The CIS extra cost routine allows users to set up and maintain a file of extra cost codes to be selected from an on-screen window when entering shipment description data. While a listing of such costs, generally including accessorial services, is often easy to compile, the cost impact of each is not as obvious.
To study such services, drivers would need code site and service information, along with other P&D data for a study period, on driver manifest logs for a study period. Carriers wishing to perform such studies should contact TCG.
One Carrier, Viking Motor Freight, performed such a study and ran regression analysis to determine the impact to various quantifiable services and sites on pickup and delivery stop time. The study results were published in the Transportation Research Forum Journal in 1989*.
Those items studied which had a statistically significant impact on P&D time were as follows:
|
Variable |
Additional Minutes |
|
Site Conditions: |
|
|
Mall |
3.2 |
|
Park on Street |
1.2 |
|
Rural Stop |
1.9 |
|
Downtown Stop |
1.3 |
|
|
|
|
Service Requirements: |
|
|
C.O.D |
3.5 |
|
Special Instructions |
1.3 |
|
Daily Stop |
2.2 |
|
|
|
|
Other: |
|
|
Infrequent Customer |
1.6 |
|
|
|
The extra time for various site conditions are as opposed to industrial stops. The Special Instructions variable included an array of requirements, lumped together for this category, such as:
- AM delivery
- Heat required
- Do not stack
- Do not break down pallet
The daily stop requirement did not include stops with no freight. It took longer, the authors concluded, because the shipper was not always ready when the driver arrived.
Appointment stops showed up as adding additional time, but this was determined to be due to other variables, not the appointment itself.
Just as interesting as the variables having an extra cost impact were those that did not, including:
- Day of the week
- Driver age (although "junior" driver, the lowest skill level assigned to a new driver, did add 1.1 minutes
- Order of stops
- Population of the area served
- Inside pickup or delivery (but the authors felt this was due to a small sample)
- Hazardous materials (this was felt by the authors to be due to more skilled shippers and better packaging of these commodities which off-set the increased paperwork and other requirements at the stop)
CIS users might wish to make use of some of this information when determining their own extra costs.
* Smith, Housden, Jones, Leslie, Strickland (1989) "An Estimate of Pickup and Delivery Stop Time for a less-Than-Truckload Motor Carrier" Journal of the Transportation Research Forum vol. XXX, no. 1, pp 153-159