Written by T. Bishop, Dispatch
I've been routing trucks at this yard since 2014. Most weeks are similar: come in at 5 a.m., look at yesterday's notes, look at today's loads, build the routes in my head, then cross-check with the WMS. Some weeks are weird. This was one of the weird ones.
Monday.
Started clean. Six routes built by 5:45 a.m. Two trucks down to Pueblo, one north to Fort Collins, one east to Limon, two staying inside the metro. Forty-one stops between them. The Pueblo run was light on the way back, so I paired it with a brewery pickup in Colorado Springs that had been sitting on the schedule for a week. Drivers rolled out at 6:30 a.m. and we were tracking on time by 9.
Tuesday.
Snow. Always a wildcard in March in Denver. Two routes pushed to Wednesday. The two we ran were short and stayed in the metro. We took the down day to deep-clean the dispatch hut and re-stock the printer paper, which sounds boring but is actually one of the small operational tasks that prevents bigger problems later.
Wednesday.
Caught up. Ran the two pushed routes plus the two scheduled. Four trucks out, four trucks back, all loaded both ways. This is the kind of day where the operational math just works and you can feel it.
Thursday — the missing pallet.
Customer in Boulder called (well, emailed) at 10 a.m. saying they were short one pallet on their delivery from Wednesday. Our BOL said 12 pallets out, the customer counted 11 in their dock. We re-checked the loadout photos, re-checked the BOL, and re-checked the dispatcher notes. Everything said 12 pallets. Eventually I walked back to Zone E and found pallet #4112 still sitting there with a 'Boulder Wed' label on it. The driver had been short one pallet of cube space and somebody had made a quiet decision to leave it without telling anyone. We delivered it to Boulder Friday morning at no charge and added a hard rule: every short load gets reported up the chain in writing the same day.
Friday.
Apology delivery to Boulder. Two more routine routes. End of week tally: 14 pickups, 12 deliveries, 1 mystery solved. Net loaded ratio for the week was 89%, which is below our 91% target but not by enough to lose sleep over. Saturday I came in for half a day to file paperwork.
The moral.
Every problem in this business eventually shows up in the dispatch hut. Most of them are small, all of them require a paper trail, and a few of them teach you a rule that you stop violating forever after. The pallet #4112 incident gave us a new rule, which means it was worth the apology delivery. That is how operations evolve in small companies — incident by incident, never in a slide deck.