Operations

Service time

How long a stop takes once the vehicle arrives: park, unload, carry, install, capture proof, return to the vehicle. Distinct from dwell time, which is spent waiting, and from the service window, which is the arrival window promised to the recipient. Service time set too low is the most common reason a plan that looked feasible at 6 a.m. falls apart by noon.

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

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.
Zone: The geographic unit an operation plans, prices, and measures against: a set of postal codes or a drawn boundary carrying its own capacity, service level, and cost profile. Reliability and cost move per zone per shift per provider, so a single network-wide average hides the places where the promise is actually breaking.
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.
Invoice reconciliation: Matching what each provider billed against what each delivery actually did, then pursuing the difference. The arithmetic is not the hard part: charges, credits for failed attempts, and surcharges arrive in different formats from couriers, contracted fleets, third-party delivery channels, and your own drivers, each with its own dispute window. Cost per delivery you have not reconciled is cost you cannot manage.
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 Every quote and every invoice is checked against it, so a rate card that is out of date shows up first as unexplained cost per delivery.