You Are Where?

There is nothing new about getting lost. It’s widely suspected that North America’s earliest settlers only wound up here because they wandered out onto the ice in the middle of the Bering Strait and made a wrong turn. To avoid that fate, early maritime navigators used the stars as fixed points to maintain a course in the otherwise featureless oceans. Aviators relied on the stars in much the same way, using basically the same tools as their waterlogged counterparts: a watch, a compass, and a sextant.

For truck operators, the advent of maps with fixed points-such as interstate highways-has made the task of navigation considerably easier.

Until recently, a copy of a motor carrier road atlas did the job admirably, and gave fairly accurate mileage to boot. But calculating detailed routing by flipping through the pages of an atlas is like trying to mentally calculate Celsius from Fahrenheit, and just about as accurate.

Trip planning software can make the job unbelievably simple and astonishingly accurate, and computer-savvy truckers now have a multitude of mapping and routing products to choose from. But if you’re a small fleet or an owner-operator, you have to be a savvy shopper in order to find them.

Some of the better consumer-level CD-based products include, in no specific order, Microsoft’s Streets 2000, Delorme’s Street Atlas USA V-7.0, and Rand McNally’s TripMaker and StreetFinder Deluxe 2000.

If you operate a small fleet or a single truck, these CD-based mapping products will point you in the right direction for a modest cost. They offer local detail, maps of smaller towns, and the ability to print lists of waypoints, written directions, mileages, and accurate time-and-distance lists. They’re also great for pinpointing points of interest and favorite stopping spots-most allow the user to add their own locations to the program.

But these applications-designed for road-tripping vacationers and traveling salesmen-all fall somewhere just short of wonderful when it comes to details professional truck drivers need. They lack the truck-specific detail of the paper atlases, such as weight restrictions, low bridges, and “no-truck” routes. Another rub is that many of these products have only a minimum amount of Canadian information. Sucks to be us, eh?

Of course, there are more sophisticated and comprehensive routing and mapping packages available. But they’ve been developed for big fleets with the budget, mainframe, and tech staff to match.

THE RIGHT FIT

But lately, several software developers have tapped into the need for mapping and routing programs that would be useful and affordable for small fleets and owner-operators. They’re succeeding with a modular approach-you can take basic routing and mileage capability and, as you want or need it, add trip planning, fuel tax, fuel optimization (which recommends fuel purchases at locations offering less expensive fuel and then calculates the tax payable based on the mileage run), and more. If you’re wondering what all this data can do for you, stand back:

Door-to-door directions with time and mileage listings from stop to stop.

o The ability to re-sequence multiple drops within a city based on practical postal code routing, along with the ability to calculate, and bill, drop charges.

o Estimated time of arrival at the next destination, or reverse time and distance calculations for JIT applications.

o Calculate fuel purchases based on miles run in a given province to equalize the tax owing for the given mileage.

o Audit-ready fuel-tax reports. In fact seven of the 10 provincial ministries of finance and many more U.S. auditors currently use this type of software.

And much of the software can be integrated into existing dispatch programs or accounting and billing software.

SCANNING THE LANDSCAPE

The field of suppliers is growing and becoming more competitive. A leader in market is ALK Associates, the developer of PC*Miler (www.pcmiler.com). The latest version is called PC*MILER/STREETS 2000 and it includes commercial street-level driving directions, mileages, and maps. It covers all of the North American point-to-point highway routing and mileage functionality found in PC*MILER 2000, plus nationwide street-level routing and mapping, unlimited street-level stop optimization, and cost-effective regional and nationwide versions.

An address-matching module features a sound-based address geocoding capability, and the result is faster and more accurate searches. You can import your own customer addresses, as well as pick-up and delivery location information, and you can eliminate manual trip entry, automatically resequence stops, and add your own address-specific custom places to the database.

ALK also offers an AS/400-Windows edition of PC*MILER/STREETS 2000 and a TCP/IP interface which allows virtually all types of UNIX, mainframe, and other platforms to communicate with the software.

ProMiles Canada (www.promiles.com) offers its ProMiles 99 planning and routing software for $1599, which includes truck routes for all of Canada and the U.S. and city-level maps so you can access specific points on the map by typing in an address. (For owner-operators, ProMiles can be leased at $50 per month).

The program’s database has more than 65,000 truck-usable roads and over 15,000 locations (not including city-level data) covering 805,000 miles of roads and 965,000 accessible locations. Of course, the software is truck-specific, so weight restrictions, low bridges, scale houses, truck stops, etc. can be accounted for. ProMiles 99 lets you set custom speeds for roads so that you get the most accurate ETA for your deliveries. If you haul doubles or 53-foot trailers, ProMiles lets you calculate trips using designated roads. A “reduce tolls” option gives you the ability to reduce your use of toll roads no matter what routing method you use.

The company also offers several add-on packages, including postal code searches, and an expanded Canadian directory including virtually every Canadian location with a postal code. One module is designed to help with fuel tax administration, another for fuel-use optimization-plan your trip and ProMiles can calculate the most cost-efficient route for your truck to travel. And the company’s alliance with HighwayMaster Communications, the cellular-based voice and data communications provider, lets you track equipment.

