Why cost-per-stop is the wrong unit economic
The whole industry benchmarks itself on cost-per-stop. It quietly destroys margin while making everyone look productive.
The default unit economic in last-mile logistics is cost-per-stop. It’s simple, it’s familiar, and it’s quietly destroying margin in every operation that uses it.
What it ignores
A stop that fails — wrong address, recipient unavailable, vehicle breakdown — has the same cost-per-stop number as one that succeeds. Worse, the failed stop generates rework: a callback, a re-route, often a return trip. None of that shows up in cost-per-stop.
What to measure instead
Cost-per-successful-completion captures rework. It punishes routes that look efficient on the dispatch screen but fail in the field. It rewards investment in address verification, ETA accuracy, and recipient communication — all of which show up as line items but pay back through fewer failed completions.
The mechanical change
Switching from cost-per-stop to cost-per-completion is a one-line change in your reporting. The cultural change — explaining to ops leaders why their efficiency number just dropped 8% even though nothing got worse — is harder. Worth doing.