Operations

Rate card

The contracted price sheet for a provider: base rate, distance or zone bands, vehicle type, surcharges, and the accessorials that apply per stop. Every quote and every invoice is checked against it, so a rate card that is out of date shows up first as unexplained cost per delivery.

Where this fits

The day-to-day vocabulary of running deliveries. Routes, waves, drops, manifests, ETAs, SLAs. These are the units operators reason in, and the inputs every downstream model needs.

Related terms

Hours of service: The regulated limit on how long a commercial driver may drive and work before a required break or reset. A hard routing constraint: a plan that ignores it produces routes a driver cannot legally finish, and the break has to be placed where there is somewhere to stop.
Cubing: Calculating how much of a vehicle an order will actually occupy, by dimensions rather than piece count, so the plan commits real space instead of an average. Distributors cube a box truck before they load it, and a route that fits on paper but not in the vehicle is a cube failure rather than a routing failure. Cube capacity is a hard constraint, not a preference.
Route adherence: How closely the executed route matched the planned one: sequence kept, stops served in window, no improvised detours. Low adherence usually means the plan was wrong rather than the driver was, because drivers route around what the model could not see. Measuring it is how an operation finds the constraints missing from its own planning.
Vehicle utilization: The share of a vehicle's available capacity actually used on a route, measured by weight, volume, pallet positions, or stops. Capacity left unused and missed promises often share a cause: it was committed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Promise buffer: The padding added to a quoted delivery time so the commitment survives a bad day. Every operation has one, most do not know its size, and it is paid for twice: once in customers who choose a faster competitor, and once in capacity held against a risk that rarely lands. Delivering early half the time is the sign the buffer is too wide.