The choices between the timetable and the customer's door

In 2021, a corridor using three terminal locations repeatedly missed the receiving windows agreed with industrial customers. The rail leg was only part of the problem. Late bookings compressed collection and terminal handling, leaving little room for ordinary variation before the planned departure. Our sales team argued that an earlier deadline would make the offer less attractive than competing road services. Planners argued that the existing promise depended on too many favourable handovers.

I asked the teams to examine the complete movement with a group of customers, including what happened after a missed receiving window. We proposed moving the booking cut-off eight hours earlier for the standard service and describing a separate option for later requests. The change made the offer less flexible, and some volume moved elsewhere. We also funded additional collection coordination rather than assuming that an earlier deadline would resolve every operational issue on its own.

Arrival within the agreed receiving window rose from 88% to 95% across successive twelve-week observations. The customer and shipment mix was not identical, so I did not attribute the whole movement in the rate to the cut-off change. Additional coordination cost €96,000 over the following year. Late-booking volume on the standard product fell by 11%, a consequence the commercial team had anticipated and that remained in the corridor account.

We retained the revised offer and reviewed the exceptions separately. The decision made the ordinary promise more credible at the cost of some flexibility and additional operating effort. It did not establish that earlier booking is the answer for every lane. Customers with different inventory patterns needed a different discussion. The important change was to stop selling one arrival expectation while relying on an unspoken set of conditions that only the planning team understood.

I would discuss the booking cut-off with shippers before finalising the sailing proposition, rather than ask commercial colleagues to explain a necessary restriction after customers have planned around it.

A 2022 equipment review found that several corridors were being managed as separate pools. A unit available near one customer's return movement could remain unavailable to another planning team, which then arranged an empty repositioning journey. The local managers had good reasons to protect the equipment they expected to need. A shared pool would require them to trust a wider allocation process and accept that a familiar unit might not remain in their depot.

I supported a trial across the participating corridors, with common visibility of availability and a defined process for resolving competing requirements. The proposal also required eighty additional leased units. Finance questioned why an efficiency programme needed more equipment. The operating case was that a larger, better-positioned pool could reduce empty travel and missed opportunities even though the lease bill increased. We kept that claim open to examination rather than presenting the larger fleet as an automatic improvement.

Empty road kilometres fell from 1.28 million to 0.96 million across comparable twenty-four-week periods, a reduction of 320,000 kilometres. The additional annual lease cost was €240,000. We did not translate the distance reduction directly into an equal cash saving, because vehicle costs, scheduling and other commitments affected the financial result. We also made no verified emissions claim from the distance figure alone.

The trial exposed a new coordination burden. Some depots spent more time resolving priorities, and the allocation rules needed revision when local demand changed sharply. We retained the pool while adjusting those rules and keeping local escalation routes. The result taught me that equipment efficiency concerns the complete cycle, not simply the smallest number of units on a balance sheet. It also showed why a useful operating improvement should carry its additional costs into the board account instead of letting the kilometre reduction tell the whole story.

Next time I would examine equipment availability with the empty-distance proposal at inception, making the additional pool an explicit part of the choice from the beginning.

Ahead of the 2023 operating year, we reviewed a proposal to remove reserved contingency slots at selected terminals and purchase alternatives only when disruption occurred. The annual reservation cost was €360,000. Procurement colleagues believed ordinary utilisation did not justify the commitment. Corridor teams had experienced occasions when short-notice capacity was scarce precisely because other operators were responding to the same disruption. The disagreement concerned which risk the company should carry before the event was known.

I recommended retaining a narrower, specified reserve rather than eliminating it or treating the previous arrangement as untouchable. We documented the circumstances in which the capacity could be used and the authority needed to release it to an affected movement. We also agreed to report unused capacity alongside recoveries, so that the programme would not be defended only through the most memorable difficult day.

During the reviewed year, 18% of the reserved capacity was unused. The reserve supported alternative handling for movements associated with seventeen disrupted train departures, but we did not claim that every shipment would otherwise have failed or attach a speculative avoided-loss total. Some customers still received later deliveries. The annual cost remained €360,000, and its commercial value had to be assessed against the service offered and the alternatives actually available.

The board continued the revised arrangement for another planning period, with changes to two locations whose pattern of use differed from the original assumptions. I consider the decision an example of purchasing an option with a visible cost, not proof that all spare capacity is prudent. A reserve should be reviewed for its relevance and practical accessibility. Its value is weakened if the paperwork says it exists but the operating team cannot call on it when a movement needs a different route through the network.

I would bring the cost of reserved terminal capacity into the first service design, so the commercial promise and its supporting commitment are considered together.

In 2024, a customer-notification project proposed automatically sending an available-for-collection message when a rail arrival event entered our system. A pilot showed that the two events did not always coincide. A train could have arrived while the relevant unit was still awaiting handling or the necessary release. Customer-service colleagues warned that an early message could send a vehicle to a terminal before collection was possible. The product team wanted to preserve the planned launch date.

I approved a smaller release that used only events with a sufficiently clear meaning and kept manual confirmation for the uncertain cases. Operations and product colleagues reviewed the sources together and defined the difference between arrival, availability and onward collection. The work delayed the broader rollout by ten weeks and cost an additional €180,000 in integration and temporary service effort. We did not describe that expenditure as an unavoidable technology cost; it arose partly because the original brief had treated several events as equivalent.

In the next sixteen-week sample, customer enquiries about contradictory collection messages fell from 7.2 to 2.6 per hundred shipments on the participating flows. The result concerned that category of enquiry, not all service contacts or overall delivery performance. Manual checks remained for some events, and the team continued to review exceptions rather than assuming that the revised system had removed every ambiguity.

The project changed how we approved customer communication. We now asked what operational fact the message represented and who would act when the fact was uncertain. Automation remained valuable, but its scope followed the quality of the event rather than the appeal of a more comprehensive demonstration. I would repeat the sequencing decision while involving operations earlier next time, so that a preventable definition problem did not become a late choice between a delay and an unreliable customer promise.

A group of smaller industrial customers wanted access to intermodal departures but could not consistently fill the volume assumptions behind our standard offers. In 2025, commercial colleagues proposed combining their demand into a pooled service. The first model offered five departures a week and assumed that bookings would arrive evenly. Planning colleagues showed that the actual pattern was uneven, with some departures underfilled and others requiring additional arrangements at short notice.

I approved a revised three-departure weekly offer with explicit booking and collection windows. Customers could contribute smaller volumes, but some shipments would wait longer before departure. We discussed that trade-off before enrolling the first group and retained a separately priced alternative for movements that could not accept the schedule. The pooled product was not described as equivalent to the faster service simply because it used the same principal corridor.

Across the first six months, twenty-three customers used the offer and it carried 3,800 loaded units. Average purchased rail-slot utilisation on those departures was 84%, compared with 67% in the initial eight-week five-departure pilot. The periods and customer mix differed, so the comparison informed the next plan rather than proving a single causal effect. Three pilot customers did not join the revised service because the waiting time was incompatible with their production needs.

The product contributed €290,000 before central overhead during its first six months, after the direct transport and handling costs included in the review. We kept that definition beside the figure and did not call it enterprise profit. The decision gave smaller shippers a workable shared offer while making its limitations visible. It also reminded us that aggregation does not remove differences between customers. A pooled service becomes credible when the participants understand the schedule they are buying, including the time that improved utilisation asks them to accept.

I would agree the treatment of waiting time with smaller shippers before offering pooled capacity, giving them a clearer basis for deciding whether the arrangement suits their business.