A trucking KPI is a number that tells you whether your delivery operation is getting cheaper, more reliable or more productive. For a food distributor, the truck is where an order finally turns into revenue, and it is also one of the biggest costs you control. A short list of KPIs, reviewed every week, shows which routes earn their keep and which ones need a different plan.
The point is not to collect numbers. Each KPI below is here because it leads to a decision: change a route, change an order minimum, fix a picking problem, retire a truck. If a number never changes what you do, stop reporting it.
Cost KPIs
Start by agreeing on what "fleet cost" means, because every cost KPI divides that number by something. A complete weekly figure includes driver wages and payroll taxes, fuel, maintenance and repairs, tires, insurance, truck payments or depreciation, tolls and any rental trucks. Leaving out the fixed costs makes every route look cheaper than it is.
- Cost per stop. Fleet cost divided by stops delivered. This is the number to hold up against your smallest orders. Suppose a truck costs $1,000.00 a day to run and makes 20 stops: each stop costs $50.00 before any product is counted. An order that earns $40.00 of gross margin loses money at that stop.
- Cost per case delivered. Fleet cost divided by cases delivered. It turns delivery into a per-unit cost you can set next to your margin per case when you price an account or a product line.
- Cost per mile. Fleet cost divided by miles driven. Useful for comparing trucks and spotting a vehicle whose fuel or repair cost is climbing. It says little about whether the miles were worth driving, so read it next to cost per stop.
- Empty miles and backhauls. Most local delivery trucks leave full and come back empty. If you pick up from suppliers, track how many return trips carry a backhaul. A backhaul can replace a freight charge or a separate pickup trip.
If you want to try the arithmetic on your own trucks, the route cost calculator walks through it.
Service KPIs
- On-time delivery rate. Stops delivered inside the customer's delivery window, divided by stops that had a window. You need the window written down for each customer and a reliable completion time for each stop. Without both, "on time" is an opinion.
- Perfect delivery rate. Stops with no shortage, no wrong item, no damage and no refusal, divided by all stops. A stop that arrives on time with the wrong product is not a good stop.
- Refusals and returns at the door. Cases refused or brought back, divided by cases sent. Break it down by reason: picking error, damage, temperature, quality, or the customer changed the order. Each reason has a different owner.
- Customer complaints per 1,000 stops. Calls and messages about deliveries, scaled to volume so a busy month does not look worse just because it was busy.
Productivity KPIs
- Stops per route. How much work each truck and driver does in a day. Compare routes against each other and against their own history, not against a number from someone else's operation. A rural route and a dense downtown route will never look alike.
- Cases per stop (drop size). Bigger drops spread the cost of a stop over more product. If drop size is shrinking while stop count grows, cost per case is rising even if every truck looks busy.
- Planned vs actual route time. The route plan assumed a finish time; the driver's return time tells you the real one. A route that runs long every day needs more time allowed at its stops, fewer stops, or a different sequence.
- Maintenance cost per truck. Track repairs per vehicle per month, and days out of service. A truck whose repair bills keep climbing is a candidate for replacement. Your accountant can help you find the point where replacing beats repairing.
How to set targets without borrowed benchmarks
Industry averages are tempting, but they mix operations that have little in common with yours: different territories, drop sizes, product mixes and labor markets. Your own history is a better yardstick.
- Collect each KPI the same way every week for a couple of months.
- Find the typical value for each route, not just the fleet average.
- Pick the two or three routes that are clearly worse and ask why. The answer is often a specific customer, a specific stretch of road, or a truck that is too small for the work.
- Set the next target as a modest improvement on your own typical value, then review it each quarter.
Where the data comes from
Most of these KPIs join three sources: the route plan (stops, sequence, planned times), the delivery record (what happened at each stop and when), and the books (wages, fuel, repairs, insurance). Fuel cards and payroll exports cover much of the cost side. The delivery side should come from the driver's own record of each stop, made at the stop, not rebuilt from memory at the end of the day.
When cost and revenue are tied to each route this way, you are doing a simple form of route accounting: each route shows what it delivered, what it cost and what it earned.
How to report them
Report weekly. Daily numbers jump around too much to act on, and monthly numbers arrive too late to fix the month. Keep collection automatic wherever you can. A KPI that depends on one person updating a spreadsheet stops the first week that person is out.
Put three numbers where dispatchers, drivers and managers all see them: cost per stop, on-time rate and perfect delivery rate. Those three cover cost, timing and accuracy, and they start the right conversations. Keep the rest for a weekly review, route by route. For a wider weekly routine, see the five reports your owner should look at every Monday. If on-time rate is the problem, time-based route planning is the next place to look.
Where APFoodz fits
In APFoodz, routing plans the routes and the driver app records each stop at the door. Those stop records give you the delivery side of the KPIs above without a separate log.