Can I offer a little bit of experience from the other side of the whole routing/planning discussion, that of a planner?
I used to be a planner, back in the mid 00's, although came into it from the background of actually being out on the road, in an 18 tonner, doing 10-14 drops a day to small convenience stores.
Firstly, yes the arguments about some of the planners not being able to drive (either a car or truck), or having done the job, are valid, although not everyone is like that.
However, the snag is the number of constraints and demands that are placed on the planners from both management and the customer(s).
The demand is for the minimum number of routes/trucks on the road, so each route has to be packed to the rafters.
Then there are customers who demand an early time window, regardless of whether it's practical for us to get a truck anywhere near them within that window, unfortunately, they're accommodated by senior management, so we had to attempt to route it.
There are also time constraints with regards to actually setting the plan in place, there's probably only 3 hours in the day for the actual routing to be carried out, and, frankly, when there are only 2 people to route 1,200 deliveries, there isn't the time to look at each route in microscopic detail.
Oh yes, and I don't know what modern routing systems are like now, but back then Paragon was mostly a black background with dots on it. Roads could be superimposed, but they lacked detail, and made it very difficult to see what was going on.
Personally, having actually being at the sharp end, and struggling to get goods off, because the truck had been loaded backwards (that's a warehouse issue, not planning), or because the first drop was frozen goods, but there was a couple of cages of chilled goods blocking the freezer, I always actively tried not to let that happen.
Sometimes though it was impossible, if there was space on a truck to get goods on, but it meant the driver had a bugger of a job at the first drop, unfortunately, that wasn't sufficient justification to send another vehicle to that area.
We would always try and accommodate drivers wherever possible, if they'd come to us and propose a change to a route, we'd implement it within reason. Sometimes the drivers could beat the routing times easily, so we'd let them do it. Occasionally they'd suggest routing that would put a customer several hours outside of their time window, which we couldn't allow, as we'd get an arse kicking when the customer phoned in screaming (which they frequently did).
I used to offer any driver to come and sit with us for a day, or a week, to offer their advice. Not many did, and of those that actually took us up on it, most walked away a little more sympathetic to our cause.
Mind you, we did have some serial whingers, who'd moan regardless.
In all seriousness, for those of you that think the planners are idiots, and to be fair, they might be, why don't you offer a few days sitting with them to help? Your experience would be useful to the planners, and you'd also gain a bit of an insight into why they might be routing the way they do.
Our managers were always willing to let us swap experiences in this way, we also sent planners out with drivers, just so they could get a feel of the job.
I used to be a planner, back in the mid 00's, although came into it from the background of actually being out on the road, in an 18 tonner, doing 10-14 drops a day to small convenience stores.
Firstly, yes the arguments about some of the planners not being able to drive (either a car or truck), or having done the job, are valid, although not everyone is like that.
However, the snag is the number of constraints and demands that are placed on the planners from both management and the customer(s).
The demand is for the minimum number of routes/trucks on the road, so each route has to be packed to the rafters.
Then there are customers who demand an early time window, regardless of whether it's practical for us to get a truck anywhere near them within that window, unfortunately, they're accommodated by senior management, so we had to attempt to route it.
There are also time constraints with regards to actually setting the plan in place, there's probably only 3 hours in the day for the actual routing to be carried out, and, frankly, when there are only 2 people to route 1,200 deliveries, there isn't the time to look at each route in microscopic detail.
Oh yes, and I don't know what modern routing systems are like now, but back then Paragon was mostly a black background with dots on it. Roads could be superimposed, but they lacked detail, and made it very difficult to see what was going on.
Personally, having actually being at the sharp end, and struggling to get goods off, because the truck had been loaded backwards (that's a warehouse issue, not planning), or because the first drop was frozen goods, but there was a couple of cages of chilled goods blocking the freezer, I always actively tried not to let that happen.
Sometimes though it was impossible, if there was space on a truck to get goods on, but it meant the driver had a bugger of a job at the first drop, unfortunately, that wasn't sufficient justification to send another vehicle to that area.
We would always try and accommodate drivers wherever possible, if they'd come to us and propose a change to a route, we'd implement it within reason. Sometimes the drivers could beat the routing times easily, so we'd let them do it. Occasionally they'd suggest routing that would put a customer several hours outside of their time window, which we couldn't allow, as we'd get an arse kicking when the customer phoned in screaming (which they frequently did).
