Tag: Worldwide

The many hands–and connections –that go into overnight delivery
Information about the package is as important as the package itself.” I said that in 1978, five years after FedEx created the modern express industry. Please don’t misunderstand me. We care a lot about what’s inside the box, but the ability to track and trace shipments and thereby manage inventory in motion revolutionized logistics. Of course, back then I couldn’t have imagined what we’d be witnessing today: the vast and steady integration of the world’s economy into one giant interdependent global network.

Global integration is not a new phenomenon. It happened in the Roman era, over a network of roads; it happened during the Renaissance, when trading and merchant companies crisscrossed oceans; and it happened in the 19th century, with help from railroads and telegraphs. But today it’s happening faster than ever before and it means the dispersion of products and services of the widest breadth imaginable to every corner of the world.

We can now get our computer problems solved in minutes by a phone rep in India or get a same-day medical consultation by doctors in Tokyo, London and New York. And we can ship high-tech and high-value-added goods within one to two business days, door-to-door, virtually anywhere on the planet.

We couldn’t do any of this without complex information networks. FedEx spends roughly $1.5 billion a year on information technology. Some rough numbers will give you an idea of why. Every second of every day we have to handle 3,000 transactions, as well as 1,000 inquiries on the status of a package. Orders go out to 70,000 handheld devices carried by our couriers and contractors and millions of our customers’ desktops. Every day FedEx handles 6 million shipments around the globe. We have close to 7,000 people in IT overseeing what Rob Carter, our chief information officer, understatedly calls “an intense computing environment.”