Archived How fast is your truck done?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Depends on where the TL puts the heavy hitters and lifts spirits ive grown to realize. A boss who gets mad, doesn't lead by example and yells to improve speed gets nowhere. Hard workers are key ingredients also. When i was doing flow my TL would have me throw the truck then breakout carts and bowl out B block, move to E block bowl out, work E block freight alone, move to B block freight and work that alone then head to the backroom for toss up and backstock until noon. Id almost always have it all done by 8am starting at 4am throwing. I was happy to have that much work and willing to work fast for my own self accomplishment. Felt good.
 
bananaman said:
With two throwing and ten on the line, it takes us 90 minutes to get a 2,300 piece truck done.

It doesn't matter though. In my experience, all logistic ETL's are never satisfied with how fast the truck is done. Speed often comes at the price of worker safety as "Speed is Life" at Target. I've seen team members pass out, throwers who were hurt, injured, and taken out on stretchers by avalanches inside the truck, and just this week an elderly team member was clutching at his chest complaining of discomfort.
Click to expand...
Taken out by stretcher? What in the world is going on over there? Lol
 
necroposting this because of the Cloud 9 episode mentioning this line: 'I've got the manual, so, you know, all we need, really, are two people throwing the truck, one pushing the line, one on bulk transition, two pulling pallets, three pre-pushing HBA, and one person bowling C and D.'

In all seriousness, in my store they keep saying all trucks under 2000 need to be offloaded in an 1 hr. and above in 1 1/2 hours. Yet we have the receiving team member who can convinces everyone that she needs to be there in the truck just pushing the line so the people catching c & d and to catch and return HBA because she pushes it right back. Its annoying.

As for our setup 7 on the line one pulling pallets, 2 in the truck, the useless receiving person pushing and griping about speed (the transition catcher can push the line as its right by the dock door), one bowling HBA one bowling chemicals (our heaviest) one person behind the line for bulk transition, One for B,c+D, and four working softlines. Occasionally we have a dedicated stocker for pets and B as well as a person to prepush hba, & C+D repacks.
 
Generally, you want a 2000-piece truck unloaded in 1 hour. 2000/60 minutes = 33 cartons/minute. So, just take your truck size and divide by 33 and that's how long you should take to unload a truck.

1700/33 = 51 minutes
2300/33 = 69 minutes

If your store is not meeting this goal, I would re-evaluate how your line is setup (custom blocks, # of TMs, etc) and adjust until you meet this goal. For us, we have 2 throwers and 1 more pushing boxes off the truck, 8 on the line.
 
We always seem to have either not enough people or too many on the line. We'll get a 2k+ truck and only have 4 on the line. Then we'll get a 1500 truck and have 8 on the line. Then the TL or ETL will send someone to the floor early, before the truck is done, and then inevitably one TM will get slammed with 100 boxes in a row and fall way behind. In a perfect world...as SrTLall said...our perfect would be 2 throwers, one scanner, one pusher and 8 on the line. Never happens though.
 
SrTLall said:
Generally, you want a 2000-piece truck unloaded in 1 hour. 2000/60 minutes = 33 cartons/minute. So, just take your truck size and divide by 33 and that's how long you should take to unload a truck.

1700/33 = 51 minutes
2300/33 = 69 minutes

If your store is not meeting this goal, I would re-evaluate how your line is setup (custom blocks, # of TMs, etc) and adjust until you meet this goal. For us, we have 2 throwers and 1 more pushing boxes off the truck, 8 on the line.
Click to expand...


You have eight people on your line?! We have 5, maybe 6, with one of these people normally hopping off often to take skids out to their department.

...I'm not a math person at all and I'm totally exhausted so I don't know why I tried to do this...it's quite possible the math/process is totally wrong here lol.

For an 1800pc truck the unload at my store normally takes 80-90min. They definitely take too long, but looking at your numbers I feel a little better...payroll is payroll, right?


If you have 8 people on the line for an 1800pc truck going at 33 boxes a minute, they're on the line for 54 minutes, using ~436 minutes of payroll. To break it down even more- 1800/54= 33 boxes a minute. 33 boxes a minute/8 TMs= 4.1 boxes/m per TM. Hypothetically speaking, each TM unloads 4.1 boxes a minute at that rate.


If my store has 5-6 people on the line for 85 minutes unloading an 1800pc truck they're using ~425-510min of payroll.

1800/85= 21 boxes a minute/6 TMs= 3.5 boxes/m per TM. So each TM unloads the equivalent of 3.5 boxes a minute our rate. BUT we don't always have 6 TMs, and half the time that 6th TM is taking pallets out to the floor, so if we have 5 TMs on the line each TM would be unloading the equivalent of 4.2 boxes a minute.

