Client notes
These are named accounts of specific work: a gate time in Lincolnshire, a hospital cluster in Bristol, a high street in Fife. They are not scores out of five.
Route performance review
They sat in bay three at 05:40 and wrote down the actual time the first grocery van moved, which was eleven minutes after the sheet. That single line ended a month of arguing with the retailer about ‘traffic on the A-road’.
Helen Crowe
Depot manager, mixed grocery rounds, Lincolnshire
Multi-depot comparison
The multi-yard pack was careful about geography, which I needed. What I still wanted, and did not get, was a sharper note on how our Birmingham bay design compares with Leeds — the charts showed the delay, the building sketches were thinner than I hoped.
James Okeke
Regional operations, three-yard parcel contract
Missed-window inquiry
We sent paper sheets. They did not pretend we had a live trace. The missed-window note for the hospital cluster named the barrier wait and the 16:10 chain on the pharmacy door. I used that page in a call the same week.
Priya Nair
Planner, NHS and high-street mixed rounds, Bristol
Fortnightly round notes
Fortnightly notes are dry, which is the point. When we moved the gate by fifteen minutes I could see the afternoon bunching on the high street barely moved. We would have declared a win on anecdotes.
Callum Reid
Owner-driver depot, twelve vans, Fife
The depot ran mixed grocery rounds onto market towns and a retail park. Retailer reports showed late windows; the planner blamed the A-road. Two ordinary Tuesdays showed the first van still on bay three eleven minutes after the printed departure, every day we stood there.
The pack kept delay minutes at the gate on a separate chart from delay minutes after 16:00. The manager used the gate chart in a retailer call the following week. The afternoon chart was less flattering: two rounds still bunched on the same pedestrian street. That split was the useful part of the work.
James Okeke asked us to set Birmingham, Leeds, and a smaller East Midlands yard on the same hour axis. The delay minutes compared cleanly. What he still wanted were sketches of bay design. We photographed queues at the gate; we did not measure bay widths to the standard he later asked for.
We would now say, before a comparison starts, whether building sketches are in or out. They were out of that quote. The charts still showed Leeds losing minutes at the barrier and Birmingham losing them at the last-mile cluster. The reservation in his note is fair.