McClier-RouteSmart Partnership

By: Jim Rosenberg Route-optimization software developer RouteSmart Technologies, of Columbia, Md., has partnered with architecture, engineering, and consulting firm McClier Corp., which will enhance its End-to-End Process Analysis with RouteSmart tools and expertise.

The companies have been collaborating since early this year in work for The Washington Post and Newsday and soon will start work with the Los Angeles Times, according to McClier Vice President Don Mills. "There's been a great response to the partnership ... in just the last few months," Mills told E&P. This week's announcement formally recognizes the companies' existing relationship.

Unlike those three major metros, with existing systems and distribution networks, McClier's work with The Advocate, in Baton Rouge, will employ RouteSmart tools to come up with an all-new distribution-routing network for a soon-to-be-designed production and packaging facility.

To compute statistics for route mileage, delivery times, and other distribution metrics, RouteSmart's package combines street and subscriber address mapping based on geographic information systems with proprietary routing algorithms, providing newspapers with "a much more accurate assessment of current operations," rather than relying on spreadsheets, rule-of-thumb estimates, and historical averages, according to the company.

Used "for automatic balancing and sequencing of newspaper home delivery and single copy delivery routes," RouteSmart's approach will provide McClier's "End-to-End Process Analysis clients with the highest level of accuracy in assessing what's happening now, but more importantly what can be possible in the future as the result of the analysis recommendations," RouteSmart Vice President Chris Waltz said in announcing the partnership.

With newspaper production operations having advanced faster than the ability of circulation and distribution departments to handle the resulting products' volume and zoning, said McClier's Mills, simulation and other technologies used in other industries can help newspaper distribution catch up. "It's affording much better modeling of the End-to-End system," he said.