Capacity Planning That Fills the Truck Before It Leaves the Yard
A half-empty truck and an over-promised one cost the same thing: a run that should not have gone out that way. KO Fleetz takes the day's orders, the vehicles actually available, and how each vehicle has filled in the past, and proposes which orders ride on which truck — before dispatch commits, with its assumptions on the screen rather than in someone's head.
The loading decision is made at 5am by memory
Every distribution fleet makes the same decision before dawn: this pile of orders, those vehicles in the yard, go. It is usually made by one experienced dispatcher who knows that the Nashik run cubes out before it weighs out, that the 14-footer can take the market load but not with the water crates, and that Tuesday is always heavier than it looks. That knowledge is real and it is entirely undocumented. When that person is on leave, the fleet loads worse for a week.
The two failure modes are quiet and they are expensive in opposite directions. A truck that leaves at seventy percent of its usable capacity has burned a full day of driver, fuel and vehicle to move two-thirds of a load — and somewhere behind it a second vehicle is being sent out to carry the orders that should have fitted on the first. The over-committed case is worse because it surfaces late: the crates do not fit at the loading bay, a drop gets bumped to tomorrow, and a customer who ordered on time is told they are short.
None of this shows up cleanly afterwards either, because weight and volume rarely bind at the same moment. A dairy load hits its weight ceiling with the deck half full; a snacks load fills the deck at half the legal weight. A planner working from a single 'is it full' feeling cannot tell which constraint actually bit on which run, so the same misload repeats — and the fleet keeps adding vehicles to a problem that was really a packing decision.
Decide the load, then dispatch it
Capacity planning is the step most fleets do in their head between taking orders and assigning trucks, and KO Fleetz makes it explicit. It reads the day's confirmed demand as weight, volume and crate count, reads the capacity of the vehicles that are actually available, and proposes an allocation: these orders on this vehicle, those on the next, this run left with headroom for the walk-in order that always arrives. The plan is a proposal you accept or overrule, not an instruction the system enforces on its own.
Crucially, it plans against both weight and volume at once and tells you which one is the binding constraint on each run. When a vehicle is packed to its cube limit at sixty percent of its weight rating, that is shown as a cube-out, not hidden inside a generic fill percentage — because the fix for a cube-out (bigger deck, denser stacking) is different from the fix for a weigh-out (a heavier-rated vehicle). Historical fill for the same lane and vehicle feeds the estimate, so the plan reflects how these crates have actually stacked, not how they theoretically should.
This is planning, not measurement, and the distinction matters. Fleet utilization tells you after the fact how full your trucks ran last month; capacity planning decides how full they are about to run this morning. It is also not route planning — sequencing the stops is a separate job — and it is not the legal load-capacity check. It treats the axle and gross-weight limits as a hard ceiling it must plan under, but its actual question is commercial: given that ceiling, how do we send fewer trucks fuller without over-promising any of them.
Capabilities
What KO Fleetz capacity planning gives your team
Order demand aggregation
Rolls the day's confirmed orders into the numbers that decide loading — total crates, weight and cube per drop and per route — so planning starts from real demand, not a headcount of invoices.
Weight-and-volume dual planning
Plans each run against its weight ceiling and its deck volume at the same time, and names which one binds, so a cube-out at half the weight rating is never mistaken for a full truck.
Vehicle capacity profiles
Each vehicle carries its usable weight, deck volume and crate footprint, so a 14-footer and a tempo are planned to what they actually hold, not to a nominal tonnage on paper.
Per-run fill planning
Proposes how much cargo each run should carry against the vehicle assigned to it, leaving deliberate headroom where a lane reliably takes a late add-on rather than packing every deck to the edge.
Historical fill benchmarking
Uses how the same crates and lanes have actually stacked before, so the estimate reflects real packing behaviour instead of assuming cargo tessellates perfectly into the stated cube.
Explainable proposals
Every allocation shows the assumptions behind it — the crate dimensions, the fill history, the binding constraint — so a planner can see why an order was placed on this vehicle and overrule it on informed terms.
Mixed-fleet allocation
Spreads a day's orders across vehicles of different sizes and types together, so a load that will not fit one body is split or moved rather than forcing a second truck out for the overflow.