The Mileage and Routing application from Prophesy Transportation Software (www.eprophesy.com) is a commercial-grade Windows-based program that can automate everyday tasks you may handle manually now, such as looking up mileage and quoting rates over the phone, optimizing multiple stop trips, and routing to and from cities, intersections, truckstops, and postal codes. It can route to over one million points in North America and can calculate both industry-standard rating miles and practical mileage.

The program also integrates with Prophesy’s dispatch and accounting, fuel tax reporting, log auditing, and fuel optimization applications. For street-level mapping, you can add Prophesy’s StreetRouter module for $995 US.

A small operation or a one-truck user can get Mileage & Routing solutions starting at $495 US, and running up to nearly $2000. Prophesy claims the $495 solution would probably handle most of their needs, but it doesn’t offer the street-level mapping/routing. Prophesy’s full-blown FuelLogic program (fuel purchase optimization) lists for around $2500 US, but this is the kind of program that can save an owner-operator a fair bit of money the day he begins using it.

Rand McNally’s three Intelliroute packages (www.intelliroute.com) all offer completely integrated mileage, route-planning, fuel-optimization and fuel-tax platforms tailored-and priced-for a fleet, rather than the owner-operator. IntelliRoute products are based on Rand McNally’s latest GPS-accurate geographic database for North America. You can create routes by lowest cost or truck type, to avoid road construction, optimize fuel costs, or for transporting hazardous materials. Route archival and retrieval is available for fuel tax reporting. The company offers Intelliroute in combination with its Windows-based MileMaker mileage and routing system.

ONLINE ROUTING

Given the pervasiveness and increasing capability of Internet-based applications, it should come as no surprise that software developers now offer routing products online. If you don’t want to install yet another piece of software on your computer, or you have managers, drivers, and operations across North America and want them all to have access to mileage and routing services without having to purchase and install individual copies of the software, an online service is worth a look.

ProMiles sets a good example of how companies are marketing both desktop and Internet-based versions of their software. Last year, the company released ProMilesOnline 2.0, a worthwhile and functional update of the original ProMilesOnline Web-based router. By design, the new version feels very much like a desktop application with preferences you customize yourself.

It saves your trip options, fuel optimization options, and itinerary options for up to 50 different trips; every time you log on to the Web site, you don’t have to reenter your own parameters like road speeds, routing methods, bridge heights, or what reports to return.

And the online program can create a variety of reports, including an itinerary and a tax summary report for every trip you run, and can format the data for easy E-mailing or printing. A route page lists all the steps for the trip, direction of travel, and miles down the route for each turn, and gives links to weather reports for the stops you’ve entered. An online map has the standard panning and zooming controls, as well as a “frame trip” option which focuses the map on just your trip. You can also enter a location on the map screen and the map will be refreshed, focused on that location.

The service is available for $39.95 US a month-about $480 for one year of use-and you can sign up for a free trial subscription at the ProMiles Web site.

And other options are coming: ProMiles is beta-testing an online fuel tax administration service. But there are limitations to products like ProMilesOnline when compared to their desktop brethren. First, some use more complex programming to make the application feel more like something that’s running off your hard drive, delivering pop-up dialogue boxes and slick graphics to help make the program more intuitive. This level of programming requires current versions of Netscape or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Both browsers are free, but they’re memory-hogs; make sure your system has enough RAM to run them.

Typically, software delivered over a network can’t load and run as quickly as a program running on the hard drive of your desktop PC. Speed will depend on your Internet connection. For example, ProMiles says it only takes its computer about one to three seconds to process any trip request. How fast that gets back to you depends on your connect speed, but the company admits that any connection less than 28.8-kbps would be dubious at best.

Also, desktop products typically have many more features than their online counterparts, in large part because they simply work more efficiently running off a hard drive. ProMilesOnline, for instance, doesn’t deliver valuable desktop features like rate groups, trip-planning with the map, a trip-sheet generator, and more.

Most online products are a fee-based service. ProMiles offers a monthly subscription; Rand McNally, with its Intelliroute product, charges 50 cents for each use, billed to your credit card. If detailed itineraries and fuel-tax planning are more than you’re looking for, there are several Web sites that offer maps you can download or turn-by-turn directions you can print out, mostly for free. But remember, you get what you pay for.

One of the better sites is MapQuest (www.mapquest.com), with text-based directions from location to location, based on zip codes or street addresses. MapQuest lets you select regional, city, or street views and then alter the view of the map by any direction on the compass. It’s slow but it works, and it’s free.

But like so many vendors, it’s weak on postal-code-based requests. Strangely, while MapQuest doesn’t excel at Canadian directions, it can provide maps for almost any Canadian location. I used my home address and also the terminal address of a major trucking company located in Winnipeg, and the maps for my virtual trip popped up without a hitch-no wrong turns along the way.