World Class Faculty & Research / June 16, 2025

FedEx Acquires Company Founded By Four Smith Faculty

RouteSmart Technologies, founded by Smith School professors Bruce Golden, Michael Ball, Larry Bodin, and Arjang Assad, was acquired by FedEx. The route optimization company, built on academic research, will continue operating independently under FedEx Dataworks with plans for global expansion.

A company founded by four Robert H. Smith School of Business professors in the early 1980s and currently led by a Smith alum recently made headlines when it was acquired by FedEx Corp. RouteSmart Technologies is a global leader in route optimization solutions. Its services were built on the research of its four founders: The France-Merrick Chair in Management Science Bruce Golden, Professor Emeritus Michael Ball, Professor Emeritus Larry Bodin, and former Senior Associate Dean Arjang Assad.

In 1980, their research in vehicle routing and scheduling inspired them to start a company called Distinct Management Consultants. Golden, Ball, Bodin, and Assad have all published numerous important and well-cited articles and books as well as frequently presented at INFORMS conferences. The company focused on routing delivery and service trucks.  From the beginning, its particular niche was arc routing applications where demand was associated with street segments rather than individual houses or businesses.

“It was partly accidental,” said Golden, regarding the type of analytics and research the company focused on. “In retrospect, it was a very smart move for us because it set us apart.”

“That was our niche, to do stuff where you really needed detailed information about the street networks,” said Ball. “This was required for arc routing but also any problems where customers tended to be close together. As we also developed special expertise in arc routing and handling detailed street network data, this became our competitive advantage.”

A few years after Distinct Management Consultants formed, the company partnered with a New York-based civil engineering company. Combining advanced operations research methods with the emerging field of geographic information systems (GIS) at the time, they produced solutions in the routing and scheduling space.

“One application they had was routing garbage trucks. We started to work with them on some of those projects,” Ball said. “After working with them for three or four years we got the idea of forming a subsidiary to make a generic software product.”  Building on their initial consulting work, the first application was routing of sanitation/garbage trucks. Ball said, while today we routinely pull up computerized maps on our phone, that was a time when computerized maps, routing data and GIS were all very new. Amazingly, the digital street network data available then was based on files provided by the Census Bureau.

In 1989, the two groups created RouteSmart Technologies. Each of the four principals held leadership positions within the new company while continuing their work and research at the University of Maryland.

As the company grew, some students were employed on a part-time basis and upon graduation, were sometimes offered full-time employment. One such student was Larry Levy ’82, PhD ’87, who is currently the President of RouteSmart. Their first UMD student hire, Roy Dahl, MS ’82, is still with the company, working as Vice President of Research and Development. Many other Smith Terps and alumni from the UMD math department work at the company as well.

The partnership between RouteSmart and FedEx began many years before the acquisition.  FedEx used a customized version of RouteSmart’s vehicle routing product from the inception of their FedEx Home Delivery operation in 2000. “That solution served FedEx for over 20 years,” said Levy.

In 2018, looking to bring route optimization efficiencies to all of FedEx, FedEx embarked on a worldwide search for a routing solution partner. RouteSmart proved to be a successful partner as it was chosen again to continue working with FedEx. This, Levy said, was due to the detail-oriented approach that addressed routing challenges such as side of street routing, an emphasis on safe vehicle movement, and a premium on extremely fast solutions. “Taking that kind of detail into consideration has always been what RouteSmart’s been focused on.” In 2019, RouteSmart built the next generation routing product for FedEx and rolled it out to the entire U.S. and Canada over a 12-month period. Today this solution supports over 100,000 routes on a daily basis encompassing all of North America for both FedEx Ground and FedEx Express packages, with expansion world-wide beginning in the fall.

With the 2025 acquisition, Levy said RouteSmart continues to grow and the team has gone into a “start up” mode.

“FedEx is fully committed to other markets that we are in and are actually helping us to grow in waste & recycling, utility and postal spaces,” Levy added in terms of work RouteSmart was doing outside of their work with FedEx before the acquisition. He said that FedEx is first and foremost a $90 billion package delivery company but is looking to grow recurring Software as a Service (SaaS) revenue, which RouteSmart complements. “We’re being challenged in ways to grow this business dramatically and faster than we ever have before.”

The original four founders previously sold the company over 25 years ago but have remained connected to Levy and his team. Golden said he often recommends many of his PhD students to RouteSmart for potential employment opportunities. “Mike, Larry, Arjang and I were instrumental in the first 20 years of the company’s life and then Larry played the key role in the last 25 years.”

“FedEx values the tie with the academic community. So much so that when we earned that business in 2019, it was formally written into the contract that we must maintain a contact with the academic world and obviously, University of Maryland is where we do that and Bruce being a key conduit for that,” Larry said. “But it tells you something about their understanding of the connection to the research community and good ideas that can emerge from it.”

According to the FedEx press release, RouteSmart will continue to work with customers across a broad range of industries. Headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, RouteSmart will operate as a standalone entity under FedEx Dataworks, which is a direct subsidiary of Federal Express Corporation.

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The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.