Our route planning system works out each day's drops for our crane lorries and flatbeds, the order to visit them and the time each will take. When we bought it in 2021, it located every delivery from its postcode, using the central point of the postcode area,.
In towns that works. A postcode covers around fifteen addresses on average, and its centre is rarely more than a street away from the door. In the countryside a single postcode can cover a scattering of farms, cottages and barn conversions across several square miles, and its centre can sit in a field, a wood or on the far side of a river.
We found out properly last winter, after a driver with a load of oak beams for a barn conversion in north Lincolnshire followed the planner's location to a farm track two and a half miles from the site, with no room to turn a twenty six tonne lorry. It took forty minutes to back out.
When we compared the planner's locations with where our lorries had actually stopped to unload, using the telematics we already had, about one rural drop in five had been placed more than half a mile from the real one. Every one of those drops had its drive time worked out from the wrong place, which is why the planners had started adding twenty minutes to rural routes by hand.
The fix was to stop treating the postcode as a location. Every address in Great Britain has a unique property reference, and Ordnance Survey has published a free file of those references with coordinates since 2020. Our planner now locates each drop from the property itself. Where the right place to deliver is not the building, such as a farm with a separate yard gate or a site that does not have an address yet, the customer or the driver can drop a pin, which is kept with the delivery address and used next time.
Rural routes now finish within ten minutes of plan on most days, and the planners have stopped padding them.
A postcode was designed to sort the post. It tells you which round a letter belongs to, not where a lorry should stop. Before you use any piece of data as a location, ask how precise it was ever meant to be.
– Serguey Shinder
Top comments (0)