Time & charges

Turnaround Time (TAT)

The total time from a vehicle entering a facility to leaving it — the clearest measure of a site's efficiency.

Also calledTATVehicle turnaround

Turnaround time runs from gate-in to gate-out. For a plant or warehouse it is the single best indicator of how well the site handles vehicles, because it captures queuing, documentation, weighment, docking, handling and release in one figure that the facility genuinely controls.

Long TAT costs both parties. The transporter loses vehicle hours and may raise detention; the facility loses throughput and creates queues that spill onto public roads. Because the cost falls on two different balance sheets, it often goes unowned until someone measures it end to end.

Improvement almost always comes from scheduling rather than from faster handling. Dock appointment systems that spread arrivals across the day, matched against live vehicle ETAs, typically cut TAT more than adding labour to the dock, because the bottleneck is usually the arrival peak rather than the unloading rate.