Cold-chain distribution along the Busan–Changwon corridor presents a familiar planning challenge: tight temperature windows, strict receiving hours, and limited dock capacity at coastal retail locations. A pharmaceutical logistics firm engaged us to study why their morning runs consistently missed the 10:00 completion target despite adequate driving time buffers.
We rode along on four delivery days in January, logging temperature readings, driving segments, and dock wait periods separately. Driving time between stops averaged within four minutes of the dispatch estimate. Dock wait time averaged 19 minutes against a planned eight.
The retail locations shared a pattern: morning deliveries queued behind larger grocery inbound shipments that occupied the single refrigerated dock until 09:15. Our client's trucks arrived on schedule at 08:30 but could not begin unloading until the dock cleared. By the time the last stop finished, the route ran 52 minutes over plan.
The dispatch schedule had allocated eight minutes per dock based on historical averages that blended wait and unload time. Separating the two in the chart made the bottleneck visible. Unload itself took six to nine minutes once the dock was available.
We recommended shifting departure from the Busan depot 40 minutes earlier and negotiating staggered receiving windows with two anchor stores. The firm adopted the earlier departure within two weeks. Completion times moved inside the 10:00 target on three of four subsequent observation days.
Cold-chain routes often fail on dock capacity assumptions rather than road conditions. Separating wait time from unload time in your records— even informally—can reveal whether the fix belongs in scheduling or in store coordination.