On a large construction site you cannot simply turn up with a lorry. The main contractor runs a delivery booking system, a web portal where every supplier reserves a slot at a particular gate, sometimes with a particular crane, and a lorry that arrives without a booking, or an hour outside it, can be turned away. Transport for London's guidance on construction logistics encourages these systems, and the larger contractors and housebuilders now use them well beyond London.
Five years ago a handful of our customers worked this way. This year about one delivery in nine from our two biggest branches goes to a site that requires a booking, and the share rises every quarter. Between them those sites use seven different booking portals.
Our systems were built on the opposite assumption. The route planner decides when each lorry arrives, from the order, the vehicle and the roads. Our transport clerks take the planner's answer, sign in to the contractor's portal, try to book the slot it chose, and when that slot is taken, change the plan by hand and try again. They keep the logins in a spreadsheet. When a site moves a booking, the portal emails whoever made it, and that person may be off that day. Last year forty seven of our lorries were turned away from sites we had booked into, mostly because a booking had moved and the change reached nobody who could act on it. Every one cost us a wasted run and a customer whose crane stood idle.
What is happening is that the decision about when we deliver is moving out of our systems and into our customers'. I expect that to continue. Contractors are under pressure to keep lorries off neighbouring streets and to record every vehicle that enters a site, and a booked slot does both. Within a few years most of our commercial deliveries will be scheduled somewhere we do not control.
So we are starting to treat the booking as an input. The planner is being changed so that a confirmed slot is a fixed point it plans around, rather than a time it proposes. We have asked each portal's supplier for a way to read and confirm bookings automatically, and two can already do it. Changes to a booking now go to a shared transport queue instead of a person. And when we bid for a large site, the transport office is asked which booking system it uses before we agree a delivery price.
For decades our software decided when we turned up. The next version of it has to accept that the customer's system decides, and plan everything else around that.
– Serguey Shinder
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