Coordination as respect
The best logistics operation I’ve seen had one quality: everyone knew what was going on.
Which dock. What time. Who was receiving. Nothing was advanced. It was basic information that someone had thought about in advance, and made sure reached the people who needed it before they needed it.
Coordination is often described as efficiency. It is that too. But first and foremost it’s respect. Respect for the fact that someone’s time has value. That waiting time isn’t free just because it falls on someone else.
What coordination actually costs when it fails
Most operational problems I’ve seen aren’t caused by lack of resources. They’re caused by nobody telling the person doing the work what’s going on.
A driver arrives at a terminal at 06:30 for a slot that was moved to 09:00 yesterday afternoon. Nobody told him. He waits two and a half hours in the cab. The planner who moved the slot did so for a good reason (a forklift breakdown, a missing pallet) but didn’t think the information was urgent enough to push out. So the cost of the breakdown gets quietly transferred to the driver, who absorbs it as part of the job.
Multiply that across a year. One large transport buyer I worked with estimated that their drivers waited the equivalent of two full work weeks per truck per year for information that already existed somewhere in the system. The information wasn’t missing. It was sitting in someone’s inbox, or on a whiteboard in a planning office, or in a chat thread nobody had access to.
In the textbook sense that isn’t really an efficiency problem at all. The system has decided, implicitly, that the driver’s time is the cheapest variable to spend, and that decision shows up everywhere downstream.
Information that doesn’t arrive is information that doesn’t exist
I think a lot of operational managers underestimate this. They assume that because they know what’s going on, the people downstream know too. They confuse “the decision has been made” with “the decision has been communicated”.
A few patterns I keep seeing:
- Critical updates sent by email to a driver who’s been on the road for six hours.
- Slot changes entered into the TMS but not pushed to the carrier’s dispatcher.
- Site rules that exist in a PDF nobody opened since onboarding.
- Yard moves coordinated by shouting across a yard the size of a football pitch.
Each of these is technically a communication. None of them is coordination. The difference is whether the receiver actually got the information in time to act on it.
What to do differently as a decision-maker
If you run an operation (as a logistics manager, a planner, a site lead, a COO), the practical question is not “did we send the information” but “did it land”. A few things tend to help.
Start by asking the people downstream what they wish they knew earlier. Not in a survey, in a conversation. Most of them have a list ready and have been waiting for someone to ask.
The second thing is to treat waiting time as a real cost line in the budget. Put a number on it. Drivers, fitters, technicians, receivers (anyone who waits for someone else’s decision) is a cost centre even when nobody books it as one.
And then build the assumption into your planning that information has to reach the person who acts on it, in a channel they actually check, before they need it. If that breaks the current process, the process is what needs to change, not the operator.
Coordination is cheap when you treat it as a design problem. It gets expensive when you treat it as someone else’s problem.