A word from Mike Bussberg, Vice President of Operations at Fraley and Schilling
After eleven years in the trucking industry, specifically working in Operations I could afford to retire this very minute if I had a dollar for every time a driver used the phrase, “that’s not possible”. What I’m talking about more specifically is a driver saying it’s not possible for me to complete this load and what they really mean is “I cannot mathematically pick up this load at X time and deliver it to this location at X time”.
It feels like often drivers assume that Dispatchers and Load Planners walk around the office and plan loads by throwing darts at “the board” and leaving it all up to complete chance.
This assumption could not be further from the truth, so let me walk you through the process we take at Fraley and Schilling to plan loads for our drivers. Long-haul trucking has many dynamics that factor into planning each load we accept from our customers.
Here are the two key factors that are considered:
The shipping and receiving hours of the planned load
Number of miles from shipping to receiving
Shipping And Receiving Hours
It seems a simple consideration because it is. Obviously, if a driver is 4 hours of driving away from a shipping location that closes in 2 hours then he or she will not be making the run successfully. The Dispatcher or Load Planner now has a question to ask themselves: Which driver(s) is close enough in driving time to make the loading window at the shipper?
Number Of Miles From Shipping To Receiving
When figuring out the actual drive time involved in a delivery, a general rule of thumb is applied but before I tell you that calculation I should mention that there are many tools (transit time calculators) you can use to figure this math out yourself- nearly every trucking company offers their own version of this internally. At Fraley and Schilling we calculate a safe and legal average driving speed to be 50 mph. With this rule we can say that a 500 mile trip will take approximately 10 hours of driving time.
The Other Factors
Here’s where the logistics industry really plays into its stereotype of being complex. There are other variables we have to factor into the overall transit time outside of just shipping/ receiving hours and number of miles the driver is driving. And here’s what I mean by this, if you were going to drive cross-country would you assume that just because your GPS says you’ll arrive in 7 days that you can take this time-frame as an absolute rule? No, because you know that some things, both planned for (ie. sleep, fuel) and not planned for (ie. breakdowns, traffic) will occur.
Here are some additional factors we also immediately factor into transit time:
DOT regulations- according to the Department of Transportation, for every 10 Hours of driving you must stop and take a 30 minute break.
Fuel Stops (30 minutes)
Pre-Trip / Post Trip Inspection (30 minutes)
And here are the less predictable factors we also consider:
Weather
Traffic
Accidents
Mechanical Breakdowns
The Final Answer
Using the same example as above, our 500 mile trip, we could calculate a safe and legal transit time factoring in our shipping and receiving window, drive time, and our misc. factors to be 21.5 hours. If the driver leaves at 12:00 they should arrive at the destination somewhere close to 09:30 the next morning. Here’s the breakdown of that calculation:
500 miles – 10 hours
DOT Breaks – 10.5 hours
Pre/Post Trip Inspections – 0.5 hours
Fuel Stop – 0.5 hours
Total Transit Time = 21.5 hours
Remember, Dispatchers and Load Planners have a vested interest in the success of drivers, which is equal to happy customers and continued business for the company. We’re all in this together! There is great thought and hard work that goes into each mile that a truck driver travels. Everything is possible if we work together as a team to plan and drive!
