Editing routes

[sunad]

I had a discussion with our circulation manager today regarding routes. We had a disagreement as to how this is done with the new program. Maybe one of you could clarify so we can be sure we are on the right track...

She wanted to know how to "change a route from carrier to mail delivery" and vice versa. My conclusion was to create a "contractor" for that mail delivery route, and simply change the route via the Delivery Routes tab (change the selected "contractor" to the mail delivery "contractor" on the delivery route edit screen) - or go the opposite route if going from mail to carrier.

She argued that because in CMV2 she would use the tasks menu (by adding conditions feature) to achieve this goal, there must be more to it in the new version than just selecting it in a drop down.

Part of the reason it gets confusing for us is that our setup has one carrier per route (a 1:1 relationship). When a carrier leaves, the carrier's record is edited (names changed, etc) and changed to mail. I'm not sure if this was how it had to be done in the old program (technical limitations), or just the way they chose to do it when it was set up the first time (the person who set this up the first time is no longer employed with us).

In the windows version, it appears that many routes can be connected to the same "contractor" or carrier, if you will, to eliminate redudancy. This is, at least, the way I see it. I would like some verification if I'm right, or correction if I'm wrong.

If I'm right then we need to do some reorganization to optimize the data for the new program (removing duplicate carriers, relinking routes to carriers, etc). It would also mean a speed increase during data parsing because, it appears, it would eliminate a lot of redundancy (right now if a paper boy has 5 routes, he's listed in 5 different carrier records - one for each route).

Any insight on this issue would be appreciated.