I used to offer any driver to come and sit with us for a day, or a week, to offer their advice. Not many did, and of those that actually took us up on it, most walked away a little more sympathetic to our cause.
Mind you, we did have some serial whingers, who'd moan regardless.
In all seriousness, for those of you that think the planners are idiots, and to be fair, they might be, why don't you offer a few days sitting with them to help? Your experience would be useful to the planners, and you'd also gain a bit of an insight into why they might be routing the way they do.
Our managers were always willing to let us swap experiences in this way, we also sent planners out with drivers, just so they could get a feel of the job.
Just alittle something from the far end of the spectrum, in the summer I had a customer in a real pickle wanting "yesterday" delivery, best I could order was Next day 10am :-) Of course he paid a small fortune for this (enough I thought to justify one vehicle to be dedicated to the whole delivery!)
Sure enough it arrived at 3:30pm, after any chance of it being included in what he was doing, so he has to pay his customer, I get shouted at for the choice of courier etc.
I of course rang the courier who's excuse was that it was small item and- "he didn't think it was that important, afterall its only SMALL!"...
LONG conversation with his head office, the senior exec, then apology from senior exec. It might be small and unimportant to them but I don't care how difficult and unefficent it is, if you accept something to be somewhere at a certain time and charge the earth for it you have to do it.
The other thing is my local courier office have bizarre policy of taking things from Dorset to Manchester every night then if its to be redelivered in the Southwest it comes back to my local depot to be delivered, 600miles to go 50miles, moronic.
Sure enough it arrived at 3:30pm, after any chance of it being included in what he was doing, so he has to pay his customer, I get shouted at for the choice of courier etc.
I of course rang the courier who's excuse was that it was small item and- "he didn't think it was that important, afterall its only SMALL!"...
LONG conversation with his head office, the senior exec, then apology from senior exec. It might be small and unimportant to them but I don't care how difficult and unefficent it is, if you accept something to be somewhere at a certain time and charge the earth for it you have to do it.
The other thing is my local courier office have bizarre policy of taking things from Dorset to Manchester every night then if its to be redelivered in the Southwest it comes back to my local depot to be delivered, 600miles to go 50miles, moronic.
scubadude said:
The other thing is my local courier office have bizarre policy of taking things from Dorset to Manchester every night then if its to be redelivered in the Southwest it comes back to my local depot to be delivered, 600miles to go 50miles, moronic.
You would think they'd devise a system that allows local packages to be sifted out at the local depot stage. It can't be that difficult if it's all bar coded and tagged.However, it's the whole economies of scale thing with this type of operation, they have a central Distribution Centre, where goods arrive from all over the country and are, presumably, allocated onto specific routes then sent to the relevant local depot for delivery.
Since there'll be trunk vehicles running between the DC and the local depots every day, it's probably more cost effective to load everything onto those vehicles than it is to have the extra manpower and/or infrastructure in place to isolate local packages, which also would need re-loading back onto specific routes when the rest of the delivery arrives from the DC.
It sounds madness, obviously, but I bet someone somewhere has done the sums and it saves money to send it all to the DC. When costs are measured to the 10th of a penny per case, every little makes a difference. These kind of things are assessed and modelled fairly frequently, as the companies concerned are always after saving costs where they can.
To look at one package in isolation, it seems like a massive waste, but then if you were to employ someone to find and extract all the local deliveries at the local depots, it would probably add up to quite a cost.
Just my thoughts anyway, there has to be a logical reason behind the process, and it can be cheaper to have massive trunk vehicles running back and forth from a DC than it is to have several regional DC's all replicating each other's work.
Common sense.....PMSL
I was taking a 200kg pallet from Tamworth to a pallet network at Fradley for overnight delivery to Welshpool when the same firm had already booked me to take a pallet the next day to Barmouth the same day, i did the decent thing and told the "planners" i could take it as I was passing Welshpool for them anyway............ and save them £60
I was taking a 200kg pallet from Tamworth to a pallet network at Fradley for overnight delivery to Welshpool when the same firm had already booked me to take a pallet the next day to Barmouth the same day, i did the decent thing and told the "planners" i could take it as I was passing Welshpool for them anyway............ and save them £60
Used intelligently, modern routing systems can be a great help, and essential if you run a large fleet.
