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I finally understood why my moving crews kept showing up late
About three months ago, I started tracking the actual start times for our first jobs of the day versus the scheduled times. The data showed a pattern: crews assigned to jobs 20 miles away were on time, but anything over 25 miles was consistently 15 minutes late. The problem wasn't the drivers, it was my dispatch map. I was using the same estimated travel time for a 7 AM job as a 10 AM job, not accounting for rush hour. I adjusted the schedule to add 20 minutes for any morning job crossing the river into the city, and late arrivals dropped by 80% the next week. Has anyone else had to fix a simple planning assumption that was throwing off your whole day?
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kelly_hill1mo ago
Oh man, that's the kind of obvious thing you'd never think about until you see the numbers. Classic case of the map being a liar because it doesn't know about coffee and traffic. I bet your crews were just white-knuckling it across that bridge every morning, silently cursing the schedule. It's wild how one wrong guess about drive time can mess up the whole day for everyone. Good catch on actually looking at the data instead of just blaming the drivers.
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paulhernandez1mo ago
Started tracking our own actual drive times for a month, logging every trip. Found out the morning route to the west side was taking twenty minutes longer than the map said because of school traffic. We just added that buffer into the schedule and suddenly the crews weren't stressed about being late. It's crazy what you find when you ignore the app and just watch the clock.
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