Detention Data Drives Shift From Delay to Decision

A driver waits to load cargo. (Getty Images)

For truck drivers and fleet operators, a line from rock legend Tom Petty captures the frustration of driver detention: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Time spent waiting between arrival and release at shippers’ and receivers’ facilities has long been treated as a routine cost of doing business in trucking, but it remains one of the industry’s most persistent drains on productivity.

For carriers, the starting point to addressing excessive driver detention time is basic visibility, said Danny Crooks, vice president of corporate transportation for trucking and logistics provider Averitt Express.

“We use e-log and other onboard telematics to monitor all components of a driver’s tour of duty,” he said. “Time of arrival at either the shipper or consignee starts the clock on detention.”

That gives fleets a baseline for measuring detention at the customer and facility levels and a way to compare chronic delay points across a network.

Crooks said carriers are trying to head off detention before a truck reaches the gate.

“Preset, or prescheduled, appointments are verified prior to dispatch and then aligned with transit expectations regarding time under load,” he said.

Data on driver detention time is also feeding directly into fleets’ planning and operations software.

“Historical dwell experience for specific pickup and/or delivery locations is one of many factors accounted for in the TMS system,” Crooks said. Detention data also shapes shipper relationships, he added.

“Most shippers and receivers are aware of their individual performance with respect to dwell time and detention charges,” he said. “Those with a history of excessive delay time will often find that capacity will come at higher rates, especially in tighter markets.”

Averitt, based in Cookeville, Tenn., ranks No. 29 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of largest for-hire carriers in North America.

Driver detention is also a measurable safety concern because it can contribute to driver fatigue and lead to unsafe driving behaviors to make up for lost time.

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The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General estimated in a 2018 report that every 15-minute increase in average dwell time raises expected crash risk by 6.2%, giving carriers, shippers and technology providers even stronger incentive to focus on the issue.

Optimizing Visibility and Planning

The fleets making real progress on driver detention have moved “well past your standard arrival and departure workflows from the driver” because those are “vanity metrics,” said Bill Cain, director of product management for Trimble’s TMW.Suite transportation management system.

Instead, he said, carriers are “decomposing dwell into a phase that the shipper can actually act on,” including gate-in to dock-in time, dock-in to load or unload start, load or unload duration, and load complete to gate-out.

Cain added that many fleets track driver hours-of-service impact, revenue lost per detention event, and whether delays were caused by the carrier, customers or facility operations.

Leading fleets are also building customer and facility scorecards that benchmark locations by average detention per stop, the percentage of loads detained beyond a set threshold and average wait time by day of week and time of day.

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Cain

“This data has become more actionable because fleets can now combine real-time GPS and ELD telemetry with appointment management platforms directly into their TMS workflows,” Cain said. “That operational visibility is what enables fleets and shippers to move from reactive detention reporting to proactive facility optimization.”

Cain said he sees “four shifts happening here all at once,” starting with predictive ETA tools that replace repeated driver check-in calls. He pointed to tools, such as Trimble TruETA and Visibility, that push a live arrival window to the shipper once the driver dispatches. This calculation incorporates telematics data, route information, the driver’s hours-of-service clock, traffic and road conditions.

“Shippers and carriers see the same picture,” he said.

Geofence-triggered workflows can sharpen dock coordination, he added. Door-level location data can pinpoint which dock is ready for which load instead of simply notifying operations of a “truck somewhere in your lot.”

But the bigger opportunity, Cain argued, is before the appointment is booked.

“Weather and traffic feed appointments before they’re booked,” he said, noting that layering those conditions against a facility’s historical dwell profile helps planners answer the core question of whether a load is truly bookable.

If average dwell time at a facility jumps after a certain hour of the day, for example, planners can reposition to another time slot or find a different lane.

“Better to kill the load before it commits than recover a driver with a dead clock from someone else’s yard,” Cain said.

This is “the most important shift in the category,” and one that remains underreported, he said. “The TMS is no longer just a system of record, it’s becoming the decision engine.”

Dwell history now feeds load tendering, driver-load matching, appointment booking, lane profitability and real-time replanning. A lane that looks attractive on rate alone may not hold up once detention exposure and lost asset utilization are factored in.

Cain said customer conversations become more productive when they move from anecdote to evidence. Simply telling a shipper its facility performs poorly rarely prompts action, he said. What gets results, he said, is detailed, verifiable data, such as 18 months of time-stamped, geofence-verified and electronic logging device-corroborated records showing that a specific distribution center averages high dwell time at certain times on certain days of the week.

“The gap between the fleets that charge for detention and the less than 50% who actually receive payment can be closed using precise data,” Cain said.

The larger opportunity, though, is using customer scorecards, predictive ETA tools and historical dwell analytics to prevent lengthy delays before they begin.