Postcode Anywhere Address Management Web Service
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Home - Products - Route planning and optimisation

Fast Facts

  • Motorway travel accounts for 20% of all journeys.
  • Growth in traffic flows was 41% between 1981 and 1991.
  • The average speed for an urban journey is less than 22mph.
  • Duty on petrol and diesel accounted for 66.3% of total environmental taxation in 2006.
  • Are you doing your bit for the environment?

Our route planning and optimisation tools* and web service can help you save 30% on your fuel costs.

  • What is route optimisation?
    • Route optimisation will find you the best possible route – in fact, journey times can be cut by 30%. It really cuts down your route if there's more than one dropping-off point (delivery routes, for example), or more than one vehicle – it's the big brother of the "travelling salesman" problem.
  • Great for you, great for the environment
    • Not only are journey times and petrol costs cut by up to 30%, but so are your carbon emissions. In fact, if most small to medium sized haulage companies (which we reckon contribute to about 25% of total road use in the UK) used our route optimisation services, carbon emissions would fall by 13 million tons annually – that's the amount of CO2 generated by two Teesside power plants.
  • Who can use it?
    • Any business needing to call at several addresses or with several vehicles can benefit. The haulage industry, e-commerce... where there's a delivery, there's a company who can benefit from route-op.
  • Why Postcode Anywhere?
    • Route optimisation isn't new but it's normally very expensive – if you want to buy route optimisation software on a CD it will cost tens of thousands of pounds. It will also use old data which won't reflect changes as new roads are built.

      Postcode Anywhere's software is not only provided as a service over the Internet (with cost-per-use starting at 10p), but we host the road data and keep it up-to-date.

      Our service currently works in the UK, Europe, USA and Canada. You can even tell us the weight, height, width, length and maximum axle weight of your vehicle and we'll find the best route avoiding restricted roads.

      We specialise in complex routes with more than one vehicle and several stopping off points - but our program also works for simple routes.
  • How does it work?
    • Our incredibly complicated "approximation algorithm" (unsurprisingly) approximates an optimal route. It is impossible in practice to write a program that would cycle through every possibility to find the exact best route because it would take exponentially longer to calculate increasingly complicated routes. To find such an exact best route with 30 waypoints and 5 vehicles would take around 600 thousand billion billion years to compute (500 billion times the age of the universe)… and we don't think your customers will want to wait that long for a delivery.

      Fuel costs are serious business – they amount to around 35% of all UK haulage costs. Trials with one haulage company carried out by Postcode Anywhere set their yearly savings using the route optimisation service at around £900,000 for a total outlay for the year of a few hundred pounds.
  • What are the facts and figures?
    • Statistics from the RAC show that traffic on our roads is responsible for 26% of carbon emissions. Source

      The UK was responsible for releasing 652.3 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2006. Source

      Independent trials carried out by Postcode Anywhere and sample haulage companies reveal the Postcode Anywhere route optimisation typically reduces journey times and distance by 30%. Therefore, if 25% of all road users (representing a conservative estimate of the haulage companies and road users who would benefit from such software) used the service, carbon emissions would be cut by:
      652.3m x 26% (amount due to road users) x 25%(number of optimiser conversions) x 30% (increase in efficiency) = 12.72 million tons of CO2.
Route planning and optimisation

Available on a pay-as-you-go basis. As well as profiling your customers, you can use your credit pack to verify bank details, get a route plan and capture international address data.

  • From only 1.3 pence per lookup
  • Route planning typically consumes 2 credits
  • Can be used on a website or internally
  • Automatic top-up facility for zero admin
  • Automated notification when you need more credits
  • Credit packs are valid for 1 year

From
£50 per year for 1,000 searches

View pricing information for our route planning and optimisation service
Download the Excel spreadsheet route planning and optimisation tools
See the route planning service in use
Register for a free trial of our route planning service
Download the pricing guide for our route planning and optimisation service
Download detailed information about all of our route optimisation services

"Postcode Anywhere has enabled us to make our online booking process quicker and easier for our customers... it is simple to implement and ensures the accuracy of the address data that we capture."

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