On 3 August 2015 at 12:56, Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 16:32:05 +0100 James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com wrote:
Doing delivery each day i find them poor. More often than not I put in the road and village/town these days. I hadn't realised they were that bad. e.g. Rougham ind est has just one postcode.... loads of roads to find one's way around.
There is a publically available list of post codes which you can add to most varieties of mapping software if the one that's available to you isn't very good but like you, I start off entering the post code (taken from the one supplied with the unit) and then add the street name and house number if appropriate.
If I were a delivery driver, I would (time permitting) check the delivery address quoted on the customer's website and then use that.
My car is a Citroen and in France, it's possible to enter an address in GoogleMaps and then transmit that to the car. Citroen UK don't impliment that however. I think that such a facility is available on some software though. So a possible scenario, if you have internet access in your vehicle, and again with time permitting, is to search for the delivery customer's address, and send that to the mapping software. It all takes time and money however.
I'd be interested to know how companies such as DPD do it as they can quote an approximate delivery time and the customer can check online where that delivery vehicle is. That suggests that their delivery route is mapped before the driver leaves the depot whereas when I was a transport manager, the maxim was always to attempt delivery on the address furthest away from the depot first so that you were always working towards your home base. That was a very long time ago now though and sat navs were things that only appeared in James Bond films ;-)
The company I work for do the same. The delivery route is worked out furthest first. The ePod data is then fed back to the depot where it goes online. It is that which provides the tracking data. But ePods often go wrong (or get dropped) - the software isn't so good. So anyone looking for a programming job approach some of these companies. Pen and paper are far more convenient and quicker! The better system is the phone ones where you just send a text message after each drop - the data being collected and implemented on the tracker system. ePods cost £2.5-3k.
As I have said the satnav is accurate but some areas are a problem.
james