Working Time / Road Transport Directive:
Sweating Your Assets

So, what shift patterns can help make this legislation work for you?

Many businesses will not have to change their shift patterns, either because they already operate within this legislation or because they can identify enough Periods of Availability (PoAs) that already exist within their operation to bring working time down to an acceptable level.

Other businesses will be able to reduce working time by, for example, getting customers or delivery points to unload vehicles themselves, leaving the driver free to go to the canteen and book a break or PoA.

However, that still leaves many businesses that will be profoundly affected. One of the ironies of the way in which our government has interpreted this legislation is that the harder you sweat your assets now, the more this legislation impacts on you. Whereas, where there are known inefficiencies in operations, the legislation can probably be implemented via PoAs without too much trouble!

The solution is to sweat those assets even harder. However, whether you can do this very much depends on the type of locations you currently visit, and in particular on opening hours. Can you run two shifts instead of one - early and late, or day and night? If you can, you should find that you can get away with less vehicles than now, even though you will need more drivers. Can you deliver seven days per week? If you can, you can operate rolling shifts, for example 4 days on/4 days off, and may find that this will help you.