The vehicle fleet mix

This article describes a new and simple method for determining how much road transport capacity should be company‐owned, and how much should be hired from outside on a day‐to‐day basis. The emphasis is on bulk loads which are delivered to a single customer, but long distance hauls where a number of deliveries are to be made to neighbouring customers can also be handled. The method presented here will not work well for distribution operations in which typically a vehicle calls at a number of widely dispersed customers, because the actual allocation of the vehicles to routes becomes important. The quantities being delivered fluctuate from day‐to‐day and month‐to‐month throughout the year — in the extreme case there may be no deliveries at all to be made on certain days. The article is written in terms of delivery of goods from a source, but the approach is equally applicable where it is a question of collecting goods into a single reception point.