((I hesitate to even hit "submit" on this, because I'm totally convinced I screwed that math up horrifically, but I'm not seeing anything too glaringly obvious right now))



Aside from momentum and ridding the floor of skids quickly so guests aren't annoyed is there really any reason to add TMs to the line to have a faster unload vs a slower unload w/ less people? (I would much prefer a super fast unload, just asking out of curiosity)
 
callmetaylor said:
Aside from momentum and ridding the floor of skids quickly so guests aren't annoyed is there really any reason to add TMs to the line to have a faster unload vs a slower unload w/ less people? (I would much prefer a super fast unload, just asking out of curiosity)
Click to expand...

A lot of overnight stores have slower unloads with less people because they never have to worry about guests in the store. That can be said for 4AM stores as well because they should have a majority of the truck done before 8AM. If you're at a 6AM store, having a quick unload is a must so that you can bowl as much product as possible before the store opens. Bowling saves so much time, but you cannot bowl when guests are shopping, so that faster you unload, the more you can bowl and the faster the truck gets done.
 
StockerAce said:
We always seem to have either not enough people or too many on the line. We'll get a 2k+ truck and only have 4 on the line. Then we'll get a 1500 truck and have 8 on the line. Then the TL or ETL will send someone to the floor early, before the truck is done, and then inevitably one TM will get slammed with 100 boxes in a row and fall way behind. In a perfect world...as SrTLall said...our perfect would be 2 throwers, one scanner, one pusher and 8 on the line. Never happens though.
Click to expand...
It sounds like your custom blocks could be redone. Our line was built to have 1tm every 3 skids optimally, the placement of the custom blocks are so that every 3 skids is about the same amount boxes come off the truck.

Before we switched into putting those terrible u-boats on the line that kill productivity we could unload 2400 piece trucks in 50 mins back to back. Seriously during Q4 with doubles we could do 2200 piece and 2400 piece at 50 mins a pop.

That being said we switched from having 8 people on the line(4 front, 4 back), 3 pullers and 1 pacer. Now that we have to fit uboats on the line which don't fit on the line because they are too long so they are away from the line, we unload 2400 piece trucks in 75 mins. Had to reduce it back down to 4 on front 3 on back with 1 puller and a hybrid puller/pacer as the cut in hours from the consumables change, plus doesn't matter how many people we have there when we get alot of grocery the line backs up a bit due to having to walk far to use the uboats.

Btw i hate the uboats, i get it, less steps, less touches. Yet hours to process the freight are up not down in dry market. Used to take roughly 9 hours in total to get though all of dry that's added in the TM used to bowl out market during the unload. Now 9 hours they never complete anything but trucks with less than 225 boxes going to dry.

SrTLall said:
A lot of overnight stores have slower unloads with less people because they never have to worry about guests in the store. That can be said for 4AM stores as well because they should have a majority of the truck done before 8AM. If you're at a 6AM store, having a quick unload is a must so that you can bowl as much product as possible before the store opens. Bowling saves so much time, but you cannot bowl when guests are shopping, so that faster you unload, the more you can bowl and the faster the truck gets done.
Click to expand...
Absolutely if we were overnight we'd probably stagger people coming in leaving more of the Team to come in after the truck is done unloading as if we don't have to rush to make sure the floor is clear and clean by the time the store opens. The truck would take longer in terms of when the truck unload is started to when the truck is done being pushed and processed, but we'd probably use less hours and more specialized TMs.

4AM process. We bowl out the entire store no matter the truck size and there is absolutely a rush to get it done if the truck is over 2200, we don't pull from any other work centers so with 20 people we have to unload, bowl out and clear the floor before 8am, at least by 7:45 giving us time to pick up pallets and clear the areas to be a bit shop-able before the store opens.

20 sounds like enough except we have to deal with the bulk off the truck, deal with repacks. Takes 2 people processing HBA/Pharm repacks, 1 person processing DOM/Bath repacks then starting Home/Office repacks; they do nothing but push those repacks directly from the boxes for their shifts. Another 4-5 people for softlines repacks depending on how much they get, 1 person doing cardboard, 1 person in eletronics, 1 person doing bulk for anywhere from 30-60 mins after the unload, 1 person doing baby, you're left with anywhere from 7-10 people to actually clear the floor, with a callout sometimes. So you get to clear anywhere from 1100ish to 1600ish boxes off the floor(dry is not our job anymore).

