Transport planning: keeping control of the day

Why a spreadsheet works right up until it does not

Almost every transport company starts with a spreadsheet, and that is not a foolish choice. A planning board in Excel is free, everyone understands it, and you can put anything you like in it.

It breaks in three places. First, concurrency: the moment two people plan, there are two truths. Second, memory: the agreement that this customer never unloads before ten is written nowhere except in somebody head. Third, the link to execution: the plan has no idea what is actually happening on the road.

The result is familiar. The plan is right at eight in the morning and fiction by eleven, and nobody can say exactly when that happened.

The constraints that actually decide a plan

Optimising on distance alone produces a route nobody can drive. The constraints that make or break a plan are almost always other ones.

Delivery windows come first. Half an hour late at a distribution centre with fixed dock slots means waiting for the next slot, or not unloading at all.

Then what physically fits: loading metres, weight, stackability, and whether a particular roll container may be stacked. A plan that works in kilometres but not in loading metres is not a plan.

After that, driving and rest hours, driver skills, and the customer preferences that appear in no contract but will earn you a phone call if you ignore them.

Manual or automatic is a false choice

The argument is usually framed as though you must pick one. In practice a good planner does both on the same day.

Automatic planning is at its best with volume and repetition: many stops, known customers, stable windows. The optimiser does in seconds what a person does in half an hour, and does it more consistently.

Manual planning is at its best with exceptions and judgement. An urgent load that has to be fitted in, a customer who deserves some latitude today, a driver who knows this address better. Those are not constraints you encode.

What matters is that both work on the same plan. Let the optimiser do the bulk, then drag the three trips that need attention, and let the system recalculate what that means for the rest.

A plan is only finished when execution reports back

A plan that does not know what is happening is a forecast already out of date by nine in the morning. The question is not whether something goes wrong, but how quickly you find out.

That is why planning hangs off what the driver does: actual arrival times, the signature at the drop, a photograph when something is damaged. Not to supervise, but because otherwise the next decision gets made on stale information.

It is also where the administrative gain sits. When execution reports into the same record, a trip is administratively finished at unloading rather than starting a paper journey.

How you tell it is working

Not from a percentage in a report. From more concrete things: how often the phone rings asking where a shipment is, what time yesterday last invoice went out, and whether a planner off sick is still a crisis.

That last one is the sharpest test. If tomorrow plan can only be made by the person who made today, your process still lives in somebody head rather than in your system.