The widget shows the "running" detention penalty for loads that keep dwelling at stops for a long time. This helps the customers to call for action immediately and empowers them to reduce their detention penalty in the long run

About Detention

Detention is when a truck is delayed at either the origin pick up, or the destination delivery location for more than the agreed-upon “free time”. In most freight transports, the truck has 2 hours at the time of pick up and 2 hours upon delivery free of any cost. The purpose of detention charges is to compensate the truck/carrier when they are held up due to the shipper’s inefficiency. The cost for detention charges varies based on the company, the equipment, and geography. It is usually between $50 and $100 per hour, with a maximum cap.

Detention fees are more than just an unfortunate part of doing business, they also result in delayed deliveries and payments, lost sales, and lack of product availability. These fees negatively impact cash flow and profitability.

What I did?

I built a metric widget that displays the current running detention minutes and the top 5 loads which were contributing the most to the detention penalty. With the exhaustive data that Fourkites has, we were able to capture the live detention caused by a load during its journey. This was constantly synced to Elasticsearch from where we did a painless scripted query to get the aggregated metric and details for the widget.

Impact

This helped all the customers to quickly identify the loads which were causing them huge penalties and take corrective action saving millions in detention penalties.

Useful reads:

• https://www.loaddelivered.com/blog/the-cost-of-dwell-time-under-the-eld-mandate/
• https://www.freightwaves.com/news/cash-flow-corner/driver-detention