 |
|
Circular Distributors, the UK's leading door drop marketing company, has just completed what is described as "a major overhaul" of its territory definition process, putting into place a system which allows delivery area creation by unit postcode for the first time, and gives the company unprecedented power to update and refine its distribution routes in-house.
The company has worked throughout the project with geographic information systems specialist Kingswood MapMechanics, which has provided GIS software, digital mapping and postcode data, bespoke programming work and consultancy. |
According to CD planning director Charles Neilson: "The project has kept us at the leading edge of territory definition. Kingswood MapMechanics came up with a pragmatic solution, then worked with us on implementation."
At the heart of the project was Circular Distributors' wish to produce better-defined delivery areas that could be served as cost-effectively as possible by its thousands of distributors, and in which households could be selected to meet customers' target profiling requirements as accurately as possible.
Following the last major overhaul, the company had been using a system which produced routes on the basis of postcode sectors and Census enumeration districts. "This was fine," Charles Neilson says," but we wanted a more flexible system related directly to street addresses."
Not only has the project divided all CD's target areas across the country into units making up efficient, manageable delivery areas based on addresses; the system can also print out maps of any selected area or group of areas, as well as lists of every target address within each area (but excluding commercial addresses or any that have been omitted for other reasons).
It also meets the informal objective of creating what Kingswood MapMechanics' general manager, Theresa Barlow, describes as "routes you could describe to someone on the phone in terms like 'Go down the left-hand side of the street, then turn left at the crossroads and work your way up to the railway station'."
The Kingswood MapMechanics solution draws on the power of GeoConcept, the GIS software package it supplies and supports in Britain; and unusually, it has involved a degree of manual processing to determine logical delivery areas. Yet this approach was chosen in competition with more automated solutions proposed by rivals in the tendering process.
As Theresa Barlow explains: "We were able to show Circular Distributors that a human operator interacting with a powerful GIS would produce more effective real-world delivery areas than a fully-automated system merely trying to interpret predefined rules."
She adds: "We did some bespoke programming to make the definition process as streamlined as possible, so although it was a manual operation, it could be performed quickly and efficiently."
The software used for this operation has now been supplied to Circular Distributors, and Charles Neilson says the company will use it at regularly to update its delivery areas in-house. "It gives us a valuable degree of self-sufficiency," he says.
Prior to starting the project, Kingswood MapMechanics ran a consultancy exercise for CD, in which it used "auto-correlation" tools in GeoConcept to distinguish between areas where it would be practical and impractical to deliver. This enabled CD to eliminate uneconomic areas, using its own target population density as a guide.
Moving on to the main task of defining viable distribution areas throughout the country, Kingswood MapMechanics created a system which the computer screen automatically displays a postcode sector on screen, overlaid with a street pattern drawn with Andes street-level raster map data. Within each sector, Codepoint Polygons from Ordnance Survey identify clusters of addresses designated by a single unit postcode (the average is 15 households).
Working interactively, an operator is able to outline a freeform area on this screen, enclosing enough postcodes to make up a potential delivery area. GeoConcept is able to identify all the postcodes within the selected area, allowing the operator to decide whether the resultant area matches the rules set by Circular Distributors. These areas are known as "CD Microsectors".
The rules lay down the maximum and minimum number of households allowed per CD Microsector, and also deal with issues such as the extent of the area and the question of whether the resultant route would cross key immovable barriers. These barriers might be railways and rivers, or even major roads which would be difficult for distributors to cross repeatedly.
If the selected CD Microsector breaks the rules, the operator can redraw it interactively until the solution comes as close as practicable to the meeting all company's requirements.
Using this methodology, a team at Kingswood MapMechanics worked methodically through the country, coding every area. To smooth the process, the company programmed the system to present the operator with a new postcode sector automatically as soon as each one had been satisfactorily divided into CD Microsectors.
Completing the coding was an iterative process. In the early stages, sample routes were presented to the CD team, who were able to adjudicate on instances where two rules were in conflict (for instance, the maximum number of houses per route and the need to avoid highly irregular delivery areas). The end result was a map identifying all the target areas in Britain and dividing them into CD Microsectors representing viable distribution routes.
To turn this into a tool for CD's ongoing use, Kingswood MapMechanics then linked the postcodes in the map to tables in a Microsoft Access database of addresses from the PAF (Post Office Address File). This allows CD to print off lists of addresses within each CD Microsector, and also to "flag" individual households with instructions such as "do not deliver".
The final stage of the process is printing off maps and lists, and for this Kingswood MapMechanics has provided various printing utilities, including a routine that prints multiple route lists in batches, and one that automatically scales and prints street maps of routes on a single or double A4 sheet. The batch utility also includes the option to print routes selectively - for instance by location or by CD's own team areas. All route-printing utilities generate formatted PDF files which can be output later, transmitted by email or archived for future reference.
In all, the products supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics included two copies of GeoConcept Expert, each with the Publisher module (allowing precise control of map shading); Andes street-level raster map data of Britain; Codepoint Polygons of the UK; bespoke programming to control the creation of CD Microsectors; and batch printing routines.
"The great beauty of the new system is that it's completely updatable," says CD director Charles Neilson. "The postcode universe is constantly changing, so this feature is very useful to us." He adds: "Until now we haven't been able to stand back and consider the question of route definition so thoroughly. We're very pleased with the outcome and the work that the Kingswood team have put into the project."
|
