Reduce Empty Miles by Fixing the Decisions That Create Them
Nobody dispatches a truck empty on purpose. It happens because the return leg was never anyone's job, the cost of it was never attributed to anything, and the rate on the outbound load quietly absorbed it. Deadhead is a planning and pricing problem that shows up as a driving problem, and KO Fleetz attacks it where it is decided rather than where it is driven.
Fleet and logistics operators run KO Fleetz in production
Where the money leaks on an unloaded leg
An empty kilometre costs almost exactly what a loaded one costs. Diesel is marginally lower without the weight, and that is the entire discount. The driver is paid the same hour, the tyres wear on the same road, the service interval arrives at the same odometer reading, and the asset depreciates against distance it earned nothing for. Then it consumes the scarcest thing in the operation: hours on a driver's clock that cannot be spent twice.
The leak is not that the cost exists. It is that the cost is misfiled. Every one of those expenses is recorded honestly and then divided across the loaded kilometres, because that is what the rate card is denominated in. The outbound lane therefore looks expensive, the return leg looks free, and the lane analysis that comes out of it is confidently wrong. A corridor gets repriced, or dropped, on the strength of a cost per kilometre that has an invisible second leg baked into it — the leg KO Fleetz pulls back into view.
The compounding effect is worse. Because deadhead never appears as its own line, it is never anybody's target, so no dispatcher is measured on it and no salesperson prices for it. The empty running gets treated as weather. Work out what a leg of your own actually costs before you argue about it — the empty miles cost calculator takes the distance and your own cost per kilometre and gives you a number you can put in front of the people who decide.
The dispatcher's memory is the backhaul system
Ask how much of the fleet runs empty and you get a percentage delivered with real confidence and no arithmetic underneath it. This is not dishonesty. It is that a trip is recorded as one job with one distance, and nothing in the record says which half of it was earning. You cannot manage a quantity that has never been separated from the quantity next to it, and prising the earning half of a trip apart from the empty half is the first thing KO Fleetz does to the record.
Matching is worse, because it fails on timing rather than on information. The return freight existed. It was on the board at eleven o'clock, and it was declined, and forty kilometres away a vehicle was going free with most of a shift left. Neither fact was visible to the person holding the other one at the moment it could have mattered. On Thursday, in a review meeting, both are obvious. That gap between eleven o'clock and Thursday is the whole problem, and no amount of asking people to communicate better closes it.
- A trip sheet records total distance. Splitting it into paid and unpaid requires knowing when the trailer emptied, which nothing in the paperwork records.
- Backhaul matching lives in the head of whoever has been at that depot longest, which means it goes home at six and retires eventually.
- A spreadsheet of open orders and a screen of vehicle positions cannot be joined by a human under time pressure, so the join happens after both have moved on.
- Return loads are declined for the wrong reason: not because there was no truck, but because nobody could confirm within the ten minutes the offer stayed open.
- Monthly reporting shows the empty ratio after every decision that produced it has been made. It informs an argument, never a dispatch.
- Nobody separates structural deadhead from the avoidable kind, so an unfixable one-way corridor and a lazy return-to-base habit sit in the same number and get the same shrug.
How KO Fleetz resolves this
The KO Fleetz modules that fix it
Reduce Empty Miles is not one feature — it is a few KO Fleetz modules working off the same records. These are the ones that carry it.
The workflow
Measure it, cost it, then change the decision
Step 1: Split every leg into paid and unpaid
KO Fleetz flags each leg loaded or empty from delivery confirmation, weight change or trip status. Until this exists, everything downstream is opinion. It is also usually the point where the real ratio surprises somebody senior.
Step 2: Put the cost where it was incurred
The empty leg carries its own fuel, hours, wear and depreciation instead of donating them to the loaded leg's cost per kilometre. Lane profitability changes shape immediately, and some of it changes sign.
Step 3: Separate structural from avoidable
A corridor where freight only flows one way is geography, and treating it as a dispatch failure wastes an afternoon. A depot that pulls vehicles home out of habit is a decision. These need different people and different fixes.
Step 4: Surface the match while it still matters
Vehicles about to go free near a lane with return volume are listed against your own open orders and their time windows, at the hour the dispatcher can still act, not in Thursday's report.
Step 5: Price the lane with both legs in it
Where deadhead is genuinely structural, the answer is commercial rather than operational. A round-trip cost belongs in the rate, and that conversation needs the number, not a feeling.
What you use
The capabilities that do the work
Drawn from across the platform — this problem is not solved by one module.
Loaded and empty leg classification
Every leg carries a paid-or-unpaid flag derived from evidence the fleet already produces, which turns deadhead from a debated percentage into a sortable column.
True cost on the unpaid leg
KO Fleetz attributes fuel, driver hours, maintenance accrual and depreciation to the empty run itself rather than folding them into the loaded kilometre that paid for them.
Deadhead concentration by corridor
Unpaid distance is drawn on the lanes it was actually driven, which almost always turns out to be a short list rather than an even spread across the network.
