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Pick
Your Poison
At what point
should a questionable or marginal route be
re-delivered?
Pick your poison: either way,
the publisher pays.
Missed deliveries can lead to lower ad sales
since business people are less likely to
advertise in a book if they didn't receive
copies both at home and at their place of
business. On the other hand, lower
thresholds greatly increase printing and delivery costs
for the publisher.
These extra printing,
delivery, and lost ad sales are part of the
hidden costs of directory distribution
quality control.
How
big is the problem? No one knows for sure.
Delivery verification surveys may
under-report delivery problems. Residents
may not want to get anyone in trouble. They
may not care if they received yet another
directory. They may just want to get
off the phone. They may not remember if they
received a book or not. They may assume
someone else in the household received the
book.
For the most
part, delivery
verification surveys also fail to reveal
certain types of delivery problems. Delivery
verification will not detect out-of-boundary
deliveries since only people within the
scoped area are surveyed. Residents are only asked if they received a
book; not if they
received the same book twice during the same
initial delivery cycle.
Print Copy Inflation
Duplicated
and out-of-boundary deliveries tend to have
a lasting impact. The wasted books are often
reflected in all subsequent print order
quantities since typically the print order
is last year's print quantity plus a little
extra for population growth.
"Just get rid of the books."
Delivery managers
for future editions may
not question high print quantities. When they have
excessive books near the end of initial
distribution, delivery managers may fear
that a lot of stops were missed. This puts
them under a lot of pressure to "just get rid of the
books." Bulk drop sites such as hotels, motels,
and large offices may receive more books
than they will ever need. Brand new books may
be dumped or recycled. Residential stops may
start getting two books instead of one. It
happens a lot more often than publishers
realize.
Re-deliveries may minimize the number of
missed deliveries but the medicine can also
leave a bad taste in the mouths of
advertisers. Homes of business owners that are
delivered twice may assume that the
publisher is incompetent or the circulation
figures are inflated.
A Few
Suggestions
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Don't assume that excessive
books left over after
initial delivery are the
result of missed deliveries.
The problem could be an
excessive print quantity
resulting from previous
edition delivery problems or
even forecasting variances.
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Make it easy for your
delivery managers to be
frank about delivery
problems or inventory
issues. If you bite their
heads off, they'll just
learn to hide problems.
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Understand the realities of
directory distribution. A
perfect delivery is
absolutely, positively
impossible. A perfect field
manager will still
experience delivery problems
on occasion. Carriers can
not be closely supervised
for a number of reasons.
Close supervision is cost
prohibitive and would be a
nightmare to coordinate.
Direct supervision could
also result in the
independent contractors
being reclassified as
employees by tax officials.
The high-volume but
short-term nature of initial
deliveries means that a lot
of untested carriers may be
required to get the job
done. Some of them will be
bad.
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Focus less
on redeliveries and place more attention on
preventing problems in the first place. Minimize
problems in the pre-delivery stage rather than use
brute force approaches such as redeliveries and
increased print quantities to resolve common
delivery defects. For example, more intensive
carrier recruiting reduces the need to use marginal
workers. Providing route maps to carriers reduces
missed, duplicated, and out
of boundary deliveries.
Simplified routing will also
reduce errors. |
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And even though increased
telechecking may reveal more
problem routes, the extra
scrutiny will serve as an
effective deterrent to
dumping and substandard
performances by delivery
workers.
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Assign VIP routes
(routes with lots of
advertisers or
businesses) to the
most experienced and
trustworthy delivery
workers. The market
map on the right
shows the locations
of VIP routes. |
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And even though increased
telechecking may reveal more
problem routes, the extra
scrutiny will serve as an
effective deterrent to
dumping and substandard
performances by delivery
workers. |
Managing Inventory: All Stops Are
Not Created Equal
If, during
the late stages of initial distribution,
inventory issues (shortage or excess) appear
to be a problem, concentrate inventory where
it will have the most impact. Demographic
prism maps of the delivery area (such as the
samples below from
PictureRoute.com) can help get the most
mileage from the remaining book inventory.
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