How RouteSmart Powers Postal and Parcel Delivery with HERE Technologies

RouteSmart – A FedEx Company -- is a leading provider of advanced route planning and optimization solutions for complex, high-density service and delivery operations. For more than 40 years, RouteSmart has focused on industries like postal and parcel delivery, newspaper distribution, waste and recycling collection, public works, and utilities and field service routing. Their solutions help organizations worldwide optimize intricate route planning challenges with precision and detail, improving safety, cutting operating costs, and boosting efficiency.

In this post, we look at how RouteSmart’s end users implement HERE APIs and data for postal and parcel delivery. This includes national posts and couriers using RouteSmart to sequence daily mail and package delivery routes across thousands of addresses. These organizations must continually adjust routes to accommodate volume shifts, such as holiday surges or long-term e-commerce growth, while ensuring on-time delivery within tight service windows.

Postal and parcel delivery use case

RouteSmart provides the tools to build optimized, territory-based routes that meet real-world constraints. Operations and planning teams load service and operational data into RouteSmart through a web application or API integration with upstream systems. RouteSmart’s optimization engine then applies advanced solvers and configurable business logic including time windows, capacity constraints, labor rules, and service policies to generate high-performance route plans aligned to cost, service, and compliance objectives.

Planners can make targeted adjustments using interactive tools to reflect on-the-ground realities, then publish finalized routes directly to driver applications, navigation platforms, or enterprise systems via API. The result is consistently optimized plans that improve productivity, control labor and fuel costs, and protect service commitments at scale.

RouteSmart Postal & Local Delivery clients can utilize solution such as RouteSmart Plan (formerly RouteSmart for ArcGIS Pro) that supports GIS-based analysis of route operations and RouteSmart Engine (formerly known as RaaS) web services builds geographically compact, logical and balanced workloads in a fraction of the time it takes other systems to build less efficient routes.

Typical customer workflow

Customers typically embed RouteSmart into their daily planning cycle.

1. Data preparation

Customers collect current route data, including stops, addresses, and historical workloads, and ensure the underlying map data is accurate. In some systems, like DX’s source data, stops and addresses are not always the same thing, but in RouteSmart they are ultimately treated as service location points. Many clients also leverage RouteSmart’s partnership with HERE for up-to-date street maps and address geocoding to ensure every service location is accurately placed. For example, DX Group in the UK combined HERE’s road network data with their delivery point data and, with support from RouteSmart’s ISL professional services team, analyzed historical delivery activity and workloads to help accurately position service locations and plan future delivery scenarios before optimization.

2. Route optimization 

Using RouteSmart’s algorithms, customers generate balanced, optimized routes and service order sequences that respect constraints such as time windows, vehicle capacities, driver shift limits, and different scenarios by day. Smith Brothers, a grocery delivery service, used RouteSmart to model four-day versus five-day work weeks, allowing them to eliminate one truck out of every five routes while keeping all drivers employed. The optimization engine quickly evaluates scenarios and produces efficient route plans.

3. Review and adjustment 

Planners review suggested routes using RouteSmart’s interactive maps and tools, making manual adjustments based on local knowledge such as road closures or preferred driver assignments. Posti, Finland’s postal service, integrated RouteSmart Plan with custom tools reflecting their sorting processes, ensuring routes aligned with how mail was pre-sorted in each center.

4. Deployment and analysis 

Once finalized, optimized routes are dispatched to drivers. Some customers use SmartSuite Mobile to provide turn-by-turn directions and collect GPS feedback. Customers then track metrics such as miles driven, route hours, and service issues to quantify improvements and support continuous refinement.

HERE products used by RouteSmart

RouteSmart solutions are built on several HERE products, using HERE both at the content level (map databases and attributes) and the service level (APIs for traffic and geocoding). This allows RouteSmart to apply its proprietary optimization algorithms on top of enterprise-grade location data from HERE Technologies.

1. HERE Map Data (Street Data)

HERE Map Data is the foundation for all RouteSmart route optimization calculations. RouteSmart imports HERE’s street network, including road geometry and attributes, directly into its routing engines. This includes connectivity, one-way streets, turn restrictions, speed limits, address ranges, bridge heights, weight limits, and truck restrictions.

Cloud solutions use the latest available HERE data. The richness of these attributes ensures optimized routes are navigable in reality. For example, one-way designations prevent illegal routing, and precise address ranges help locate stops on the correct block or side of long roads, which is critical for dense urban routes and rural service areas.

2. HERE Location Services (Traffic)

In cloud offerings such asEngine, RouteSmart integrates HERE Location Services to add time-aware context to routing. HERE Historical Traffic provides typical travel speeds by road segment and time of day, deriving realistic travel time estimates rather than relying on posted speed limits alone. For example, if a route crosses a city center at 5 PM, the historical traffic data will reflect expected congestion, and RouteSmart accounts for that (maybe suggesting an earlier start or a route order that avoids a particular bottleneck at peak time).

RouteSmart also uses HERE Planned Known Incidents in some contexts to account for predictable disruptions such as construction or planned road closures. These services run in the background to augment route calculations and help planners avoid any foreseeable delays.

3. HERE Geocoding API

RouteSmart uses the HERE Geocoding API to convert addresses and meter locations into precise coordinates, ensuring each stop snaps to the correct street segment, side of the road, and position along the address range.

High match rates and accurate placement significantly reduce the manual corrections the planners have to do, even when customers load very large datasets. For example, when a utility company inputs 3.9-million-meter addresses into RouteSmart, they rely on HERE to place each one correctly on the map. The quality of HERE’s geocoding and POI data is therefore a key capability for RouteSmart.

4. HERE Map Creator

HERE Map Creator supports ongoing map accuracy. RouteSmart customers and support teams use Map Creator to submit edits such as new streets, housing developments, or gated community access points. These updates are reviewed and incorporated into the HERE map, benefiting both individual customers and the broader ecosystem.

5. Truck-specific road attributes

Truck-specific attributes from HERE are a critical differentiator for RouteSmart customers operating large vehicles. Bridge heights, weight limits, truck-prohibited roads, and delivery access restrictions make RouteSmart’s routing solutions truly truck-aware.

By using these attributes, RouteSmart can automatically produce routes that avoid roads where a garbage truck or utility van shouldn’t go. This prevents issues like trucks getting stuck or fined, and improves safety. A feature such as Commercial-Prohibited Streets uses HERE’s truck, pedestrian, and delivery access flags to discourage travel on streets where those vehicles aren’t allowed, unless absolutely necessary.

Customer results

Customers using RouteSmart with HERE inside have achieved measurable results. Gannett reduced delivery route count by 48 percent, cut total mileage by 16 percent, and lowered delivery costs by six percent after one year on RouteSmart Optimize. Smith Brothers eliminated 32 hours of overtime per week in their first optimized region while maintaining service levels and keeping all drivers employed.

Conclusion

Integrating HERE location technology has directly improved RouteSmart’s solution performance and the experience of planners and drivers. Because RouteSmart’s optimization engine integrates high-quality HERE maps and attributes, the routes produced reflect real-world road conditions. Planners spend less time handling exceptions, and drivers report that routes are intuitive and require fewer on-the-spot adjustments.

By combining RouteSmart’s route planning expertise with HERE’s location data and services, postal and parcel delivery organizations can plan, execute, and continuously adapt routes at scale.