Reducing Idle Time to Increase Driver Earnings

Background

• Our platform was paying out various bonuses to drivers, but we were exploring ways to reduce costs to become competitive.

• The challenge was ensuring drivers still earned enough to stayon the platform if we were to remove bonuses. One area we focused on was balancing the number of drivers and loads to reduce average idle time in a day.

Goal

Increase turn rate (e.g. how many loads drivers do per day)

Why is this worth solving?

Removing driver bonuses without a clear strategy risked drivers leaving the platform, which could cause us to miss loads. Ensuring drivers have enough work was key to retaining them and maintaining service levels to our customers.

Problem

Out of many contributing factors to turn rate, we decide to focus on idle time (e.g. time spent during a shift that is not on a load) because we found that they wasted 20% of shift being idle.

Solution

Our hypothesis was that if we reduced the number of drivers during idle periods, the remaining drivers would increase their turn rate, as there would be more loads to distribute. Using historical data, we analyzed each day of the week to identify the times when drivers were most idle. We then reduced the number of active drivers by 50% during those periods. By cutting driver availability when demand was low, we optimized the driver supply to better match load availability.

We built a dashboard showing the required number of drivers for each day and rolled it out to the operations teams. Over the next two weeks, we conducted bi-daily calls with ops to monitor the impact, address any issues, and refine the model.

Outcome

The solution resulted in a 20% increase in the driver turn rate in most of our larger regions. This optimization allowed us to maintain driver earnings even as we reduced bonuses, achieving significant cost savings.