However, the system used in our office used to allow just five minutes per delivery. I believe it has now been changed to allow ten minutes, but that is still nowhere near enough time to do what we do. The system also assumes that every road is virtually traffic-free, every light green, and that we're all driving round in Sprinter vans, not 18-tonners. It also dosn't know that all RDC's mean potentially long waits.
If we deliver from town-to-town, it's actually not too bad at planning an economical route. However it's much less effective in large cities. It doesn't know what side of the road a delivery point is, or whether it's on a one-way street, or a bus red-route etc. These criteria can totally mess up your day in a large truck without the ability to turn round at will. For that kind of knowledge there is no substitute for an experienced driver.
I've always been willing and happy to share my experience with those who need to know, but there is a certain breed of office person out there who thinks he & his computer are infallible.
However, the system used in our office used to allow just five minutes per delivery. I believe it has now been changed to allow ten minutes, but that is still nowhere near enough time to do what we do. The system also assumes that every road is virtually traffic-free, every light green, and that we're all driving round in Sprinter vans, not 18-tonners. It also dosn't know that all RDC's mean potentially long waits.
If we deliver from town-to-town, it's actually not too bad at planning an economical route. However it's much less effective in large cities. It doesn't know what side of the road a delivery point is, or whether it's on a one-way street, or a bus red-route etc. These criteria can totally mess up your day in a large truck without the ability to turn round at will. For that kind of knowledge there is no substitute for an experienced driver.
I've always been willing and happy to share my experience with those who need to know, but there is a certain breed of office person out there who thinks he & his computer are infallible.
Absolutely, I used to work with some pig headed individuals like that. Even when the computer is flagging up alarms that the route isn't feasible, the truck's overloaded, the driving/working hours are being exceeded, they'd still bloody let it go.
All for the sake of attempting to save a route, which would ultimately never work anyway because transport/warehouse would end up splitting it up and sending 2 vehicles anyway, or at least, putting 2 drivers on it, which screws them both up for the following day's start times.
Yes, by all means, plan the route close to maximum load, and utilising as much of the working time as you can (which to be fair, we didn't usually get near), but blatantly going way over the criteria is a different matter, and something I used to take a lot of time to try and stop people doing.
All for the sake of attempting to save a route, which would ultimately never work anyway because transport/warehouse would end up splitting it up and sending 2 vehicles anyway, or at least, putting 2 drivers on it, which screws them both up for the following day's start times.
Yes, by all means, plan the route close to maximum load, and utilising as much of the working time as you can (which to be fair, we didn't usually get near), but blatantly going way over the criteria is a different matter, and something I used to take a lot of time to try and stop people doing.
More fuel for the fire: one of our guys was sent out on a second run this afternoon (Friday) at 3.30pm, delivering a number of pallets to a customer over 50 miles away. He questioned whether the run was worth doing so late in the day, and was told to get on with it. The inevitable happened: his load was refused; the customer stopped taking deliveries at 4pm.
A hundred mile round trip to achieve precisely zilch.
Cost of the wasted fuel: around 50 quid, plus the driver's overtime. Cost of a phone call in advance to the customer: 10p.
Nothing will be said to the 'planner' who sanctioned this farce, because in my experience office staff are untouchable. Of course if a driver had squandered an amount of the company's money, we all know the likely result, don't we.
A hundred mile round trip to achieve precisely zilch.
Cost of the wasted fuel: around 50 quid, plus the driver's overtime. Cost of a phone call in advance to the customer: 10p.
Nothing will be said to the 'planner' who sanctioned this farce, because in my experience office staff are untouchable. Of course if a driver had squandered an amount of the company's money, we all know the likely result, don't we.
I once sent a van from Tamworth to York empty to collect stock from a shop they hadnt wanted, it had been there 3 months, when the van got there all the stock had vanished, 1 phone call would have saved a lot of money but id not have been able to invoice them for it...lol
The same firm had deliveries made by a 3rd party from their depots nationwide but way to return it (would you believe) when it was refused or somesuch
So there was I loading beer....spirits.....fags,etc onto my van and no paperwork to sign either end....disgraceful
The same firm had deliveries made by a 3rd party from their depots nationwide but way to return it (would you believe) when it was refused or somesuch
So there was I loading beer....spirits.....fags,etc onto my van and no paperwork to sign either end....disgraceful
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