During the 70's, for reasons I do not remember, there was a lot of conversations about how to reduce delivery times.

In a brainstorming session a person suggested that we design special trucks that had air cannons that would accept a rolled newspaper. The cannon could be programmed by address and all one had to do was keep papers in the breach. The dog lovers in the session, as you could imagine, were not keen on the idea of their pets getting nailed by a newspaper.

There is available, and in use, at all the larger newspapers complete automation in loading bundles onto carts or pallets. Automation to get these devices close to the truck door now exists. We say truck door because new plants do not include docks for the drivers. They just backup to the building.

Automation stops at the door and stops there for a good reason. There is no economic justification to automate the loading.

Automatic loading of trucks is done in other industries where they will stage a truck load of pallets. Trucks back up to the building, are loaded and then carried on runners into the truck, all the while the driver never leaving the cab.

Another method is to use a robot on an umbilical cord to move two pallets at a time into the truck that it received from a staging conveyor.

Even in an environment that could eliminate a loader there is not enough people to support automation. If trucks need to be modified to accept automation it becomes extremely expensive.

Automation before the truck loading is quite high in larger papers… 100%, and trails off to single digits for papers of 50,000 or less.

Into the truck is pretty much zero at any level.

The areas that need to be automated are the stacking and wrapping of the individual home delivery newspapers.

Every minute a carrier spends in a distribution center putting the multiple pieces of the paper together, folding and inserting into plastic bags or wrapping with rubber bands is time that cannot be used for distribution. This impacts delivery times to the homes as this time has to be factored into the route time. A carrier may have all their parts by 4:30 AM, but may not start the route until 5:00 AM when they are done assembling the newspapers.

Securing people who want to get up early in the morning for small wages is becoming more and more difficult. It is a part time job done before or after their regular job so there can be very high turnover. To make it worth while, the carriers need to have large routes to make enough money.

One of the solutions to the carrier issue is to prepackage their paper so when it is delivered to the distribution center the carrier just picks up their containers and begin their route.

All solutions to speed up the assembly process at the carrier level have not been successful. They have been too slow, have added more people and were still slow.

My sense is that in the future the stacking and wrapping function will move inside the production plant and the carrier will be given containers of wrapped papers. Technology is in place and available from the two main insert suppliers in the US as well as from collation suppliers.

The paper will still need to be rolled or wrapped so they can be tossed from the cars. Tossing flat plastic wrapped newspapers become a sail when thrown, tending to skid upon landing. The current wrapping system does not have good protection and does not stand up well when thrown and bounced along the driveway.

In the future, when the process is inside the manufacturing center, the assembled packages will be visually coded so the carrier can identify which is their paper, which is the USA TODAY product or The New York Times. Delivering different versions, such as unique insert packages to subscribers of the newspaper, would be facilitated this way.

When we remove the final assembly from the carriers, newspapers will then have a true manufacturing/packaging process. The carrier will just deliver… just like the beer guy.

Next to come will be automation of the functions for single-copy boxes. Currently, a person counts and separates newspapers from bundles in their truck based on a manifest. Then walks to the box, removes old papers and inserts the new ones. They will count the old copy, log the information and then off to the next box. This process is repeated hundreds of times each day. This method relies on the driver to do several different functions and be accurate.

Tending to the boxes typically requires two functions. The stocking function described above and a separate group that collects the money from each box, which may not be done daily. This function requires accounting for the amount of money picked up, such as by putting the coins into separate bags, which are counted at the newspaper and logged to the appropriate box.

The future of the single-copy delivering process will have arrived when the driver removes and replaces a cassette which has been put together in manufacturing. The process will go faster, more accurate and there will be no need to have separate people collecting money, as it stays with the cassette and is taken care of by an accounting representative back in the plant, which will eliminate the extra person and bagging and un-bagging of the coins.

As technology progresses, we can address delivering to stores in point-of-purchase boxes that includes a unique marketing message, but that will have to wait for another day. Who knows maybe this will occur first as it requires less capital.