Four in the morning

Four in the morning. Third delivery. Nobody knows I am coming.

That is how it worked. I drove 24-metre Scania rigs for three years, 2004 to 2007. Most mornings started the same way. I had an address, an approximate time, and no contact person. The recipient had no idea I was on my way.

I turned into the industrial estate. Gates closed. No sign. No instructions. I called the dispatcher. The dispatcher called the warehouse. The warehouse called the security guard. The guard came out after twenty minutes.

Meanwhile I stood still. Engine idling. The clock ticking toward the next delivery.

This was not a bad day. It was a normal day. The waiting times were not exceptions. They were the system.

The loading bay was occupied. Or the wrong bay. Or the right bay but nobody had staged the goods. I reversed in, waited, reversed out, drove around, reversed in again.

Sometimes loading took forty-five minutes. Sometimes three hours. The difference rarely depended on the volume of goods. It depended on whether someone had prepared for the arrival.

There were terminals that worked. Not many, but a few. They had one thing in common: the driver knew what to expect before arriving. Which bay. What time. Who was receiving. It was not advanced. It was basic coordination. But it was missing at most places.

I know this sounds like a small problem. It is not.

A driver who waits costs money. The truck costs money. The goods that do not arrive on time cost money. The bay’s inefficiency spreads backward through the chain.

Three hours of waiting times forty drivers per day times one year. That adds up to thousands of hours that nobody sees, nobody measures and nobody reports.

It is not just an operating cost. It is an information gap that has become accepted.

The problems did not show up in any system. No TMS registered the waiting time. No KPI captured the coordination gap. In the PowerPoint version we delivered “on time.” In reality we sat idling outside a closed gate.

I stopped driving trucks in 2007. I got two master’s degrees from KTH and Stockholm University. I started a tech company that built tools to solve exactly this problem. Fifteen years later I sat at Volvo Group looking at the same pattern in a larger system.

The gap between the person doing the work and the person making the decisions is not a communication problem. It is a structural problem.

The information sits with the driver. The decision-maker sits six organizational layers away. It takes weeks, sometimes months, before an operational insight reaches someone with the mandate to change anything.

That costs. Not in abstract terms. In waiting time. In fuel. In drivers who quit. In accident risks nobody measures.

The driver knows how the system works. The question is whether there is a channel back.