Our route planning and optimisation tools and web service can help you save 20% on your fuel costs.

• What is route planning?
  • Route planning will give you turn by turn driver instructions to navigate from one place to another. It will also give you the road distance between two places, which can sometimes vary wildly from the traditional "crow's flight" distances. You can even integrate the benefits of route planning into your store locator so it returns the closest points by road rather than straight-line.
• What is route optimisation?
  • Route optimisation will sequence a set of waypoints into a sensible route and can cut journey times by 20%. By combining multiple drop-off points, vehicles, vehicle sizes, delivery timeslots and more, route optimisation solves the big brother of the "travelling salesman" problem.
    
    Route optimisation is run in partnership with The AA on our sister site RouteOptimiser.com.
    
• Great for you, great for the environment
  • Tests have shown that RouteOptimiser can save 20% on average in distance and time. Not only are journey times and petrol costs cut, 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 8.5 million tons annually – that's more than the amount of CO2 generated by a Teesside power plant.
• 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 2p for a single route plan, or 1p per waypoint for route optimisation), but we host the road data and keep it up-to-date.
    
    Our route planning service currently works in the UK, Europe, USA and Canada - route optimisation works in the UK only.
• How does route optimisation 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 20%. 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 20% (increase in efficiency) = 8.48 million tons of CO2.

PRICES & LICENSING | FEATURES & BENEFITS | TECHNICAL Easy Access the web services within your own applications in minutes, with simple pay-as-you-go licensing. Reliable Load balancing and failovers between multiple data centres keep the hosted service running all of the time. Secure Our sophisticated security systems protect our customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Faster Typical sub 50 millisecond response times for route planning queries. Powerful Enables you to carry out best route for multiple delivery points. Accurate Delivers times, distances as well choice of route directions. SOAP Classic web services made easy. Just check out the WSDL and the documentation then fill your boots! XML XML works in pretty much anything from PHP to Java and ColdFusion and we've even got code snippets for pretty much every platform. CSV As part of our XML service we can return CSV results for those who find it easier to work with. Recordset ASP and VB6 may be retro but plenty of you still love 'em. But accessing SOAP from ASP is a pain. That's why we built our recordset service to work with ADO and access our service in a couple of lines of code! Route planning is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. As well as route planning, you can use your credit pack to verify bank details, profile your customers and capture international address data. From only 2 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 500 routes