Practical planning comes very much to the fore in two new digital mapping tools for planning and optimising door-to-door delivery operations. One of them, MM Territories, is a new module for the GeoConcept geographic information system that helps door-to-door delivery businesses build viable, walkable delivery rounds quickly and automatically.
It can produce quite small rounds that actually work in the real world, taking proper account of the local environment and on-the-ground location of individual addresses. Crucially, it respects commonsense rules such as “don’t make a newspaper boy cross a busy road,” or “make sure delivery agents won’t accidentally cross into each other’s areas.”
MM Territories is highly configurable, allowing users to define their own delivery areas with data such as Ordnance Survey Code-Point unit postcode polygons, and can further use a wide range of raster and vector, street or road level mapping (all available from MapMechanics).
Taking detailed delivery round planning a stage further is MM Postman, a module which ensures delivery staff walk the shortest distance without doubling back on themselves or crossing roads unnecessarily. It can also print out a list of the streets for staff to visit, helping to reassure them they are taking the right route, and even prints address ranges for sections of streets, confirming the direction of the route where there is a choice.
Users define each walking route on screen on a GeoConcept map display, either by postcode sector or other geographical unit, or by drawing a freeform shape to encompass the proposed route. They can amend the result to add or remove areas to produce a route with the right length and number of properties.
The optimal route takes the delivery person along each side of each street separately, and is displayed on a map with resizable arrows to indicate sequence and direction.
Standing back from the fine detail of targeting potential customers, users can benefit from OptiSite, a powerful network modelling tool from MapMechanics which helps users evaluate the implications of dealing with dispersed demand points or target locations. It is ideal in door-to-door distribution for defining territories, but is also effective in handling sales, service and marketing territories and in franchise allocation, and in planning store or depot locations.
Data can be imported easily from a spreadsheet or database, and OptiSite can base calculations either on direct lines between demand points and resources, or on actual routes. It can optimise use of existing resources, and also perform “what-if” analysis.
Which is the best location from which to serve existing or potential customers? And more subtly, which are the best alternatives? That question is addressed by Service Allocator, another product developed by MapMechanics, which also addresses key marketing questions such as which retail outlets are most likely to be used by each potential customer.
Users can designate which roads to consider (for instance, all roads or just main roads), and can apply their own speed criteria. Alternatively, they can use special road speed data files available from Kingswood MapMechanics, differentiating between real-world speeds achievable at various times of day (peak, off-peak and so on).
Binding all the above solutions together, and putting them in the context of an enterprise-wide information system, is the role of Intranet Intelligence, a major new approach to sharing corporate data (especially geographic or marketing-related data) in an organisation, coordinating resources centrally while preserving interactive and fully customisable access.
Built around the core of GeoConcept Internet Server, Intranet Intelligence allows individual users or departments to work locally on corporate data, and even make changes in it, without adversely affecting other users or requiring individual subsets of the source data. They can share names, addresses, business and demographic information, marketing intelligence or maps of a given area; and significantly, the data can be stored anywhere in the organisation and kept in its original format. It need not be pooled in one place.
Supporting all these products and services, MapMechanics offers one of the widest ranges of digital map data, demographic data and implementation support in the market. |
