Hot shot delivery

A hot shot delivery is a dedicated run for one order, sent outside the normal delivery route. The truck is apart, the next scheduled run is two hours out, and two hours is the difference between the vehicle going home tonight and a bay tied up until Thursday.

When does a shop call for a hot shot?

When the job is already committed. A tech has the intake off and finds a cracked hose, or the box that arrived holds the wrong side, or a gasket set came up one seal short. The vehicle cannot move and the bay cannot turn over, so the part becomes worth a special trip.

The other trigger is the promise time. A customer was told five o'clock, and the difference between keeping that and calling to move it is thirty minutes of driving that the supplier will usually eat to keep an account happy.

What does a hot shot cost the shop?

Rarely a line on an invoice, often an hour of somebody's day. Local suppliers absorb off-route runs because the delivery driver is already out and the account is worth more than the fuel. Distance flips it. A dealer part from a store three hours out arrives by courier at a rate somebody has to approve, and the counter will ask for a purchase-order number before the driver leaves.

When that rate does reach the ticket, it reaches it by name. California requires that "service work and parts shall be listed separately on the invoice, which shall also state separately the subtotal prices for service work and for parts" (Business and Professions Code section 9884.8), so a courier charge buried inside a part's selling price is the line a customer asks about in a dispute. If it pushes the ticket past what was already approved, section 9884.9 wants consent first, and an oral yes has to carry "the date, time, name of person authorizing the additional repairs, and telephone number called, if any" on the work order. Make the call before the driver leaves.

The real cost sits in the bay. A truck on a lift waiting for a $40 sensor is a bay producing nothing, and the charge for that never appears anywhere on the ticket. What it produces is hours nobody sold.

How is a hot shot different from a delivery run?

A scheduled delivery run is a loop. The supplier's driver leaves on a fixed cadence, hits every shop on the route and comes back, which is why the counter answers a stock question with a time rather than a distance. A hot shot leaves the loop, carries one order and comes straight back.

Will-call is the third option and it moves in the opposite direction, with somebody from the shop driving to the supplier's counter. That one is fastest when the store is close, and it costs the shop a person for the round trip. On a busy Friday the person is worth more than the wait.

What makes hot shots pile up on a diesel ticket?

Parts lists that are long and hardware that is single-use. A turbo job on a 6.7 Power Stroke carries a stack of gaskets, clamps and bolts that only exist on the estimate if somebody read the procedure and put them there. Miss one and the truck sits.

Two habits cut the volume. Build the full parts list before the job starts, including everything a kit does not cover and every single-use fastener the procedure names. Then confirm the part is on a shelf somebody can touch, because a supplier's line card tells you the brand is carried and says nothing about whether the local store has one today.

Which parts cannot ride one?

The ones with a charge in them. Air bag inflators, air bag modules and seat-belt pretensioners are hazardous materials for transport purposes under 49 CFR 173.166, classed either as Class 9 under UN3268 or as Division 1.4G depending on the device. Packaging and shipping papers both follow from that classification, and neither happens because a service advisor asked nicely at four o'clock.

Ask the counter what a module takes to move before you promise a customer a time. A supplier who has to build a compliant shipment around one part is quoting a day. The same question applies to anything else carrying propellant or a lithium cell, and asking it once on the phone is cheaper than finding out after the customer has been told the truck goes home tonight.

Where do hot shots show up in the numbers?

Nowhere obvious, which is the problem. The freight charges land on a supplier statement weeks later, mixed in with ordinary invoices. The shop books them as parts cost against parts margin and never ties one back to the repair order that caused it.

There is a second number underneath it, and nobody bills for that one either. Every off-route run started with somebody at the counter on the phone, and that person was building estimates when the call came in.

Shops that want the number tag each expedited charge to a ticket for one month and read the list. Whatever job types keep showing up on it are the ones going out with an incomplete parts list, and that is where the fix goes.

The same list answers a supplier question worth asking once a year. Some of the runs will trace back to a store that promised stock it did not have, and that is a conversation to have with a rep rather than a cost to keep absorbing. A shop that can name the account and the date on five of them gets a different answer than one describing a general feeling about deliveries.

Back to the glossary, or read how an estimate gets priced.