95% ... and Beyond!!

Unregistered Carriers on 01/20/2009 - 1091
Unregistered Carriers on 01/21/2010 - 1078

Illinois - 95.00%
Maine - 93.40%

Today, we hit 95% registration. This achievement, of course, led me to wonder what it will take to get to 96%. It's not an easy calculation, but that never prevents me from trying. In fact, Bill Leonard recently told me that some days I sound like the "Rain Man" in this blog. But I digress ...

First, remember that the registration percentage calculation is:

# Registrations / (# Registration + # Unregistered Universe Carriers)

We generally assume that about 80% of our registrations are carriers that are actually on the Unregistered Universe list, but that's just an average.

This calculation is manageable ... unless you factor in the next variable - "new adds". The Unregistered Universe list expands and contracts, so if, on a given day, we registered nobody but we got a "new add", our percentage would actually go down for that day. Nothing's easy.

Our last variable is de-activations, where we don't have to register anybody on a given day in order to make our percentage go up. So, if, on the aforementioned day, we register nobody, we deactivate two carriers and we have one "new add", our percentage would still go up ... without registering one single carrier.

So how do we put all this stuff together and estimate the effort needed to get to 96%? Beats me!

I've got a spreadsheet called a UCR Daily Activity Calculator, however, that functions like a mixing bowl: I put in today's beginning numbers, I plug in my assumptions for the day about registrations, new adds, deactivations, resends (peculiar to UCR Link) and voila ... out comes my anticipated percentage for tomorrow morning. It's usually pretty close but rarely "spot on" because I have no way to accurately anticipate how many new adds I'm going to get from FMCSA.

My gut feeling: we need about 300 more registrations and our average number of new adds and deactivations to get to 96%. With any luck, we can do it in about a month.

Let's see how close I get.