Keeping Contractors in Line

A user told us recently “A contractor  came to us last week with a claim for £300 due to delays they said they had getting on site.  We ran off a report from Zone Manager showing how often they didn’t turn up or were late.  Claim withdrawn!”
An important benefit with using Zone Manager is the records that it keeps, which can show whether Contractors are working well to the plan or not.  What you can report on depends on the activities you record. At the basic level you are at least recording what is expected or planned. Taking this further, if you record when deliveries arrive you know whether they were on time or not.  Of course with modern traffic conditions some tolerance is needed here.  (In Zone Manager you can specify the tolerance you are willing to allow e.g. 15 or 30 minutes)  And further still, if you record when the vehicle leaves, you know whether the time that was booked, was insufficient, or whether more than enough was booked (i.e the TC asked for more than they needed), potentially preventing other activities taking place.  Either way, excessive over or under booking of time implies bad planning.

Just putting Trade Contractors and Suppliers bookings in the Diary gives you a starting point. When a vehicle arrives that is not on the schedule, it can highlighted as ‘Unplanned’.  If it never arrives it is a ‘No-Show’. You can just keep notes of these manually but a better way is to enter then on Zone Manager.  At the end of the week the Unplanned Deliveries report will give you a breakdown by Contractor.

If you recorded arrivals at a site Gate or Holding Park then you can produce a number of more detailed reports at the push of a button, most of which would have taken someone hours to do manually.
For example :

• Percentage of late (or early) arrivals by Contractor
• Percentage of No-Shows by Contractor

Recording when vehicles depart gives you the full picture and the performance reports will now include:-

Whatever level of recording you are able to do, the Trade Contractor performance summaries give a comparative breakdown of all of the above, showing totals and percentages.

Zone Manager can give very similar reports for Crane and Hoist usage.  Usually the mechanisms for recording these times are not in place, typically because these do not fall under the control of the site logistics operator.  However often implications can be made relating to the time vehicles spent on site - if a vehicle with a delivery requiring a hoist, spent a longer time on site than planned, then probably the hoist was used for a longer time too.

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