TAT in Logistics: Turnaround Time, and Which One You Are Measuring

Vehicle TAT measures the time a vehicle spends at a facility: gate-in to gate-out, covering queueing, docking, loading or unloading, paperwork and release. Order TAT measures the customer-facing cycle: from an order being placed to it being delivered. Both are legitimately called TAT and they answer different questions — one is about how efficiently a facility handles vehicles, the other about how quickly a customer is served.

When a depot reports its TAT has improved while the sales team insists TAT has worsened, they are usually both right, because they are quoting different measurements. The fix is not analytical sophistication. It is agreeing which cycle the word refers to in your organisation, writing that down, and using the other name for the other measurement.

Even within vehicle TAT, the start point is contested. Timing from gate-in captures the queue and puts the facility on the hook for congestion it created. Timing from the moment the vehicle docks excludes the queue entirely and produces a flattering number that leaves the biggest source of delay outside the measurement.

There is no universally correct answer, but there is a correct practice: pick one, apply it everywhere, and understand what it excludes. A facility that measures dock-to-dock while its drivers wait three hours at the gate is not measuring turnaround time so much as measuring the part of turnaround time it is comfortable with.

Contracts typically allow a free period at each facility, after which detention charges start accruing. TAT and detention are therefore the same clock read for two purposes: one operational, one commercial. Where the free period is generous relative to actual performance, poor turnaround stays invisible in the accounts and shows up only as vehicles unavailable for the next trip.

That second cost is the one most often missed. A vehicle standing at a gate is not merely accruing a charge — it is a vehicle not doing the next job, and on a tight fleet the opportunity cost of the lost trip can exceed the detention recovered. Fleets that look only at detention billed will systematically understate what slow facilities cost them.

The reason TAT is so often disputed is that it has traditionally been recorded by the people whose performance it measures, on paper, at the gate. Gate registers get filled in retrospectively, times get rounded to the convenient quarter hour, and by the time two parties compare records they are comparing recollections.

Geofenced arrival and departure timestamps remove the argument by taking the measurement out of anybody's hands: the vehicle entering and leaving a defined boundary is recorded automatically, with the same definition applied at every facility. That does not by itself improve turnaround, but it does move the conversation from whose figure is right to why the figure is what it is, which is the conversation worth having.