Backhaul candidates in the moment
KO Fleetz matches vehicles going free against your own open orders by position, time window and remaining driver hours, at the point a dispatcher can still say yes.
Load status from the vehicle
Where axle or body weight is available, the loaded flag comes from the truck rather than from a status update somebody was supposed to remember to tap.
Lane profitability with both legs
A corridor's margin is assembled from the round trip it really requires, so a lane that only works if the return is imaginary stops looking like a good lane.
Empty ratio where someone owns it
Unpaid share is broken out by depot, lane, customer and vehicle class, because a single fleet figure has never caused anybody to do anything differently.
Repositioning visibility
Moves made to get an asset somewhere rather than to carry something are counted as their own category, since they are a planning artefact and not a failed sale.
In the product
What this looks like in KO Fleetz
What changes
The difference it makes
- Paid and unpaid distance stop sharing one number
- Per leg
- The empty run carries its own fuel and hours
- Cost lands right
- Backhaul surfaces while the dispatcher can still act
- In the moment
- Structural deadhead is told apart from avoidable
- Geography or habit
How you will know it worked
Measure these
We publish no savings figure for your fleet, because we have not measured your fleet. These are the metrics that will move if this works.
| Metric | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Unpaid share of total distance | Empty kilometres divided by total kilometres, calculated from KO Fleetz leg classification rather than estimated. Break it out by depot and lane from the start; the fleet-wide number is only useful as a headline and nobody can act on it. |
| Empty ratio on your worst three corridors | Track the lanes where deadhead concentrates, separately and by name. Improvement here is real. Improvement in the fleet average can be an artefact of the mix of work changing. |
| Backhaul conversion rate | Of the return opportunities surfaced against a vehicle going free, the share actually taken. A low rate is informative: it usually means the time windows never fit, which is a different problem from nobody looking. |
| Revenue per operating kilometre | Total revenue over all kilometres driven, loaded and empty. This is the figure deadhead actually moves, and unlike revenue per loaded kilometre it cannot be improved by driving more empty legs. |
| Structural versus avoidable split | Classify each corridor's deadhead as geography or decision, and review the classification quarterly. A programme that never reclassifies anything is a programme where nobody is really looking. |
Put a number on it before you talk to anyone
The empty miles cost calculator is free, shows its formula, and asks nothing of you. Work out your own figure, then bring it to a demo.
Customer evidence
Fleets using KO Fleetz to do this
Customer story pending. A short, attributed quote from a fleet that used KO Fleetz for reduce empty miles belongs here — the result, in their words.
Frequently asked questions
The feature is the instrument: it classifies legs, maps deadhead onto corridors and surfaces backhaul candidates. This page is about what you do with it. Most fleets that measure empty running still do not reduce it, because the reduction depends on three things the measurement cannot supply — attributing the cost so lane analysis stops lying, deciding which deadhead is geography and which is habit, and pricing the structural remainder into the rate. That crosses trips, analytics and your commercial team.
No, and this is the most important limit on the page. KO Fleetz matches against your own order book — work you have already sold, on lanes you already run. It will tell you that a vehicle goes free at 11:00 near a corridor where you have return volume that afternoon. It will not find you a load from the open market, and if your empty running is caused by not having freight in that direction, this solution does not fix that. Buying capacity you cannot fill is not a software problem.
Unknown until you have measured it, and we will not guess. What we can say is where the answer comes from: the split between structural and avoidable. A fleet running a one-way corridor into a region that ships nothing back has deadhead that is geography, and the honest response is to price it rather than pretend it can be dispatched away. A fleet where vehicles return to base by default because that is what they have always done has a different answer entirely. Most fleets have both and have never separated them.
It can, directly, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Waiting three hours for a return load that fits is sometimes the difference between making the next appointment and missing it. A truck that leaves empty to protect a booked slot is often making the correct decision. This is why the two are separate solutions with separate metrics — improving on-time delivery and reducing deadhead pull against each other at the margin, and the trade should be made deliberately with both numbers on the table.
Yes, with slightly softer edges. Delivery confirmations, trip status transitions and the dispatch record itself are enough to mark a leg as empty in most operations, and that covers the great majority of fleets. Weight data improves two specific cases: part-loads, where a trailer is neither full nor empty and a binary flag is a lie, and multi-drop work where the trailer empties progressively. If you have axle sensors or a weighbridge feed, connect them. If you do not, start anyway.
One depot, one month, classification only. Resist the urge to build the whole programme first. The classification alone tends to produce the argument you need, because the real ratio is almost never what the room believed it was, and the corridors it concentrates on are almost never the ones people nominate. Once there is a number nobody disputes, the cost attribution and the pricing conversation follow much more easily than they would have on day one.
Find out what share of your fleet earns nothing
Send one depot's trips for a month. KO Fleetz will classify the legs, cost the empty ones, and show you which corridors carry the running.