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ost transportation companies have learned to use computer technology for optimizing routing and delivery schedules. Non-transportation companies haven't availed themselves of such tools, despite the fact they spend a lot of money moving vehicles around.

There are two main reasons: Optimization software is expensive, and it's fairly hard for general business users to learn. It's not surprising, then, there's been no stampede to computerization by companies whose primary mission isn't delivery, even though such tools could save money and time while helping deliver better customer service.

ArcLogistics Route from Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. is a route-optimization program designed for the business user who's more concerned with running a company than with learning a complex program. The goal of the product is to use state-of-the art digital mapping technology to optimize the time and distance between service or delivery locations while making the product easy to use. The designers have succeeded in meeting these goals. The program is powerful, functional, and flexible. If your business involves delivering or picking up goods or services across multiple sites using several vehicles, you should consider it.

The problem of finding the shortest line connecting many points on a plane is notoriously difficult. No one has yet found an algorithm guaranteed to find the most efficient route, though newer techniques can guarantee the arrived-at solution is within a couple of percentage points of the absolute optimum. In a real-world situation, professionals must compute routes for multiple vehicles while taking into account the delivery-time promises made to customers, the varying volume and weight capacities for vehicles, the different skills of drivers, and the variance in vehicle operating costs. The probability that any such business is using its resources as efficiently as possible using only intuitive rules of thumb is practically zero.

ArcLogistics Route's data disks contain information on every street in the United States. You begin by defining the business' service area (any size square up to 200 miles per side). The program loads the street data for the defined region, then recognizes any valid address in the area and provides a scalable map.

You then define warehouses, depots, the home office, or other sites. Information about your vehicles and drivers is then added, as are the costs per mile and hour to run the vehicle. You can specify specialties for the driver or vehicle, such as whether the truck has a lift.

You then match orders to routes. Orders are programmatically assigned to vehicles, and routes are computed so driving times, distances, and wait times are minimized. You can print a route manifest and a map with directions for each route. According to the company, ArcLogistics Route is the only routing product that uses actual street distances and travel speeds to compute trip time.

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