By Joel Davis, VP of Marketing, Gravitate
Consider a delivery that goes exactly as planned. The driver loads the right product, arrives on time, and completes the drop. The customer gets the fuel.
Around that successful delivery, however, someone reenters the order, someone calls for an arrival time, someone tracks down the bill of lading, and someone else reconciles the quantities before accounting can invoice.
Multiply that work by the customers you hope to add next year, and the staffing request makes sense: “We need another person.”
The workload is real. But the request rests on an assumption worth examining: that next year’s business will require the same manual effort per transaction as this year’s.
Fuel businesses depend on experienced people. Growth may require more of them. Yet a staffing plan can also carry forward years of workarounds, each too familiar to question. As you prepare for 2027, these five questions can help you identify the capacity your business needs, separate from the work that is quietly consuming it.
1. What, exactly, would the next person spend the day doing?
A job title can conceal the problem. “Dispatch support” might mean coordinating additional deliveries. It might also mean calling carriers for information that customers cannot see. “Accounting support” might mean managing more accounts or repeatedly chasing missing documents.
Before defining the role, follow a handful of transactions from order through invoice. Include a routine delivery and one that required intervention. Ask employees to show you the actual steps, including the spreadsheets and messages outside the official process.
Look for work that repeats because information is missing, inaccessible, or entered differently by another department or trading partner.
That distinction changes the investment decision. You may need another person to manage additional business. You may also need to eliminate a recurring task that every additional transaction will otherwise create.
2. Where are experienced people spending time before they can use their experience?
A dispatcher evaluating a supply change needs current inventory, available product, truck capacity, delivery commitments, and the cost of the alternatives. Gathering those inputs can take longer than deciding what to do with them.
The same is true of a pricing professional assembling supplier postings and freight costs before evaluating a customer quote.
When that preparation happens manually, the cost extends beyond payroll. A sourcing opportunity can disappear while someone checks whether the truck can make the trip. A customer may call again while the answer sits in another company’s system.
Measure the waiting and information gathering around a decision, as well as the decision itself. Then ask what would let the employee begin with the necessary facts already available.
Sometimes the answer is a shared process or a clearer responsibility. Sometimes it requires systems that connect inventory, sourcing, pricing, dispatch, and delivery information.
When evaluating technology, ask the provider to walk through one of your actual deliveries. Can information move from order through execution without repeated entry? Can a recommendation account for both supply economics and delivery constraints? What still requires a phone call?
Those answers reveal more about potential operating capacity than a feature list.
3. Which decisions deserve a better starting point?
During a load-planning proof of concept with Sheetz, our team at Gravitate compared manual planning with AI-assisted planning. An experienced dispatcher took about 44 minutes to build a set of loads. The AI generated a plan in about 90 seconds, after which the dispatcher reviewed it and made adjustments. (Panel recap)
That was one planning exercise, not a measure of the dispatcher’s entire job or a staffing forecast. But it made an important question tangible: what could an experienced operator accomplish with a strong starting point available that much sooner?
The opportunity extends beyond the initial time saving. An operator can potentially revisit a plan as inventory, supply, or delivery conditions change. A plan that was sensible at the start of a shift may deserve another look before the next truck leaves.
Choose a recurring decision with a measurable consequence. Test AI-assisted recommendations against the current process, including review time and downstream results. Establish which inputs must be reliable, who approves the recommendation, and what happens when information is missing.
The business case should explain how better decisions improve the operation, alongside the time they save.
4. What work should our best people have more time to do?
Ask the employee everyone depends on what they would address if routine coordination consumed less of their day.
They may want to investigate a customer’s repeated emergency orders, coach a newer dispatcher, or work with a carrier to prevent a recurring service problem. Those activities can improve the business, yet the next ringing phone keeps pushing them aside.
Make that work part of the plan. Otherwise, recovered time is likely to disappear into the next queue.
Also distinguish judgment from undocumented knowledge. A delivery restriction that only one dispatcher remembers should become information the whole team can use. Deciding how to protect an important customer relationship during a disruption may still require that dispatcher’s experience and authority.
Involve experienced employees in documenting operating rules, testing recommendations, and defining exceptions. Budget time for that involvement. Their knowledge is essential to making the improvement work, and implementation is additional work before it creates capacity.
5. What would prove we have created usable capacity?
Scattered minutes do not automatically add up to an available employee. Time recovered in accounting cannot cover an understaffed dispatch shift. A faster morning process may leave the afternoon bottleneck untouched.
Define where the capacity is needed and what it should enable: more deliveries per shift, quicker quoting, shorter delivery-to-invoice time, less overtime, or dependable vacation coverage.
Measure service and accuracy alongside throughput. More deliveries are valuable only if the team can maintain its commitments. Faster invoicing should not create more corrections and disputes.
Include software, integration, training, and ongoing review in the cost. Test through a busy period before assuming the improvement can support the next stage of growth.
You may find that hiring remains the right answer. You will have better evidence for the role, its timing, and the responsibilities it should carry.
6. Give process improvement a line in the budget
For 2027, pair the staffing plan with one specific commitment to improve a workflow that is consuming capacity. Name an owner, establish a baseline, and fund a manageable change. Set a date to review the result with the employees doing the work.
Necessary hiring can proceed while that effort takes shape. A team already stretched thin needs support to improve its processes.
The discipline is to examine both needs together. Otherwise, a business can scrutinize every proposed salary while renewing its most expensive workarounds without discussion.
Every new hire should help build the business you want to operate. Before approving the next position, make sure its job description does not simply preserve the problems your current team has learned to live with.
