On-Time Pickup

On-time pickup measures whether a carrier arrives at the origin facility and completes loading within the agreed-upon window. It's the upstream counterpart to on-time delivery, and in many cases it's the better predictor – a shipment that picks up late is almost always going to deliver late, especially on tight transit lanes.

The metric is calculated the same way as on-time delivery: pickups completed within the scheduled window divided by total pickups. The pickup window is typically set by the shipper or warehouse and confirmed through a tender or appointment. A carrier that accepts a tender for a Tuesday 8:00 AM pickup but doesn't arrive until Wednesday has failed on-time pickup, and the ripple effects – missed delivery appointments, detention charges, rescheduling fees – are already in motion.

On-time pickup often gets less attention than on-time delivery because the customer doesn't feel it directly – they only see the delivery. But for shippers managing tight supply chains, especially in cold chain or retail compliance environments, a late pickup is the root cause of most downstream failures. Tracking it separately lets logistics teams distinguish between carrier reliability problems (late pickups) and transit execution problems (on-time pickup but late delivery), which require different corrective actions.

Shippers who pair on-time pickup tracking with proactive alerts – flagging a carrier that hasn't checked in by a threshold time before the pickup window closes – can intervene early, rebrokering the load or adjusting the delivery appointment before the problem compounds.