The thing that’s the biggest issue here is that the cpm system is the ultimate carrot and donkey method. The office bods know that come hell or high water a driver will achieve 12,000miles a month as that is what they need to do to get a reasonable wage, so there’s no incentive to improve efficiency.
For carriers it’s a simple way of doing it, they have fixed costs for office premises and staff, fixed costs for trucks and trailers, fixed costs for insurance and they just need to divide those into 144,000miles x the amount of trucks they run to figure out what that cost is per mile, add fuel costs per mile, which thanks to the fuel surcharge system is again almost a fixed cost, then add the cpm for the driver, maintenance and tyres and add a cpm for profit and there’s the rate.
This is why there are so many drivers logging 1155kms a day and this is why the elog is being brought in.
Glass partitions and driver debrief rooms have exacerbated this as there is no feedback from drivers, they’re too scared to mention the unmentionable that they have had to falsify their logs in order to complete a trip in the expected time, so all the office bod knows is how long PC Miler tells him it takes.
As Chris knows only too well, I spent a few months in the office and trying to explain to customers and brokers about how much time a job actually takes is something they don’t hear quite often.
On many occasions I had to get deliveries rebooked after the customer or broker worked out the times based on loading within an hour of the alloted pick up time and then starting from there with a fresh log for the day, running the speed limit everywhere and doing 11hrs driving at the speed limit within a 12hr day.
That’s how things are done over here because nobody has ever stood up and told them how things actually work in the real world.
If you tell people you run 100% legal on a Facebook page you get called a ■■■■■■ or a ■■■■■, they all think they’re rubber duck ffs.
I say let them bring it on, us lot are used to managing our time properly and we’re not afraid to stand up for ourselves, we will end up a highly sought after commodity within the first few months of 2018.