UPS accelerates flow of packages around the US

As part of a continuing effort to improve customer service, UPS has completed a major upgrade of its U.S. ground distribution network, reducing the time it takes for hundreds of thousands of packages to arrive at their destination every day.

The changes, implemented over the past four months, amount to the largest time-in-transit improvement effort since 1998 when UPS became the first carrier to offer money-back guarantees on its ground service. Each modification has slashed a full day off the previous guaranteed delivery time without any change in customer rates or pick-up and delivery hours.

Shipments from Los Angeles to New York and vice versa, for example, now are guaranteed to arrive in four business days instead of five. Packages flowing from Dallas or Houston to Florida now take three days on the ground instead of four, and those moving from St. Louis or Kansas City to North and South Carolina now take two days instead of three.

Approximately 60 major origin/destination lane combinations, spanning some 20 metropolitan areas, were affected. Among them are some of the nation’s largest metropolitan population centers, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Some of the improvements, such as the four-day coast-to-coast delivery standard, were made in part through changes in railroad service. Others were made through modifications to UPS’s hub-and-spoke interstate trucking network and others through changes to package sorting times or locations.

All told, an estimated 370,000 customer packages now are benefiting from the faster delivery times each day.

“UPS operates the most extensive and reliable ground transportation network in the nation, but we’re always searching for more efficient ways to deliver for our customers,” said Chris Mahoney, senior vice president, Transportation. “That effort is enabled by the technology we’ve deployed in recent years. It’s the technology that allows us to search for new approaches to speeding the flow of goods for our customers.”

The acceleration of the ground network actually has its roots in the development of a network to track every package and in giving customers the ability to make packages “smart” by generating their own UPS labels. UPS now can model more efficient transport solutions using that information on each package’s movement.

The technology also is being applied in other ways. Just two weeks ago, UPS unveiled the deployment of package flow technologies that are speeding the sorting operation inside its package centers. The suite of package flow technologies is designed to improve the balancing of delivery loads between routes every day while speeding the actual loading of delivery trucks. That package flow project followed the unveiling of the fourth generation of the small hand-held computer used by UPS drivers, a model that will allow UPS drivers to offer substantive customer benefits.