Barnes, the chief information officer, said. "Recipients do not pay UPS, but they sure influence which carriers their suppliers use," David A. This year, UPS began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.Īnd now the UPS researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes-saving roughly three million gallons of fuel-in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. "We want to make ADSB the backbone of our future air traffic system," said Vincent Capezzuto, the manager of the program for the FAA. UPS specifically is collaborating with the FAA on a system-formally, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, but usually just called ADSB-that may make conventional radar obsolete click me. And both are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air safety and scheduling. Meteorologists at both companies routinely outguess official Weather Service forecasts. "Information technology has become essential."Ĭustomers of both FedEx and UPS can now print out shipping labels that are easily scannable by computers. "When you handle millions of packages, a minute's delay can cost a fortune," said John Kartsonas, an analyst with Citigroup. UPS and FedEx are each pumping more than $1 billion a year into research, while also looking for new ways to cut costs. Increasingly, it is the search for high-tech answers to such questions that is occupying the entire package delivery industry. What if the package contains medicine that could turn from palliative to poison if the temperature wavers? What if it is moving from Bangkok to Bangor and back to Bangkok, and if customs rules differ on each end? And what if the package is going to a big company that insists on receiving all its packages, no matter who ships them, at the same time each day? But increasingly, it is the researchers at its Atlanta headquarters, its technology center in Mahwah, N.J., and its huge four-million-square-foot Louisville hub who are asking the questions that will drive the company's future. Yes, the ubiquitous brown trucks, with their brown-clad drivers, are the face that UPS presents to the world. LOUISVILLE, Ky.-Worldport, the United Parcel Service hub at the airport here, gives new meaning to the phrase "hub of activity." On a peak night, workers have less than four hours to process more than a million packages from at least 100 planes and probably 160 trucks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |