Building the day's run without three phone calls

The plan for the day exists in three places. There is the version on the whiteboard, drawn up at half seven. There is the version in the transport manager's head, which is the whiteboard plus everything that has changed since. And there is the version each driver is actually working to, which is the last thing they were told on the phone.

When those three agree, the day goes well. They stop agreeing at about half nine.

What makes skip hire scheduling awkward

It is not ordinary delivery routing, and the differences are the whole difficulty.

Every job is two jobs. A skip goes out and it has to come back. The delivery is scheduled; the collection is a commitment made for an unknown date, usually to be pinned down later, and half the time changed by the customer.

The vehicle has one space. A skip lorry carries one container. It cannot batch drops the way a parcel van can. Sequencing is therefore not about packing a load — it is about pairing: what you drop here lets you collect there, and what you collect determines where you must go next to tip.

The tip is a fixed point. Every full skip has to go somewhere before the next empty one can be delivered, and the transfer station has opening hours and queues.

Customers move. Not the address — the day. "Can you come Thursday instead" arrives constantly, and each one is a small unpicking of an already-tight sequence.

Skip hire is not a routing problem. It is a pairing problem with a tip in the middle of it.

The empty miles nobody counts

The waste in a badly sequenced day is invisible because it never appears as a failure. Every job got done. It just took a vehicle eleven hours instead of nine.

The usual causes are ordinary. A delivery in the north of the patch followed by a collection in the south, then back north for the next drop. A full skip carried past the transfer station because the collection after it was booked first. Two exchanges at neighbouring addresses on different days because they were taken by different people on different phone calls.

Say a vehicle does one avoidable extra hour a day. Across a five-vehicle fleet that is 25 hours a week of driver time and fuel, and it is the cheapest capacity you will ever find — you already own the lorries and you are already paying the drivers.

Plan on geography, promise on time

The tension in every skip hire office is between the sequence that makes operational sense and the promises made when orders were taken.

Some promises are real: a builder who needs it before the gang starts, a permit that only allows placement in a window, a wait-and-load. Most are not — "sometime Tuesday" is the honest state of the majority of jobs, and treating it as a fixed slot is what forces the day into an inefficient order.

The practical version is to capture, at order time, which jobs are genuinely time-bound and which are just "that day". Then build the run on geography, dropping the flexible jobs into the sequence where they fit. This is a data problem before it is a planning problem — if the order does not record whether the time matters, everything gets treated as though it does.

The phone calls are the symptom

Count them for one morning: office to driver, driver to office, office to customer, customer to office. In a yard running on a whiteboard the number is remarkable, and almost every call is one of three sentences.

• "Where are you now?"
• "What am I doing after this one?"
• "Has the skip at the Mill Lane job gone yet?"

All three are questions about state — where things are and what has happened. They are only questions because the state lives in one person's head and has to be transmitted by voice. When the run is on the driver's phone and updates as jobs are completed, the calls that remain are the ones that need judgement: the site that is blocked, the customer who is not there, the decision about whether to squeeze one more in.

What good looks like on a screen

Not complicated. The day, by vehicle, in order. Each job showing size, address, whether it is a drop, a collection or an exchange, and whether the time is fixed. Drag one job to another vehicle and it moves. Drag it up the list and the sequence changes. The driver's phone reflects it without anyone ringing anybody.

Then the two things that stop the day unravelling: live status as jobs complete, so the office knows what is actually done rather than what was planned; and a clear view of what has not happened yet as the afternoon closes in, so a job that is going to fail is spotted at two o'clock rather than five.

Overdue collections are a scheduling problem

The skips that are out past their date are the quiet drag on a fleet. Each one is a container earning nothing, and in aggregate they are the reason yards buy skips they do not need.

They persist because nothing surfaces them. Once the list of hires running long is visible — sorted by how long — it becomes a normal part of building the day: three of them are near tomorrow's run, so they go on it. That is capacity recovered without buying anything, and it also stops the awkward discovery that a skip has been sitting somewhere for six weeks, which is a conversation about money as well as logistics.

Start with the whiteboard question

If you want a quick read on how much this is costing you, ask one question tomorrow morning: how many phone calls did it take to get the day from the whiteboard into the cabs, and how many more before lunch to keep it there?

That number is the tax you pay for the plan living in a place the drivers cannot see.

SkipHub puts the run on the board and on the phone at the same time — drag-and-drop on the desk, today's jobs in the cab, status updating as work completes. The features pages cover scheduling and the driver view, and the photo that ends the argument covers what drivers should be capturing while they are there.