Newspapers deliveries. Circulation district managers for the Daily Commercial and its sister publication, the weekly South Lake Press, are tasked with getting the newspapers delivered to their Lake County, Florida, subscribers, as efficiently as possible.
Today with the help of our Route Planner, the circulation department is saving time and mileage by creating optimized routes in minutes, instead of hours.
District Managers and “Down” Routes. Paul Nikolai, circulation director, found himself looking for an efficient route planning program to help his district managers easily create maps for “down” routes—routes where the usual newspaper carriers aren’t available on that day for some reason, such as illness or personnel changes.
District managers are responsible for newspaper deliveries on those routes, which change frequently because of vacations, a high number of “Snowbirds” who only subscribe during the winter months and other typical subscriber fluctuations. These district managers handle a total of 80 different routes, each of which can require the delivery of 25 to 500 papers.
Paul discovered MyRouteOnline.com via a Google search. He put the software to the test one hectic day when his district managers had more down routes than usual. After pulling a list of subscribers from the newspaper subscriber database, Paul uploaded a CSV file to MyRouteOnline route planner, and created a route in minutes.
Paul then emailed the final route to his smartphone so when he was out making the deliveries, a simple click on a route address brought up Google Maps, which showed him exactly where he needed to go.
“With MyRouteOnline, I was able to see each address on the map,” he explained. “It makes it so much easier to simply click on that address to see where exactly it was located. On just one route, I cut the time I spent delivering newspapers by 50%. It took me two hours to deliver 200 papers instead of the typical four hours it would have taken me without MyRouteOnline.com.”
Not long ago, Paul would have tried to recreate the route manually, using handwritten subscriber books with outdated information that required him to look up a few addresses at a time. Now with MyRouteOnline.com, he can quickly create a digital map and send the route to his Smartphone. Now Paul’s district managers use MyRouteOnline to easily create routes when necessary. While some send their routes to their smartphones, they also print out the MyRouteOnline’s maps for rural areas where they don’t have cell connections.
“Everything is easy and straightforward,” Paul said. “MyRouteOnline.com is very user friendly. When I used to be a district manager, I would take each address and look it up in Google addresses. It would take 8-10 hours to plan a route using these old manual methods. With MyRouteOnline.com, it happens instantaneously.”
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