Starting Over. It’s more than a TV show or a John Lennon song. No one likes to begin something again- but we’ve found that starting over can be a beneficial thing for your customers. I’m talking to all of you who run radii for your clients- Especially those of you that copy and paste or upload the old geo-codes into the new count. You may find over time that you are missing addresses and have big holes in your mailing areas.

In the infinite wisdom of the USPS – they make route changes and send those out to the CDS holders weekly. They will add a few addresses to this route- take a few from that one, and re-configure route boundaries in an effort to become more efficient at delivering our mail.

The result of all of this USPS activity is that Compact’s weekly change file for the country is around 40-50 million addresses. If one address in the route changes- then the entire route has to be updated. You will find all of these changes listed by ZIP Code and route on the Compact Resident List site under Route Query. The date of the change is also listed. This is the same place you go when your client calls and says- “I had 358 people in CR003- where did they go?”

When you run a radius- it will incorporate all of the routes within the given Geo.

When you copy and paste old Geography into a fresh count- you may begin receiving 0 counts in some of your routes due to the movement of addresses or the deletion of a Route in its entirety. A zero should be an indicator that some kind of change has taken place. Depending on the size of the radius in question you could be missing significant market areas.

It’s really easy to re-run your radii – the starting address is still in the original count. So, instead of starting a new count and then copying and pasting – (clone the old order if you have to have the old original count) all you have to do is click a tab on the pop up window.

The job you are wanting to update (T000857004) is a radius job. Do you want to:
( ) Keep the existing geography
(X) Re-run the radius (any routes added manually will be lost)

By clicking the re-run the radius button you will automatically get the new Geo.

Should you and your customer email Geo files back and forth- it’s a good practice to run radii from their origination point quarterly and create new Geo files.

So rather than thinking starting over is a bad thing- keep your customers happy and sales on track- and re-run your radii!

Chris Slauter
Compact Information Systems