“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day,
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.”

“Time”, Pink Floyd, 1973

CSA 2010, together with the increasing use and mandate of Electronic On-board Recorders will create a new focus for the trucking industry and its customers. That focus will be on time.

“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.” ~Denis Waitely

We have been tracking utilization of our tractors for some time. Recently, we started tracking those with paperless logs separately. There are two things which we found surprising. The new paperless logs have what is called an Efficiency Report. This report measures what percentage of the driver's legal time is used driving. What we found shocking was that the percentage of a driver's available drive time that they actually drove was surprisingly low. The other surprise was that the drivers with paperless logs have consistently been averaging more miles per week more than the fleet average. How do you reconcile this data? I have been talking with drivers who are using paperless logs to try to understand the cause of this. What I discovered is that the drivers on paperless logs have learned to manage their time better. We now have a waiting list of drivers wanting to start on paperless logs. Once drivers realized that they must comply with the hours of service regulations, paperless logs were seen as convenient technology. For the first time, operations can monitor a driver's time in real time. Programs are available to load information from the driver's paperless logs directly into optimization software.

Those in the industry have a history, and a habit, of thinking in miles. The reason for this is that we are all paid in miles and as we have become more judicious in controlling our costs, we think of costs in miles. I suggest we also begin to think of costs in minutes. To give an example, let's say a driver is offered three loads. What are the factors that will go into his decision? A lot of drivers will weigh factors such as weight, distance (with longer being preferable) and destination. In talking with one driver using paperless logs, he told me that one change is that he now makes the selection based upon what works best with his logs. Maximizing his use of legal time has become a primary factor in his decision making process. It can also determine if the driver and the trucking company will be profitable.

A truck must produce a certain amount of revenue each day to be profitable, regardless of the number of miles run. The same is true for drivers. The driver shortage now hitting the industry will lead to a competition for “driver friendly” freight because drivers hate to sit and love to drive.

So, how does one manage time? What happens at shipper's and receiver's facilities is often determinative of how much time is wasted. Many carriers and drivers view these problems as beyond their control. However, if you review your contracts with your customers, almost all provide that the shipper agrees to pay accessorials for such items as truck detention, trailer detention, TONU (truck ordered, not used) and similar items. But do carrier's charge accessorials? Prior to the recession, carriers were becoming good at charging accessorials, and innovations in technology made this much simpler. However, as many shippers gained the upper hand during the recession, many said they would no longer pay accessorial charges. Carriers caved because insisting on a customer paying for wasting its time would result in loss of the business.

Now the pendulum has swung back to the carriers and most are achieving long overdue rate increases. If you are a carrier, one of the things you can do to prepare yourself for CSA 2010 and EOBRs is begin to start charging accessorials the customer has already contracted to pay. As compliance tightens, you'll be in trouble from a profitability standpoint as well as a driver recruitment and retention standpoint if you do nothing to make customers accountable for waste. If you are a shipper or receiver, you can prepare yourself by making dock personnel accountable for wasting a carrier's time. You will not only avoid accessorial charges, but you will lean the supply chain and position yourself as a customer of choice among carriers and drivers.