How it works
A delivered price, worked out the way you already work it out
This is the long version. It is written for the person who will have to run it, not for the person who signs the invoice.
Step one
Origins, not head office
A load leaves from a quarry, a depot or a yard. It does not leave from your registered address, and if the price is worked out from the office postcode it is wrong the moment you have more than one site.
So the first thing you set up is every place material actually leaves from. Each one gets its own map, because a site forty minutes from Fenside is not forty minutes from Beck Row.
Products then attach to origins. Where two origins can both serve a delivery, you can see which one prices better, which is a decision most offices are currently making from memory.
Step two
Journey time, not crow flies
Distance is a poor guide to what a delivery costs you. Forty minutes up the A11 is not forty minutes through Cambridge at eight in the morning, and a straight line across the Fens ignores the fact that there is no bridge.
Every square on the map is scored on estimated HGV journey time from the origin, then falls into a band. You set the rate for each band. Eleven bands gives you enough resolution for a working radius without turning it into a spreadsheet.
The step between bands should widen as you go out, because past a certain point you are paying for a driver's day rather than a run. Most rate cards already do this. This just writes it down.
Step three
Paint the squares you know
The model does not know everything, and you do. So any square on the map can be given a fixed price by hand, and a painted square always beats the band.
Reasons people paint squares:
- A regular customer on an agreed rate.
- Access that takes longer than the map thinks, down a track or through a village.
- A weight restricted bridge, so it needs a smaller vehicle and a different price.
- A corridor along a main road priced keenly, because return loads are easy to find there.
- An area you would rather not serve, priced so that you only get it if it is worth it.
Paint forty or fifty squares and the map starts to hold the knowledge that used to live in one person's head. That is the whole point of it.
Order of precedence
What wins when two rules disagree
- A painted square. Always. If you set it by hand, it holds.
- The first matching journey time band. Everywhere else.
- Nothing. Outside the furthest band the page says so rather than guessing.
That last one matters. A quoting tool that invents a number for a delivery two hundred miles away is worse than one that says it does not know.
Setup
You are not the one doing this
The usual reason a system like this never gets used is that somebody has to sit down and type a rate card into it, and that afternoon never arrives. So we do it.
Send us your rate sheet, your quarry list and your product range in whatever state they are in. A spreadsheet, a scan of a printed sheet, a photograph of the one on the office wall. We load your origins, your products and your bands before we speak, so the first time you see it, it is already showing your prices on your patch.
The part worth your time is the bands, and even there the honest answer is that most firms start from what they already charge and adjust over the first fortnight, once they can see it laid out on a map.