Day-ahead demand planning
Builds the loading plan for the coming day or shift from confirmed and forecast demand, giving the yard a proposed vehicle-by-vehicle fill to work to before the orders arrive at the bay.
How it works
How KO Fleetz does it
Step 1: Pull in the day's demand
Confirmed orders are read as weight, volume and crate count per drop, and grouped by the route or zone they belong to. This is the demand side of the plan — what actually has to move today.
Step 2: Match against available capacity
The vehicles genuinely available for the day, each with its usable weight and deck volume, are set against that demand. The legal axle and gross-weight limits are applied as a hard ceiling the plan cannot cross.
Step 3: Propose the allocation
KO Fleetz proposes which orders ride on which vehicle, weighted by historical fill, and flags the binding constraint on each run. Every proposal carries the assumptions that produced it.
Step 4: Review, adjust and release to dispatch
The planner accepts the plan, moves orders between vehicles, or holds capacity back for expected walk-ins. The agreed loading plan then hands off to dispatch and route planning as the day's brief.
Outcomes
What changes
- The loading decision made, not discovered at the bay
- Before dispatch
- Both constraints planned, with the binding one named
- Weight and cube
- Fewer half-empty trucks and fewer overflow vehicles
- Fuller runs
- Every allocation carries the assumptions behind it
- Shown working
Frequently asked questions
They sit on opposite sides of the trip. Fleet utilization measures how full your vehicles actually ran after the fact — last week, last month, this lane — so you can see where capacity was wasted. Capacity planning is the decision taken before the trip: given today's orders and today's vehicles, how should the load be split so the trucks leave properly filled. Utilization tells you the misload happened; capacity planning is where you prevent the next one. Most fleets want both, and the utilization history is one of the inputs the planning step learns from.
No, though it uses it. The Load Capacity feature is about legality — axle loads, gross vehicle weight, the limits that get a truck fined or grounded. Capacity planning treats those limits as a hard ceiling it must plan under, and never proposes a load that breaches them. But its real question is commercial fill: within the legal ceiling, are you sending trucks out full or half-empty, and are you over-committing any of them. A run can be perfectly legal and badly planned — under the weight limit but leaving a second vehicle to carry the overflow. That commercial gap is what this feature works on.
No. Capacity planning decides what fits on which vehicle; route planning decides the order the stops are visited in. They are deliberately separate steps because they answer different questions and can change independently — the same loaded vehicle can be sequenced several ways, and the same route can be run by different vehicles depending on the day's demand. The capacity plan hands its vehicle-and-load allocation to route planning as an input, so the sequencing works with a load that has already been shown to fit.
Both, at the same time, and it tells you which one is binding on each run. This matters because the two rarely max out together. A dairy or beverage load reaches its weight ceiling with the deck half empty — it weighs out. A load of snacks, packaging or empty crates fills the deck long before it is heavy — it cubes out. Planning on weight alone sends the cube-out truck away looking underloaded; planning on volume alone overloads the weigh-out truck past its axle limit. KO Fleetz plans against both ceilings and names the constraint that actually bit, because the fix differs for each.
It proposes; the planner disposes. The output is a suggested allocation with its assumptions attached — the crate dimensions it used, the fill history it leaned on, the binding constraint it found — not a locked assignment the system enforces. A planner can move orders between vehicles, hold a truck back for the walk-in order that always turns up, or overrule the split entirely. The point of showing the assumptions is that overruling is then an informed decision rather than a fight with a black box. Nothing goes to dispatch until a person has accepted the plan.
The plan is only as precise as the demand you can give it, and it is honest about that. With confirmed orders carrying weight and volume, it plans tightly. With rougher inputs — crate counts only, or a forecast rather than firm orders — it plans to ranges and leaves more headroom rather than pretending to a precision it does not have. For genuinely volatile days it will lean on historical fill for the lane and flag the runs where the estimate is soft. What it will not do is invent order data it was not given; a vehicle planned from a guess is labelled as such, so nobody dispatches a soft plan believing it is a firm one.
See a day's orders planned onto your own vehicles
Send us one day of orders and your vehicle list; KO Fleetz will show you the proposed load per truck, the binding constraint on each, and where a run was going out half-empty.