Be fair to your traffic office
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THE TRAFFIC OFFICE is the hub of a transport company or the transport department of an own-account fleet operator. Maintenance, administration and accounts are all spokes in the transport wheel in both freight and passenger fields, but the traffic office must be the centre of the operation.
Despite its importance, all too often the traffic office looks like the poor relation. Many, for instance, are housed in portable offices in the corner of the yard. Now, while this semi-permanent office accommodation has advantages it also has a greenhouse-like ability to be hot in summer and cold in winter! Hardly conclusive to a content and efficient traffic staff.
Stepping inside the office, time-sheets and work tickets are often mixed up with spare parts for engines and calenders depicting ''British bird life''. Very homely, but is it efficient?
A traffic office need not look as clinical as an operating theatre, but there is a lot to be said for a pleasant, logically laid-out and properly equipped traffic office. It should function better and the traffic staff will certainly appreciate it.
I have set out a few ideas and observations that spring to mind; some relate to a particular side of road transport, but many are equally applicable to most traffic offices.
First, the actual location of the traffic office. Obviously it's useful if it's near to the vehicles and drivers — when you're des-. perate for a vehicle or driver, seeing one come in the yard can be a tremendous relief!
Just as the office will have a lot of contact with drivers, fitting staff will also need to be within easy reach. It's a drag having to walk right across the yard to find out if a particular vehicle is ready or not.
There are disadvantages to such easy access. Drivers may be encouraged to wander in and out of the traffic office and generally treat it like a rest room. Another drawback to having a traffic office so near the action is noise. Units revving up and pulling off loading banks can be really irritating when you're on the phone.
So while a strategically located traffic office is a basic requirement, these limitations should not be forgotten.
Assuming you are planning the office from scratch, make it big. As the business expands and more vehicles are bought, you will inevitably need more traffic staff and hence a bigger office.
Many offices are untidy and inefficient purely because they are too cramped — they have a myriad of little pieces of paper pinned to the wall. All have important notes and telephone numbers on them — if you can ever find them. Too much space has never been a problem.
A prime requirement in'a traffic office is plenty of working surfaces. Planning sheets and the like usually need a lot of room and trying to work on a small table is hopeless. Built-in bench working tops are ideal. But if this is not practicable, simple flush-fitting office desks next to each other will be almost as good and have the advantage of incorporating drawer space in them, and allow the furniture to be moved if necessary.
If you do have built-in bench working tops it's worth getting some free-standing drawer units as well. Pens left out are usually borrowed permanently by drivers needing to complete their logbooks!
Another feature of many traffic offices is the poor condition of the chairs. All the typists' broken chairs with the stuffing coming out seem to end up in traffic. This, in my view is totally unjustified.
The traffic office is always a busy place, meaning the room and its contents generally earn their keep. It is natural that the furniture-will take a hammering, so get some of decent quality to begin with.
Most traffic planners or clerks will be getting up and down frequently, and chairs that swivel and are on wheels will be a great help. And from personal experience I would resist the temptation to have easily cleaned vinyl-covered chairs — they're not so good in summer.
So, to keep your traffic staff happy, fabric-covered swivelwheeled chairs (preferably with arms) should fit the bill. If this seems extravagant, remember Michelangelo didn't paint the Cistine Chapel with a wallpaper brush!
The one thing you're guaranteed to find in every traffic office of course is a phone, and usually more than one. Traffic staff are plagued with spending a considerable amount of time on the phone, be it booking in deliveries of goods for a distribution company or trying to hire coaches in midsummer for a coach operator.
For these people, a pushbutton phone is a good idea. They don't cost that much extra but can save time. sore fingers and frayed tempers when your finger slips on the last digit of a nine-figure number.
While on the subject of phones, a ploy used successfully in most traffic offices is to keep one line with an exdirectory number. This can be kept relatively free for important outgoing calls. This number could also be given to drivers as a hot-line in emergencies, but the main thing is to keep the number unpublicised, or it will quickly become just as busy as the others.
How many times are you asked "What's the number for Bloggs?" or "Do you know Manchester depot's number?" The simple way to cut out this time-consuming business is to pin on the wall next to the phone a chart listing all the most important and commonly used numbers.
These would include the 'numbers of other depots, major customers, truck or trailer rental companies, commercial repairers, 24-hour breakdown services and so on.
The chart should be large enough to give room for the addition of new numbers when necessary or allow for phone number changes.
Other less frequently used numbers can be listed in a sturdy alphabetically indexed book, virtually chained in a drawer next to the phone, along with a code book. • Pinning things to the wall is a popular pastime in traffic offices and there are usually maps, cflarts, notices and assorted pieces of paper in abundance.
So why not provide a large piece of something like soft board on the wall? Maps, both local and national, are a good idea pinned up.
If maps are pinned up, one is far more inclined to consult it than if you have to get an atlas or road map out of a cupboard.
Much of traffic office wall space is often taken up by some 'means of showing driver/ vehicle allocation and movements. This is common to most types of road transport and various methods are used.
Probably the simplest and cheapest is a blackboard with a painted grid on it showing drivers, vehicle registrations or fleet numbers and journeys being operated.
Although this has the advantage of being inexpensive it is far from ideal. After a while you will get a dusty, chalky atmosphere reminiscent of a school classroom as the markings are rubbed off each day, and the blackboard gradually loses its clarity.
