Most weeks I spend somewhere between Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening building the next week's consolidation routes. It's a puzzle. Here's how I solve it.
The inputs
Every Monday by noon I have a list of:
- All buy-back pickups requested or scheduled for the coming week (typically 18–35)
- All outbound deliveries we owe (typically 25–60)
- The available truck capacity (we operate two 53-footers and contract a third when needed)
- The known facilities on each route corridor where we have standing relationships and can consolidate at short notice
The algorithm, simplified
I sort the buy-back pickups by ZIP code and geographic cluster. Then I overlay outbound deliveries — when a delivery and a pickup are within 30 miles of each other and ±2 days, I try to combine them into a single truck pass.
The third pass is consolidation calls. I have a list of about 70 facilities across the Midwest where we have a standing relationship to ask "do you have empties this week?" without a formal pickup request. About 25% of the time the answer is yes, and a small consolidation gets added to a route that already exists.
What makes a good route
The economic test is freight cost per tank moved. A well-built route averages $11–$14 per tank. A standalone trip can run $35–$70 per tank. The delta is the entire business case for our outbound logistics layer.
The constraint is time: I have about 12 hours of routing work each week to allocate. If I spend an hour saving $200 on freight, that's a great hour. If I spend three hours saving $80, I should have spent that time elsewhere.
What I lose sleep over
Two things:
- A facility says yes on Monday for a Friday pickup, then no on Thursday because their shipping dock is unexpectedly busy. This destroys route economics because the truck still has to make the run, now with a smaller payload.
- A driver's truck breaks down mid-route. Cascading delays hit five customers. I get the calls.
We've added margin for both — typically I plan a route at 85% of theoretical capacity to absorb a no-show, and we have a backup truck on retainer.
What I'm proud of
In 2023 we moved 11,400 tanks at an average per-tank freight cost of $11.85. That's a 38% reduction from 2021 when the average was $19.10. The difference is almost entirely better routing — same trucks, same customers, same fuel prices.
The interesting math in the IBC business isn't on the wash bay floor. It's in the routing spreadsheet. The wash bay scales linearly with labor. The routing layer compounds.