Idle Wheels

Outside every mill, cold store and wholesale warehouse there is a line of vehicles doing nothing. Everyone who works there knows it is bad. Nobody knows Outside every mill, cold store and wholesale warehouse there is a line of vehicles doing nothing. Everyone who works there knows it is bad. Nobody knows how bad, when it is worst, or - the part that decides what to do about it - Why? The yard manager is sure they all turn up at once. The drivers are sure the yard is slow. Neither can show the other anything, because the only record is a gate register with arrival times in it and nothing else. Idle Wheels is three taps a vehicle. In at the gate. Somebody has started on it. Gone. From those it splits the visit into the two halves that have completely different answers: the time the vehicle stood doing nothing, and the time it was actually being loaded or unloaded. Every yard guesses at that split, and almost every yard guesses wrong, because the standing time is invisible from inside the shed. Then it does the thing that makes the figure worth having. Knowing vehicles waiting ninety minutes is nearly useless on its own, because it is true of two opposite situations. If fifteen arrive between eight and nine and the yard can handle six an hour, the yard is not slow: it is being asked to do three hours of work in one, and the answer is to stagger the arrivals, which costs nothing. If six arrive in that hour and they still stand ninety minutes, the yard genuinely is behind, and the answer is hands or bays, which costs a great deal. So the app works out this yard's own capacity - from its own handling time and how many vehicles it can work on at once - and sets each hour's arrivals against it. Hour by hour it says which of the two is happening, in plain words, with the count of vehicles behind each. The chart draws the capacity as a line across the columns: what stands above it arrived faster than the yard could ever have managed, and what stands below it but still waited is the yard falling behind. It is careful about what it will not claim. The middle tap is the one that gets missed when a lorry rolls in during a rush, and a visit without it can be measured gate to gate and no further. The app never guesses at it: those visits are counted on their own and reported as what they are, so you can see exactly what the missing tap costs. No hour is judged until eight vehicles have arrived in it, and no verdict is given at all until the yard's own handling time is known. Every figure is the middle of the yard's own visits rather than an average, so one lorry left overnight cannot rewrite a week. It measures the yard, not the driver. There is no field anywhere for a driver, an owner or a transport company, and no figure is ever worked out for a person: a vehicle carries a short label so that two standing in the yard can be told apart, and nothing else. It holds no money either - no waiting charge, no demurrage, no hire, no value of a load - only minutes and vehicles.Everything stays on the phone. No account, no sign-in, no internet, and no permissions are requested, because none are needed.