Our Morning Report Was Built Before the Rural Vans Had Sent Their Day

Every morning at five, our delivery performance report is compiled using the previous day's proof of delivery records. By eight, it is presented to every depot manager. A delivery is considered on time if a signature or photograph is recorded inside the customer's window. For most of a year, two depots in the hills trailed behind the rest by six or seven points.

Their managers were placed on improvement plans. However, they insisted their drivers were delivering on time, while the report showed otherwise. The handsets store a delivery when there's no signal and send it when connectivity is restored. On parts of those depots' routes, drivers can travel four or five hours without coverage, and some vans return late with a day's records still pending on the handset.

The handset only sends records once it is docked. Most records arrived before five in the morning. Yet, a significant share arrived after that time, and by then, the report had already counted them as deliveries that never happened. Customer services, reviewing the same data at half past eight, submitted several dozen redelivery requests for parcels that were already on doormats.

There was nothing wrong with any individual record; each one contained the correct delivery time. The issue lay in not storing the time it reached us, preventing anyone from seeing how much of yesterday was still in transit when the report was frozen. Now, every record carries both the delivery time and the time it reached us. The report now displays, for each depot, the share of the day's expected records that arrived by the time of its construction, and these figures are marked provisional for forty-eight hours and final after that.

Customer services no longer raise redelivery requests while the van's handset still holds unsent records. Additionally, a handset that hasn't sent any records in six hours triggers a ticket for its depot, as it's usually a fault rather than a valley. After the late records were included, both depots ended the year above the company average.

The improvement plan was withdrawn, and I personally apologized to the manager. A report with a fixed cutoff had been measuring both the speed of our data travel and the effectiveness of our drivers, combining them into a single number.