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You’ve heard of lean manufacturing; now brace yourself for lean haulage. Pioneered by Toyota, lean manufacturing is credited as being a key factor in the company’s expansion from a small car-maker to a global automotive force. The lean concept reduces waste by eliminating over-production, unnecessary motion and waiting, unnecessary  movement and processing of materials, unnecessarily large inventories, and the reworking or scraping of sub-standard product. The lean haulage concept has now been trademarked by European firm Greater Than.

Greater Than has gathered data of more than two million  hours of ‘real-life’ truck driving, which it uses to establish more than 12 million ‘best practice’ profiles, against which the data it gathers from your fleet can be benchmarked. The gap between actual performance and best practice is identified as waste, and Greater Than’s software can identify where such waste occurs and give precise instructions on how to eliminate it.

How lean haulage works

Greater Than installs a computer in each of your vehicles. Over three or four weeks, explains managing director Hugh Brown, the computer runs initial  value calculations that determine performance. This is used to set company, divisional and individual objectives.

Up to this point, the service is provided for free, but over a subsequent 36-month rental period, Greater Than provides support in order to help reach the best practice objective.

Brown estimates that the cost of running a Greater Than programme in a fleet will equate to about 1.5 percentage points of the 14% waste identified. But, he is anxious to point out, it is not a substitute for good transport management.