Saturday, December 1, 2007

Maps vs. GPS

Prospective pizza driver David from Michigan wrote, How do you learn the areas and is a GPS unit a practical tool?

Our store had a huge wall-map with a grid. The computer assigns the grid to the delivery ticket when the order is placed over the phone, so we know where to start looking. In about 2-3 months you will have a pretty good idea where 95 % of the streets are in your area.

A GPS may be handy at the beginning, but I would not rely on it. Learning the streets yourself will help you to know what goes together as a double. Also, the time it takes to key in the address will slow you down.

What would be really cool is to have the address barcoded on the delivery ticket, so that you could just swipe the ticket with a portable barcode reader in your car, and have the address entered into the GPS automatically.

1 comment:

Simon said...

Yeah Kevin I agree about GPS. It's invaluable at the beginning for a novice, but then you soon realise that most addresses are within about 500 yds of the 5 main roads in town so its only about learning the last few turns really.
Plus we have so many new houses that at least 15% of addresses are not listed initially.
After a couple of months the guys all stop using them.
I like the idea of a barcode. In the UK we have the postcode printed on the slips. It is 7 characters (e.g. WA10 2JP) and narrows the possibilities down to 30 houses. It's really useful.

In fact the only person who really benefits from the GPS is me who had to drive to the Commissary 100 miles away today to pick up stock because someone miscalculated the order. Still it was a lovely drive through the mountains!