Seven numbers that tell you how your deliveries are really going

Ask most delivery operations how last month went and you get a total: we did 2,400 deliveries. That is a measure of how busy you were, not of how well it went. A month with 2,400 deliveries, a 71% on-time rate and two drivers who quit is not a good month.

Seven numbers cover almost everything a local fleet needs to know. Each one is computable from completed work, and each one, when it moves, tells you something specific to do.

1. On-time rate, measured from real timestamps

The headline number, and the one most often computed dishonestly.

Compute it from the actual completion timestamp against the promised window, on every order, including the ones that were rescheduled or failed. Not from the plan. Not excluding “exceptions” — an exception is exactly the thing you are trying to count.

Track it weekly, and split it by route, by driver, by window type and by day of week. The aggregate number tells you whether you have a problem. The splits tell you where it is, and it is usually much more specific than “we are running late” — it is Thursday afternoons on the north route.

2. Stops per driver-hour

The productivity number, and the one that quietly determines your cost per delivery.

Completed stops divided by paid driver hours, including loading, returns and waiting. Not just the hours on the road — the paid hours, because that is what you spend.

Local fleets typically sit somewhere between two and six. Where you land is mostly about density and route quality, not driver effort, which is why this number responds to planning changes far more than to pressure on drivers. It is also the number that moves a build-versus-buy decision more than anything else.

3. Fully loaded cost per delivery

Total delivery cost for the month divided by completed deliveries. Total means wages plus payroll costs, vehicle, fuel, insurance, maintenance, phones, software, and the share of the dispatcher’s time.

Almost nobody computes this, and it is the only number that tells you whether delivery is making or losing money. Compute it monthly and track the trend rather than the absolute — the trend is what tells you whether growth is helping.

Split it by vehicle and by route when you can. There is usually one route that is quietly twice the cost of the others.

4. First-attempt success rate

The percentage of deliveries completed on the first visit.

Every failed attempt is paid for twice: once for the trip that failed and once for the retry, plus the call, the reschedule and, sometimes, the refund. A fleet at 92% first-attempt is spending meaningfully less than one at 84% doing identical volume.

The fix is nearly always notification and access, not driver behavior. Track the failure reasons — nobody home, no access, wrong address, refused — and the top reason will point at something specific: an arriving-soon message that goes out too late, an address book that needs cleaning, a building with a buzzer nobody documented.

5. Service time at the stop

Median minutes between arrival and completion, split by stop type.

This is the most useful number nobody measures. It sets what a realistic day looks like, it is the input your route planning most needs, and its distribution tells you where the friction is. If the median residential stop is four minutes and one route averages nine, something about that route — apartment blocks, parking, a proof step that is slower than it needs to be — is eating an hour a day.

Use the median, not the mean. One thirty-minute wait at a loading dock will distort an average and tell you nothing.

6. Distance per stop

Route distance divided by stops completed, per route.

This is your density measure and your fuel bill in one number. It tells you whether territories are drawn sensibly and whether sequencing is working. A route where distance per stop is double the fleet average is either genuinely rural — fine, now you know what it costs — or badly grouped, which is fixable this week.

Measure it from completed routes, not planned ones. The difference between the two is its own useful signal: a large gap means drivers are not running the plan, and it is worth asking them why. They usually have a good reason that should be in the plan.

7. Driver retention

Drivers who stay, over a rolling twelve months.

Turnover is expensive in a way that never appears on a delivery report: recruiting, training, the productivity dip of a new driver learning the territory, and the on-time rate on the routes they cover while learning. Replacing a driver costs the equivalent of many weeks of their pay once you count all of it.

It is also the best lagging indicator you have of whether the operation is well run. Drivers leave overloaded routes, unpredictable pay and days that are impossible from 10am. If retention is falling while the other six numbers look fine, the other six are being achieved by pressure that is not sustainable.

The numbers that mislead

Total deliveries. Activity, not health. It goes up when you are busy and tells you nothing about whether busy was good.

Average route time. Hides everything. Two four-hour routes, one with twelve stops and one with thirty, average out to nothing meaningful.

Deliveries per driver per day. Ignores hours worked and route difficulty, and rewards giving your best driver the easiest route.

Any metric computed from the plan. Planned distance, planned on-time, planned cost. These measure your optimism.

Customer satisfaction with no denominator. Three complaints is a different number at 200 deliveries than at 4,000.

How to actually run this

Pick one hour a month. Compute all seven. Put them in the same spreadsheet or dashboard each time so the trend is visible, and write one sentence next to each about what changed and why.

Then pick one to move. Not seven. The one with the clearest link to money right now — usually first-attempt rate or stops per driver-hour — and work it for a quarter. The others will be measured, which is enough for now, and you will find they move too, because these numbers are not independent.

An operation that knows all seven and is deliberately working on one is in better shape than one tracking twenty and acting on none.

PrivateMile reports on-time rate, stops and distance per driver, fuel and distance cost per vehicle, proof compliance and driver pay from work actually completed — measured from real timestamps and real routes, not from the plan.