One of the more important things when implementing route changes is making sure you don’t miss anyone. It’s surprisingly difficult to just get a list of active accounts from most billing systems. And some companies never consider an account “inactive” and keep it on the books permanently.

Some things to consider:

• Is the account seasonal?
• Is it in collections?
• Has the service or product deliveries been suspended?

Regardless of the criteria, you don’t want to miss any of these accounts when making changes or they’ll be out of the place in the new route architecture. That means extra mileage for the drivers and possibly complaints from the customers.

While the ideal situation is getting everything fixed before the new route start running, sometimes that isn’t feasible. You need a backup plan to quickly identify those accounts and assign the correct location, route and stop number.

Here are two “tricks” for quickly identifying any accounts that got missed:

1. Use new route identifiers, not current ones.

Let’s say there four routes currently identified as A, B, C and D. Using this technique, the new route identifiers could become 1, 2, 3, 4 or P, Q, R and S. This can be a permanent or temporary change. After the new routes Go Live, any accounts that appear on A, B, C or D need to be corrected.

Some of the common reasons this might happen are: new accounts are incorrectly routed against the old route architecture, seasonal accounts that returned after the new routes were assigned or accounts that slipped through the cracks. Regardless of the reason, this approach provides an easy way for anyone in the company to easily spot the mistake and correct it.

2. Use a special number sequence.

Some industries can easily change route labels, but it’s more difficult for others.

Industrial laundries often use tags in the garments that have to match the route and day. Another way of “tagging” accounts without changing the route identifiers is sequencing the stops in a particular way. Almost all companies sequence stops throughout the day in one of two methods.

The first method is using multiples of 10
(e.g. Stop numbers are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50…)

The second method is sequential numbering
(e.g. Stop numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…)

With either approach, you’ll also see 0, 1 or 9999 used to identify new accounts that haven’t been sequenced yet. Or perhaps ending in 5 or other occasional odd numbers in order to adjust the sequencing throughout the year.

What you’ll never see is stop numbers that all end in either 3 or 7. And that’s the key to this trick. Use stop numbers like 7, 17, 27, 37, 47, 57… for all the accounts that are part of the route balancing. After the Go Live date, any stop number ending in any other digit wasn’t part of the route balancing and needs to be fixed.

These are two simple way of solving a difficult problem. You can use either or both depending on the specific situation. And it’s pretty easy to change the stop numbers back to the standard sequencing after everything is running properly.