The Hidden Cost of Ad-Hoc Dispatch
Most fleets assign loads by radio, phone, and experience. It works, but it leaves two expensive gaps: trucks running empty because the dispatcher could not see a nearer load, and no record of what was planned versus what actually happened. In a typical trucking or mining operation, fuel accounts for 30-40% of total operating costs, and empty kilometres are the most avoidable slice of it.
Start With Defined Routes
The foundation is deceptively simple. Define your routes once, on your own geozones: loading faces, crushers, dump sites, weighbridges, customer yards. A route is a start zone and an end zone on your actual haul roads, not a line on a public-road map. From that moment, every trip dispatched on the route is automatically tracked against it:
- Step timeline: start zone, loaded, en route, end zone, offloaded, each with a timestamp and duration
- Route exits flagged: a truck leaving the defined route is marked in real time
- Unexpected offloads flagged: weight dropping outside the destination zone raises a flag
- Overdue marking: vehicles exceeding your configured threshold turn red on the board
Dispatch From Live Availability
With routes defined and weights live, dispatch stops being guesswork. The dispatcher sees which vehicles are free, which are inbound to each zone (closest first, with road-network ETAs), and whether each is empty or loaded. Assigning the next task from that picture is how empty kilometres actually get cut: the nearest empty truck gets the load, instead of the one that happens to call in first.
Planned vs Actual Closes the Loop
Because every trip is measured against its route, you get the record ad-hoc dispatch never produces: cycle durations by route, flags by vehicle and shift, and a clean answer to "did today go to plan?" That is where the compounding savings live: each bottleneck you remove stays removed, and each fix is visible in the next shift's numbers.
Getting Started
Route and task planning works best combined with real-time weight data: when the system knows where every truck is and what it is carrying, dispatch decisions get sharper. Learn more about Kimax Route Planning or book a demo to see it on your own operation.