It’s 06:45. The plant gate opens. Within the next 90 minutes, a typical mid-sized manufacturing plant will receive three, four, sometimes seven lorries simultaneously—some with a booked time-window, others without, and still others with a slot that was actually intended for 08:30. The dock is full. Dispatch is on the phone. And somewhere on the car park, a driver is waiting, with no idea when his turn will come.
By midday: two empty docks, one forklift with nothing to do.
You know this pattern. The question is, why does it barely change despite time-window management.
The morning peak goods-in—a structural problem, not a discipline problem
Around 40% of all daily inbound deliveries arrive at a plant within the first 90 minutes after opening. This is not an outlier—it is an industry-standard pattern, found across all manufacturing sectors: mechanical engineering, food processing, chemicals, automotive suppliers.
The reason is simple and does not lie in the behaviour of individual drivers or hauliers: drivers start early to avoid traffic jams. Routes are planned so that the first delivery arrives as early as possible in the working day—then the rest of the route can run flexibly. Haulage logic and plant logic run structurally against each other.
This is not a matter of goodwill. It is a matter of incentive structure.
If a driver sets out at 05:30 and arrives an hour earlier than his slot allows—what is he supposed to do? Wait? Where? At his own expense? In practice, he simply drives to the plant gate and hopes someone will let him in.
What time-window systems solve—and what they don’t
Time-window portals structure the calendar. They create visibility over which deliveries are registered for which time periods. This is real progress compared to pure spreadsheet chaos—and for many plants, the introduction of such a system was an important first step.
But: A slot is an intention, not an arrival promise.
Between the moment a slot is booked and the moment a driver actually stands at the plant gate, there are typically 12 to 48 hours. In this timespan, the following happens:
- The haulage firm receives the order, subcontracts it to another operator
- The subcontractor assigns a driver—often not the same one originally planned
- The driver receives his route in the morning, sometimes only in the cab
- Traffic, roadworks, a breakdown on the previous leg—all change the ETA without your system knowing
The time-window portal has no contact with the actual moving vehicle throughout this entire phase. It knows when a slot was booked. It does not know when the lorry will arrive.
“We have slots—but we still don’t know in the morning who is actually coming.”
This sentence falls in almost every honest goods-in conversation.
The reaction: stricter rules. The result: the same curve
The most common response to the morning peak is regulation: early arrivals are no longer processed. Drivers without slots must wait. Penalty fees for missed time-windows are introduced or at least threatened.
Some plants do well with this in the short term. But in the medium term, it becomes clear: the arrival distribution curve barely changes.
Why? Because drivers are not acting on their own initiative to leave earlier—they do so on the instruction of their dispatch, which in turn reacts to customer wishes, traffic forecasts and route optimisation. Penalty rules for drivers at the gate change nothing about the planning logic behind them.
Moreover, if you consistently turn drivers away, you are effectively penalising the carrier. And carriers have long memories. A plant known on Google Maps as “long wait times, poor communication” will pay for that in the medium term in the spot market—with weaker capacity and higher rates.
What it costs to react every morning instead of steering
Look at the morning peak with fresh eyes—as a cost calculation.
Take a plant with 30 deliveries per day. 40% arrive in the first 90 minutes: 12 lorries between 06:30 and 08:00. If your dock capacity in this timeframe is designed for 6 simultaneous processings, waiting times develop—conservatively estimated at 20 to 35 minutes per excess vehicle.
A quick calculation:
- 6 waiting lorries × 25 minutes dwell time × 250 working days = 37,500 dwell minutes/year
- Industry-standard dwell costs: €0.80–1.20 per minute per vehicle (incl. driver costs, vehicle tie-up)
- Result: €30,000–45,000 imputed dwell costs per year—from the morning peak alone
That is purely the vehicle and driver side. Not included: the dispatcher hours that vanish into call loops every day, the overtime in goods-in on peak mornings, and the costs of the midday gap when dock capacity sits idle.
The real issue: you are steering with past data
A time-window system shows you what was planned. Your goods-in reacts to what is happening right now. The gap in between—that is the morning peak.
As long as you don’t have a reliable ETA for the approaching lorry, you cannot pre-assign a dock, plan resources ahead of time, offer a rebooking before congestion develops. You manage arrivals. You don’t steer them.
The fundamental problem is not the absence of rules. It is the absence of lead-time information.
Whoever knows that 4 lorries will arrive simultaneously in 45 minutes can act. Whoever only sees it when they arrive at the gate can only react.
Most plants operate in the second mode—not because they choose to, but because the information simply isn’t available. Up to 80% of advance notice data in German plants still runs via spreadsheet or email. That is information arriving when the lorry is already on the motorway.
Slot discipline is not the opposite of flexibility
There is a widespread assumption: the stricter you enforce slots, the more control you get. Allow flexibility, lose control.
That is wrong.
True steering does not come from stricter rules at the gate, but from earlier information before the gate. If you know a carrier will arrive 90 minutes early, you can act proactively: offer a different time-window, adjust resource planning, or simply be prepared.
This requires you to contact the driver—not the haulage firm, not the dispatcher, but the person actually driving the vehicle.
What actually works—and why it so rarely happens
The solution is conceptually straightforward: direct contact with the driving driver, early enough to still respond.
In practice, this fails because of a structural problem: the driver often works for a subcontractor, who is in turn commissioned by a haulage firm, which is assigned to your supplier. You have no direct contractual relationship with the driver. You often don’t even know his name.
And even if you do: which app should he download? Which portal should he use? Studies show that 97% of drivers own a smartphone—but no driver wants to download a different app for every plant.
This is the knot where most approaches fail. Not from lack of will, but from friction.
Heylog unties this knot through a different channel: the driver receives a WhatsApp message—automatically, without an app, without registration. He confirms his expected arrival time. You see the ETA in the dashboard before the lorry arrives at the gate. No call, no portal, no uncertainty until 06:45.
The bottom line
The morning peak goods-in is not your hauliers’ failure. It is the result of planning logic that is not aligned with your dock capacity—and probably never will be, as long as incentives remain as they are.
Stricter slots shift the problem; they don’t solve it. The real variable is not the slot rule, but the lead-time information: do you know in time what is coming?
Whoever can answer yes has stopped reacting. Whoever answers “mostly” or “not really” manages the same congestion anew every morning.
How many hours of lead time do you currently have before the first lorry arrives at the gate—and what do you do with that time?
Frequently asked questions
Why do deliveries cluster so heavily during morning peak goods-in?
During morning peak goods-in, approximately 40% of all daily inbound deliveries typically arrive within the first 90 minutes after plant opening. The reason lies in haulage dispatch logic: drivers start early to avoid traffic on later route stops—regardless of which slot was booked. This pattern is structural and cannot be broken by slot rules alone.
Do stricter slot rules help reduce goods-in congestion?
Only to a limited extent. Time-window portals structure planning, but a slot is not an arrival guarantee. Between booking and actual arrival, 12 to 48 hours pass without reliable ETA information. Stricter gate enforcement punishes the driver but changes nothing about the haulage firm’s planning logic. What matters is early lead-time information—not harder enforcement.
What do dwell times from the morning peak goods-in actually cost?
At a plant with 30 deliveries daily and 40% morning peak, you accumulate up to 37,500 waiting minutes per year from peak congestion alone. At industry-standard dwell costs of €0.80–1.20 per minute per vehicle, this totals €30,000–45,000 in imputed costs annually—not counting dispatcher hours and midday dock idle time.