Say we get 2200 piece truck it takes us 70mins to unload, then it takes us another 30 mins to bowl it out as we no longer have payroll of bowlers that's done all post truck. That's 100 mins out of the 240mins we get before the store opens, 20 of those mins are used for break/huddle, so it's really 220mins. So now we're left with 120 mins to clear the floor, say it's 1500 boxes with 9 people clearing the floor, between bulk/eletronics/baby/softlines some level of support comes, we maybe bump that number up to 10 people on the floor effectively. That's 1500 boxes with 10 people push in 120 mins before store opens that's 150 boxes a person or 48 secs a box but that's no good, we'd finish the floor by 8am we still have to clear carts and clean up. For that to happen we need to finish somewhere closer to 7:30am so we get 90 mins for everyone to do 150 boxes or 36 secs a box. We're a high turnover store we hire alot of young kids 36 secs a box is lofty expectations. 45-50 is what we can do although it fluctuates with the turnover not everyone that we on-board turns out to be as good as the person they replaced. Usually taking a month or two to try to work them up to a TM like that. Our store has few TMs that have been in logistics longer than year, usually teams for flow and backroom are half rebuilt every year.

With just 2-4 more TMs this would be a breeze, could pretty much guarantee it to be done before 8am but it's not due to that, especially if we get a call out. So i'd say 4am can be a rush, then again my store is peculiar. Still profitable but impossible to build lasting teams.
 
Last edited:
Having a TM 'assigned' to a certain number of skids doesn't really work for us. We have one TM that does that religiously and refuses to help further up or down the line when someone gets behind and it just causes more issues then solves. For instance I usually will work on anywhere from 4-8 skids just by myself (but most of those are backstock and very low numbers). Very often we'll get a run of boxes that go on one or two skids so everyone but one or two people are standing around. Then...there are the just flat out slow people that have to place every single box on a skid in exactly the perfect position. But that's a whole different thread. LOL.

Uboats on the line!? That sounds like a horrible idea. It's hard enough to stack the skids with how random the boxes come off the truck...I can't imagine trying to do a uboat...ugh
 
Our unload starts at 10pm and we usually finish by 11:30 if it's a normal crew and not a double. With our normal crew we usually have two throwers, two pushers and then maybe 8-10 people on the line if no one calls out. There have been times though where an unload will finish earlier, the earliest we've ever finished was 11:10, or later, one time we didn't finish until after 1am lol but it was two big trucks.
 
StockerAce said:
Having a TM 'assigned' to a certain number of skids doesn't really work for us. We have one TM that does that religiously and refuses to help further up or down the line when someone gets behind and it just causes more issues then solves. For instance I usually will work on anywhere from 4-8 skids just by myself (but most of those are backstock and very low numbers). Very often we'll get a run of boxes that go on one or two skids so everyone but one or two people are standing around. Then...there are the just flat out slow people that have to place every single box on a skid in exactly the perfect position. But that's a whole different thread. LOL.

Uboats on the line!? That sounds like a horrible idea. It's hard enough to stack the skids with how random the boxes come off the truck...I can't imagine trying to do a uboat...ugh
Click to expand...
Like I said your custom blocks and line set up probably should be changed. We condensed the line down to be purely next to the line before we had uboats. No one has to walk anywhere except to grab replacement skids. That means backstock only takes 7 skids total that includes 1 skid just meant for oversized items. It's rough for new TMs to get used to covering the blackline because they have alot more numbers to remember but the numbers are balanced based on where they are in the backroom and how much we expect off the truck. Black line tends to only be about 20% of a truck if it can be helped try not to commit more than 20% of the line to it. Our line used to consist of 24 skids and a tub with 7 of those for blackline 30% of the line is for blackline, 30% vs 20% because the backroom would complain if we just dumped all the boxes are too few skids.

The blackline is placed at the front of the line opposite to the push skids that tend to get long runs of boxes, like HBA, Chem, Dry grocery. Each side of the line supports their opposite side of the line during long runs. So they'd move boxes under the line and feed the line down, so the line never stops. The person with the long run of boxes can now focus purely on getting all those boxes onto the pallet without looking/thinking much. Every 3 pallets by the end of a truck would have received roughly the same amount of boxes, there is some consideration to skids that get larger boxes that take longer to place, or hba that tends to require alot of fine stacking. That being said no one ever had to really support a by stacking the pallet with them, if there was a particular long run of boxes they support maybe 1 pallet up, we always support up never down the line. The expected support comes from the person across from you so you never miss any of your own boxes going down the line by being too far form your skids. That is the problem when people support further down the line, the boxes for the skids they were suppose to cover now are past those skids so now everybody is walking back and forth more.