A better idea is to use a sheet of Perspex with a grid marked on white card behind it. Daily movements or vehicle allocations can be written on the Per spex using marker pens, as shown in our photo. At the end of the day these markings can be wiped clean with a damp cloth — a simple and cheap method.
A third way of showing traffic movements is to use a magnetic system. This involves a proprie tary pre-lined metal chart on which magnetic flexible shapes can be fixed. These shapes are available in a variety of colours and forms such as red squares, blue triangles and so on, and can also be written on with a ball-pen.
Using this system, drivers' names can be fixed to the chart and the vehicles put against the names using the movable shapes. Different colour shapes can be used to represent different size vehicles, for instance. The metal board and magnetic shapes are available from office supplies shops.
Whichever system is used it is a good idea to leave a space at the bottom where vehicles off the road for servicing or repair can be entered and where vehicles temporarily at other depots can be listed. The aim should be to show every single vehicle based at the depot so that nothing can be forgotten or missed.
A job that often falls to the traffic office is handing out the weekly wage packets to the drivers, so a safe is a useful and sometimes necessary addition to the office — it's far easier than having to go to a bigger company safe in another office to get each wage packet as drivers come in.
A safe in the traffic office itself is also handy for looking after money brought in by drivers from COD deliveries they have made during the day.
Talking about keeping things safe, a key board for holding spare sets of ignition or door keys is a lot better than leaving keys loose in the drawer. The hooks on the board should be in registration or fleet number sequence or some other logical order. If there are exactly the same number of hooks as keys you will quickly be able to spot when keys are missing.
You can buy ready-made lockable steel key cabinets which are excellent as long as they are not shut tight when the person who needs to get an ignition key from the cabinet hasn't got the cabinet key.
Many traffic offices in distribution companies will use a pigeon-hole system for sorting invoices or delivery notes into geographical areas and delivery days. If you work out the surface area of these boxes you will quickly see that their construction involves a large amount of wood, so you really want to make them just once.
The rule, therefore, is to make the dimensions of each box big enough to take the larg • est invoice/delivery note you handle, plus a little extra. Then, if you take on additional thirdparty distribution work for a company that uses larger notes, your existing boxes should still be suitable. Having to fold each delivery note in half becomes a time-consuming and annoying chore when you're putting away a hundred or more each day.
Again, with an eye to the future, add a couple of rows of boxes more than you need at the present. This allows for your delivery area expanding or, for instance, providing a six-day service instead of your present five days. Also, perhaps a space for a map showing the area covered by each box should be left. Shelf space is sometimes lacking in some offices, and books tend to pile up on desks or lie around on window sills. A couple of shelves for phone directories, handbooks and so on would not go amiss.
For the innumerable loose papers such as odd work tickets, invoices, expense sheets and scribbled notes, stackable filing trays are one answer.
Almost every type of office will have a filing cabinet and the traffic office is no exception. A simple lockable one is ideal for storing drivers' records or customer files and it should be in the traffic office for the times When these details may be needed outside normal office hours.
Cupboards seem pretty basic items but are invaluable in traffic offices for storing all those things that either temporarily or permanently end up there — in my experience traffic has a knack of accumulating all sorts of objects, such as drivers' tunics, load straps, coach headrest covers, spare parts and parcels bound for other depots.
Capacious cupboards will swallow all these things and stop, them being left lying around the office to be trodden on or lost. There should also be some safe place for keeping logbooks or tachograph discs. Since these are the subject of ,various legal requirements, it's best not to leave them kicking around.
In some companies, drivers can stroll into traffic offices with queries or comments for the hard-pressed traffic staff, while in others the traffic office is almost out of bounds.
Whichever policy is adopted depends much on the individual company or traffic manager.
Obviously, easy access and communication between traffic staff and drivers is a good thing, but preferably not at the expense of the progress or concentration of traffic.
The most common arrangement to handle this is a hatch or partition through which traffic and drivers can speak or hand over documents, similar to a Post Office. When building or designing this, it's advisable to have more than just one hatch or window so that several drivers can be booked off or spoken with at once.
This speeds up booking-off drivers at the end of the day, a time when everyone wants to get away without unnecessary delay. Again, allow plenty of desk space either side of the hatch or partition so that the paperwork can be sorted out properly by both drivers and traffic staff.
Finally, to complete your traffic office, decorate it properly. Yet again it is traffic that tends to be neglected when the paint pots are out. With people in and out of the office all day it will need decorating more often than pure administrative offices.
Have it done out in bright cheerful colours and make sure lighting is good. Maybe some photos of company vehicles could complete the decor. As well as being efficient, the office should look good and be a pleasant environment generally for the traffic staff to work in.
So there are a few guidelines. I don't claim any as original — they are just my own observations. I'm sure your own traffic office already incorporates many of them, but I'm equally sure there are still improvements to be-made.
This may well involve spending money — are you still with me? — or perhaps just rearranging the furniture or introducing new systems. But when a new tractive unit costs £25,000 or a new coach around £35,000, a tiny fraction of this could bring about significant improvements in the traffic office.
Your aim should be a better, more efficient, more pleasant office. It may be through saving 30 minutes each day, but multiply this by the number of days in the week and by the number of staff in the office and you will see a tangible improvement. That's the secret of productivity. — not working harder, but working smarter.
As a bonus, a better office will reap benefits in terms of staff attitude, performance and turnover. And you need not be ashamed to show visitors through the traffic office anymore.
Potential customers cannot fail to be impressed by a well ordered, professional-looking office. And its about time the traffic office won the recognition it usually deserves but so rarely gets.