Mapping a carrier handoff on paper first
Changing a parcel contract is expensive. Drawing the current handoff — wrap, label, bay, driver — is cheap and usually reveals the miss before anyone signs.
A specialist drinks distributor in the South West wanted to move next-day lines from one parcel firm to another. The operations director had a quote. The warehouse had a habit: wrap at the far end of the packing bench, labels printed in the office, and a bay that the afternoon driver already treated as theirs.
We spent an afternoon drawing that habit on A3. Wrap to label was a walk of forty metres. Labels waited on a spike because the printer sat with the clerk who also answers the gate phone. The bay filled early on Thursdays because a local van used the same door. None of this was in the quote.
The drawing did not choose the new carrier. It showed that any new firm would inherit the same walk and the same spike unless the bench moved. The director delayed the switch by a month and moved the printer. Missed collections dropped on the existing contract before a new one existed.
Bring last month’s missed-collection notes if you have them. A blank month is also useful; it tells us the misses live in conversation rather than on paper.