Walking and touching a product are the two biggest time sinks to productivity in flow. Reduce the amount of walking to as small as possible. Uboats really messed that up though, we walk constantly now, we can't have uboats near the line because then we can't pull skids past the uboats. Even though we got hours taken away from us to the new consumables team so they could do dry grocery. We were rewarded by being forced to unload directly onto uboats also have to use 8 uboats so it's nearly 1 uboat->1 valley so it's easier for them to stock. Uboats are also great because of how shaky they are you have to really be careful stacking them or if they take a turn a bit too jaunty you got broken salsa all over the floor. TBH i wouldn't be so against it, if it wasn't for the fact it's terrible for the unload process as it doesn't at all fit our line. It's also taking what used to take 2 skids on the line now takes 8 uboats so much walking.
 
I'm at a AAA+ store with overnight unload. I'm guessing unloading 2 (3 with P-fresh) trucks every night is not common because I don't hear about it at all on here. Unload starts at around 10:25 and sometimes it doesn't get done til after 1AM if we get two big trucks. Usually we have 7 for the line with the team flexing to either side when necessary, and the 2 unloaders, the scanner, and the TL usually helping out the guys push boxes in the truck or moving skids, so that's 11 for the line. Usually we have 2 pulling pallets but we always start with one until we need the 2nd. Make sure your pallet pullers are helping out on the line and not just waiting for pallets to be filled. One day last week we got a 2800 green truck and 2400 blue truck and unload was done at around 1:30. Also I don't hear people mention "Green" or "Blue" trucks, not sure if that's just my store. Green has the groceries, HBA, chems, pets, and paper stuff etc. while Blue has everything else. It's pretty rare we only get 1 truck for one night. It use to happen more often but now apparently they just "Send what they have" instead of waiting to have a more filled truck to send. Also it almost never happens that we don't get a P-fresh truck, but every time it does, we get hit with a 1800-2800 P-Fresh unload the next night, it's ridiculous.
 
semantics said:
Black line tends to only be about 20% of a truck if it can be helped try not to commit more than 20% of the line to it
Click to expand...
The problem is that you can't pull those pallets in the middle of the unload. Plus, it varies so much each truck.

We sometimes have trucks with 1000+ pieces going to the backroom. By the time the unload is done, every single backstock and transition pallet is stacked 8 feet high and there's boxes all over the floor.

Lights said:
Also I don't hear people mention "Green" or "Blue" trucks, not sure if that's just my store. Green has the groceries, HBA, chems, pets, and paper stuff etc. while Blue has everything else.
Click to expand...
I'm familiar with the blue side/green side but I've never heard of entire trucks split that way. You're right to say that it probably isn't very common.
 
Lights said:
I'm at a AAA+ store with overnight unload. I'm guessing unloading 2 (3 with P-fresh) trucks every night is not common because I don't hear about it at all on here. Unload starts at around 10:25 and sometimes it doesn't get done til after 1AM if we get two big trucks. Usually we have 7 for the line with the team flexing to either side when necessary, and the 2 unloaders, the scanner, and the TL usually helping out the guys push boxes in the truck or moving skids, so that's 11 for the line. Usually we have 2 pulling pallets but we always start with one until we need the 2nd. Make sure your pallet pullers are helping out on the line and not just waiting for pallets to be filled. One day last week we got a 2800 green truck and 2400 blue truck and unload was done at around 1:30. Also I don't hear people mention "Green" or "Blue" trucks, not sure if that's just my store. Green has the groceries, HBA, chems, pets, and paper stuff etc. while Blue has everything else. It's pretty rare we only get 1 truck for one night. It use to happen more often but now apparently they just "Send what they have" instead of waiting to have a more filled truck to send. Also it almost never happens that we don't get a P-fresh truck, but every time it does, we get hit with a 1800-2800 P-Fresh unload the next night, it's ridiculous.
Click to expand...

When I was in an O/N store, we were definitely not perfect but we usually did at least 40 cartons/minute. That 5200 pieces of freight would have had a goal time of 12:40 for us (same start time).

Doubles for me depended on each individual truck. Many ETL's don't get this, but the trailer unload portion of their job is a balancing act. You can't just throw all the payroll in the world at it. Think of it as a scale, where you are balancing the "throwing" side of the truck with the "sorting" side of the truck. If you add a body to one side, you often times need to add someone to the other to balance out speeding it up. So on a double, if I had two full trailers, I would have 4 total throwers (2 in each), a scanner for each, a pacer for each, 2 backside of the line, and 5 on the line itself. Sure it was 15 people total, but I could unload a double in just about 2 hours and it was clean that way. Its an addition of 4 people from what your store uses (so 4 x 2 hours a piece or 8 hours of payroll), but we got done with our unload an hour faster than you. If you have 11 people on the line for another hour then that is 11 hours of payroll extra, so I saved 3 hours per double on just the unload alone... plus the team is energized if a double goes that fast.

