GENESIS OF ORION:
When I started as a full time driver, I was either loading my own pc or it was loaded by another knowledgeable driver, who was generally aware of the most efficient route to take to complete the task in the least amount of time and miles. I was taught to deliver certain known customer resis to their workplace if they approved, run a parallel resi street along with a biz section, and it was possible to take lunch and breaks and still bonus most days. The pc was loaded that way and only very minor changes were made to accommodate the process for traffic, weather, resi bulk etc.
This was fine until UPS decided a preload could perform this same task with improved efficiency and at a cost savings. We were told we would be the "first on the road and the last ones off the road" and that we would become better drivers as a result of not wasting all our talent on lowly pc loading. We are currently the "last on the road and the last off the road", so that prediction was a half truth at best. But the preload was a large investment and had to be a SUCCESS at any cost.
Finally after many corners cut, many management members doing the loading, time card coding out sort time to drivers AM time, voila a SUCCESS was born!
Then EDD came along to make it monkey simple to load the cars in "perfect order". Another large investment and one that we all know how well it has gone, ditto the above time saving methods. Mis-loads, mis-spas, ridiculous addressing, multi stops when a biz has many different employee names but really only one stop, one single stop for 10 apts that are really 10 stops. To this day I am still forced to scan my resi EDD for mis-spad biz with addresses that PAS cannot recognize as commercial due to it's inherent limitations. Any human seeing these same addresses would know right away that they are business and not resis, but EDD is a SUCCESS!
Now comes OREO (Onboard Re-shuffling Enhancement Operation) which promises to do the unthinkable; eliminate the wasted time and miles that has been created by the ridiculous virtual looping created by the "wizards" of Microsoft Streets and Trips that see the pc jumping over dead end streets and culdesacs, delivering every street from north to south like we are driving hi-liter pens instead bread wagons, and even jumping over a street only to turn around and drive back to deliver it.
I'm honestly curious how much money UPS has saved from eliminating the original driver load method, considering how little service has been improved with these "improvements", given that each new idea presents a whole bag of problems because in the real world computers can't compensate for many subtle nuances, only big obvious things that they can be programmed to look for, and sometimes not even those consistently.