Give the shipper the waiting-time record

Every Japanese carrier knows that its drivers spend too long waiting at shippers' docks. Since the changes to drivers' working hours in April 2024, every carrier also knows that waiting is no longer free. An hour at a gate is an hour of restraint time that cannot be spent driving. The amended logistics efficiency law now asks shippers and carriers to reduce loading and waiting time, and the largest shippers must name an executive accountable for it.

Carriers have responded in two ways. Some have begun charging for waiting, which the government's indicative freight rates now recognise. Others have begun measuring it, usually through gate logs, handset check-ins or telematics. The two responses are often combined in a way I think is a mistake: the carrier measures waiting privately and produces the figures only when it wants a rate increase. The data becomes a weapon in a negotiation. I want to argue that carriers should give it away, on terms, as a shared record.

Ninety minutes nobody owned

When we fitted arrival logging at the gates of our sixty busiest shipper sites in 2023, the average wait between arrival and the start of loading or unloading was 112 minutes. At the worst site it was over three hours. Before then, waiting had been recorded on paper delivery notes, inconsistently, and nobody in our company or the shipper's could say what it amounted to across a month.

The striking thing about those 112 minutes was that nobody owned them. The shipper's warehouse manager knew trucks queued in the morning but did not know they also queued in the afternoon, because the afternoon shift reported to someone else. The shipper's purchasing department, which negotiated our rates, did not know trucks queued at all. Our own drivers knew, and complained to dispatchers, who knew and complained to depot managers, who had no evidence to take anywhere. Each party held a fragment.

A waiting-time record put together for a negotiation does nothing to change that. It persuades a buyer to pay more, or not. It does not tell the warehouse manager which hour to add a loading crew, or tell the shipper's production planner that releasing finished goods at eleven every morning creates a queue at noon. Those are the changes that reduce waiting. They are made by people who never see a rate negotiation.

Reciprocity, not a data grab

So we offered shippers the data. Each month, a shipper that signs our agreement receives a report for each of its sites: arrivals by hour, waiting by hour, the share of trucks that arrived within their booked slot, and the causes our drivers record, such as goods not ready, dock occupied or paperwork incomplete. Individual drivers are not identified. The shipper may use the report to change its own operations, and may share it with other carriers that serve the site.

In return we ask for advance shipment notices at least a day before collection, stating what will be loaded and when it will be ready. That information lets us plan the run, match a driver whose remaining hours fit the expected wait and book a slot that is realistic. It is exactly what carriers most need and are least often given.

The agreement limits how either party may use what it receives. We do not sell the data or use one shipper's operating patterns in talks with another. The shipper does not use our reports to judge individual drivers. Data are kept for three years and then deleted. These terms took longer to write than the reports took to design, and they were the reason several shippers signed.

Our sales executive was uneasy. He feared that showing customers evidence of their own inefficiency would damage relationships built over decades, and he would rather have kept the reports for negotiations. One large chemicals shipper declined both the agreement and the waiting charges, and moved about ¥1.4 billion of annual volume to another carrier. That was a real loss and I do not dismiss it.

But the shippers that signed have changed their operations in ways no negotiation could have produced. Forty-one of our sixty busiest sites now exchange data with us. Average waiting at those sites fell from 112 to 44 minutes over eighteen months. Several moved loading crews to match the arrival pattern in our reports. One food manufacturer changed the time it released goods from its production line. We also charge for waiting beyond thirty minutes, and those charges brought in ¥640 million in the year to March 2026. They are easier to agree when both sides already hold the same figures.

Agree when the waiting starts

The lesson I would pass on is mundane. Before sharing any report, agree definitions. We did not, and nine sites took months longer to sign because we argued about when waiting begins. At the gate? At the booked slot, if the truck arrived early? At the dock, if the yard is the shipper's responsibility but the queue is on a public road? Each answer is defensible. A shared record needs one answer that both parties accept before the first report is sent, or every report becomes an argument about method.

The same applies to causes. Our drivers originally recorded causes in free text, which shippers read as accusation. We replaced it with eight agreed codes, including two that place the cause on our side: truck arrived outside its slot, and documents incomplete. Including our own failures made the rest more credible.

There is a broader point for carriers' boards. Carriers have spent years treating data as a competitive asset, to be guarded from customers and competitors alike. Some of it is. But waiting at a dock is not a carrier's secret. It is a cost borne by drivers, carriers and shippers together, and it falls only when the party that can change it can see it. The carrier that shares the record gives up a negotiating card. It gains a customer that can act, and in a market short of drivers, that is the better trade.