Now, if I had a baby double (main dock a full trailer, but second dock a small one), I only did 1 thrower and 1 scanner inside that truck. So I only unload with 13 on those.
 
Tgarv90 said:
Our unload starts at 10pm and we usually finish by 11:30 if it's a normal crew and not a double. With our normal crew we usually have two throwers, two pushers and then maybe 8-10 people on the line if no one calls out. There have been times though where an unload will finish earlier, the earliest we've ever finished was 11:10, or later, one time we didn't finish until after 1am lol but it was two big trucks.
Click to expand...

Our normal setup is 2 Throwers, 1 Pacer (Next to Throwers, pushes line, pulls PIPOs, grabs lines, switches out if needed), 1 Scanner (right inside trailer door), 1 Backside who stands right by scanner for Transition/Bulk, 1 Backside for rest of BS, and 4 on the Line. That is 10 people total and we can push 35-40 depending on the single.
 
How many pallets do you guys have, total? We have (I think I'm counting right, trying to remember) 18 per side. So 36 total places for boxes to go. That doesn't include bulk, which we don't always have and would put an extra pallet or two up front. We need to pull pallets while doing unload...otherwise plastics and paper would be 25 feet high (read: impossible to stack). And many other pallets have to be pulled over the course of an unload. Last night was a regular night, I suppose, and I think our truck was 2700.
 
SFSFun said:
The problem is that you can't pull those pallets in the middle of the unload. Plus, it varies so much each truck.

We sometimes have trucks with 1000+ pieces going to the backroom. By the time the unload is done, every single backstock and transition pallet is stacked 8 feet high and there's boxes all over the floor.
Click to expand...
Wait, you don't move your backstock pallets? We pull ours and just stage them in receiving around a corner although sometimes we pull them out of receiving near the stockroom just because yeah sometimes you get 1000+ blackline and it wont sit nicely back there. Our backstock pallets have hard set custom blocks that reflect a relative location in the backroom so all of chem and paper are only on one pallet. If it gets too full we pull it and stage it for backroom to grab it later, so it's easier on them and easier on us because when pallets get tall you have to spend more time to make the stack perfect. Otherwise we'd need to just randomly throw boxes on pallets all the time because making it harder on the backroom. In fact i prefer to be pulling and staging pallets over having more pallets, making the line more compact means people have to walk less, meaning they're spending more of their time actually moving boxes off the rollers.

I will say this a pacer probably wouldn't be necessary if our flexible conveyors were not so completely trashed, we really need a person just to push and fix boxes getting jammed on the line itself, otherwise the scanner and throwers are spending a good portion of their time trying to fix that.
 
Last edited:
semantics said:
Wait, you don't move your backstock pallets?
Click to expand...
There isn't really any way to get them out except by pulling them one by one from the end farthest from the dock. And the transition and bulk is on the pallets closest to the dock so it doesn't have to travel very far and also because it won't need to be pulled to the main stockroom.

When we take a double, every backroom TM grabs a pallet jack and brings as many pallets down as possible in the lull when the line is being moved over to the second truck.
 
SFSFun said:
There isn't really any way to get them out except by pulling them one by one from the end farthest from the dock. And the transition and bulk is on the pallets closest to the dock so it doesn't have to travel very far and also because it won't need to be pulled to the main stockroom.

When we take a double, every backroom TM grabs a pallet jack and brings as many pallets down as possible in the lull when the line is being moved over to the second truck.
Click to expand...
Well that sounds terribly restrictive. We have just enough room to slip pallets by each other on the backside although it does get harder the closer you are to the docks, which is why the pull pallets that are on that side of the line are all far away from the dock.
 
Usually our ETL will pull pallets as they fill. It's constant as the softlines, paper, h&b, cereal and plastics pallets fill quickly. Then others might have to be pulled as well because of a large number of cases that day.
 
They pull the backstock?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

T
Fdc truck delivery.
2
Replies
25
Views
466
FlowTeamChick
F
K
Have your stores changed the truck days in 2024
2 3
Replies
64
Views
4K
FlowTeamChick
F
versionDefect
How big is your backroom
2
Replies
42
Views
2K
SigningLady
SigningLady
K
New Truck schedule?
Replies
6
Views
3K
FlowTeamChick
F
M
Trailer unload time
Replies
17
Views
2K
HInbound
H
Back
Top