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As seen in Postal and Parcel Technology International | January 2019

Doug Hill, Director of Marketing, shares background on the development of Route Health Score to provide postal operators with essential insights into their routes.

The parcel delivery landscape is changing quickly, and the competition is maturing. New, nimble companies have realized they need to stay ahead of the competition if they want to survive and compete with established organizations.

The savviest companies know they need to start with a good foundation and have embraced route optimization as the first step in a comprehensive delivery plan. Objective understanding of the results of route optimization efforts are key to helping managers improve efficiency.

Looking at routing operations on a map will often alert users to some issues, but understanding the objective factors that go into healthy routing operations will uncover many more inefficiencies. The RouteSmart Route Health Score was developed to provide postal operators with essential insights into their routes. The Route Health Score, available in all RouteSmart Technologies’ on-premise and software as-a-service solutions, enables operators to evaluate the effectiveness of their routing efforts and address the factors that are most important to their operations. Having healthy routes that are balanced, compact and do not cross over each other indicates that posts are working efficiently and saving time, miles and money.

The Route Health Score permits routing specialists to monitor the well-being of their routes by evaluating three key factors: balance, efficiency and compactness. These factors are quantitative, therefore taking the guesswork out of route optimization. The ability to weight the score towards the factors most important to each company will help build better routes and drive down costs.

Route optimization systems must offer an array of deployment options to meet the needs of delivery groups. On-premise solutions provide the freedom to review and refine large projects down to the smallest details, while hosted solutions enable organizations to quickly create dynamic routes for fast-changing e-commerce deliveries. RouteSmart offers both options. RouteSmart has evolved from on-premise desktop solutions for route planning on the largest scale, to fast, more efficient algorithms and has built tools for the postal industry to help the optimization process.