Nobody measures the recovery
James Findlay, CEO of Axel Intelligence
Most companies think they track all the metrics that matter - OTIF, miles per route, stops per hour, cost per drop. The dashboard is full. The scorecard is green.
However, good dispatchers can make a fragile network look healthy and existing metrics only measure the plan. None of them measures the recovery.
Here's what we mean. A truck breaks down at 9 a.m. The dispatcher scrambles to reroute trucks, call customers to rearrange windows, reallocate drivers to minimize overtime, and reschedule problematic deliveries to subsequent days. By noon, the operation is stitched back together. The end-of-day report looks fine. OTIF reports 96%.
Every dashboard answers the obvious question "did we miss the window?" but which dashboard answers the insightful questions "how long before first action?", "what was our network exposure?", and "how much time did we take to regain control?"
When we asked around 100 Northeast batch-delivery operators how long passes between a disruption and first corrective action, the typical answer was a response lag of ten minutes. Ten minutes before the reroute is even decided, let alone executed. Nobody tracks that number, because existing KPIs aren’t built to catch the scramble between the plan and the outcome.
A slow recovery doesn't just risk one late load - it degrades every decision made during the window. The dispatcher managing a crisis isn't optimizing the other 40 stops and the costs bury themselves inside metrics that still look healthy: the fuel from the panicked reroute, the customer whose window technically wasn’t missed but has spoilage concerns, the hour spent firefighting instead of planning.
The industry has spent years perfecting metrics for the plan and none for the recovery - and in dispatch, recovery is where the day is won or lost. Response Lag. Network Exposure. Total Recovery Duration. These are the KPIs of the future.
The next generation of logistics software won't just tell operators what happened. It will measure how fast they got back on their feet.