How to Measure the Office Time Spent on Paper Delivery Dockets
How much office time do paper delivery dockets actually take in your business? The useful answer is not an industry estimate. It is the number you can measure in your own office.
This guide gives you a simple one-week audit. You are measuring workload, not trying to turn every saved minute into an invented cash saving.
Step 1: Choose one normal working week
Avoid an unusually quiet week or a one-off project if it is not representative. Use a week that looks reasonably like normal trading for your operation.
Step 2: Count the dockets the office handles
Record the number of paper delivery dockets that come back to the office during the week. Keep this as your baseline volume.
Step 3: Time the routine handling
Record the minutes spent on the normal work around those dockets:
- collecting and sorting returned dockets;
- checking whether the information is complete and readable;
- entering or re-entering delivery information into another system;
- filing or organising records for later retrieval.
Step 4: Record the exceptions separately
The routine work is only part of the picture. Keep a separate note of exceptions that create extra office work:
- a docket has not come back;
- a docket cannot be read;
- a job, customer or site reference is unclear;
- supporting photographs, signatures or weighbridge information need to be matched;
- the office has to contact a driver or another person to reconstruct the record.
For each exception, record how long it takes to resolve.
Step 5: Measure retrieval time
When accounts or a customer asks about an older delivery, time how long it takes to find the relevant docket and supporting information. Do not count only the successful search; include the time spent checking folders, messages or asking other people.
Step 6: Add the office hours
At the end of the week, total the routine handling time, exception time and retrieval time. You now have a measured weekly workload for your own operation.
Keep the categories separate as well as the total. That shows whether the biggest issue is routine data entry, missing information or finding records afterwards.
Step 7: Compare the same measures after changing the process
If you introduce digital delivery records, repeat the audit using the same categories. Compare like with like: the same type of work, over a comparable week.
With Tipper360, selected delivery information is recorded during the job and the completed record becomes available to the office after synchronisation. Supporting photographs, signatures and notes can remain with the relevant job where required.
The result worth measuring is whether the office spends less time handling, reconstructing and retrieving delivery records.
Do not automatically convert every hour into a cash saving
An hour no longer spent handling paper does not automatically become an hour of cash saved. Staff may use that capacity for invoicing, customer queries, planning or other work. The defensible figure is the workload you actually measured.
Want to look at the wider cost problem first? See where paper dockets create office workload.