11 March 2026
How to read a day’s delay minutes without drowning in the sheet
Planners already know the round ran late. The useful question is which hour ate the minutes, and whether those minutes sat at the gate or at the fifth drop.
A completed round sheet is a long list of planned and actual times. Read left to right and every drop looks equally guilty. Delay minutes become useful when you cut the day into the hours the yard already uses: gate to first drop, late morning, the school-run band, and the last ninety minutes.
Start with the gate. If the first van is still on the yard twelve minutes after the printed departure, those minutes belong to loading, not to the high street. Charting them as ‘traffic’ hides a bay that cannot take two rigids at once.
The middle of the day is where pedestrianised streets and retailer back doors sit. A missed window at 11:40 on a market town is rarely the same problem as a missed window at 16:50 on a retail park. Keep those rows on separate charts even if they live on the same round number.
Empty running after the last drop is often missing from the conversation because it does not appear as a missed window. It still burns fuel and overtime. Ask for the time the vehicle returned through the gate, not only the time of the final signature.
When we draw delay minutes for a Content Routehub review we keep the hour axis identical from week to week. A planner can then see whether moving the gate by fifteen minutes actually shortened the afternoon bunching, or merely moved the same minutes to a different line on the sheet.