Two UPS drivers in the same Area?

[tarbar66]

No its nothing like that,our new manager is telling the dispatch guy to send 3 drivers into the same area.On numerous occasions two drivers are delivering to the same customer an hour apart and I am going in later to do an on call pick up.I am saying to the new manager and the dispatcher that I should be doing the deliveries and the pick ups in that area.They disagree as the new manager wants me to go to another area thats not mine to do deliveries and pick ups as it helps his numbers.

Customer service isn`t even considered as the numbers are more important.We have the head guy in the UK coming in soon an American by the name of Tony Colazio so obviously want to tell him what a shambles is it when guys scratching a planned day are being messed about along with being asked to go off route to do pick ups and deliveries.

Hey I know Tony, his claim to fame in management started when he was a supervisor cleaning up a train derailment outside of the "Flood City" in Pennsylvania.

 

[The Blackadder]

The simple problem with the PAS system is that it was put in place by tech geeks.

Now tech geeks are great they gave us the internet, however they have spent a day on road.

Again all they have to go by is numbers, all the centers know the people higher up only look at numbers.
So cutting routes that have no logic is not a thing that anyone cares to fix.

Until UPS gets leadership higher up that understands how bad the system is being put in it wont ever get fixed.

Sadly it seems UPS is moving away from having people higher up that know what is going on on the road.

 

[brownIEman]

You sound like you have done or are doing dispatch. I was wondering if I could ask a question? My question, if you don't mind, is why does it seem that their are quite a few drivers on here, me included, who see these subdivisions being used to as stop count props. I realize the aspect of creating a paid day, but the logic of how its done escapes me. I do not admit to being a Rhodes Scholar. I just can't wrap my head around how moving one stop in a subdivision to another car just to make a stop count makes any sense.

I appreciate your time, and thank you in advance.

menotyou,
There are as many answers to your question as there are drivers that are getting the sense of the system and its implementation as you describe. I guess the over arching answer would be that the system is not perfect - It is a GIGO system (you put Garbage In, you get Garbage Out).

When a dispatcher is making a plan that assigns address ranges to specific drivers for a day, he uses actual historical days to estimate the stops and volumes that are likely to come in for a given area. If he picks poorly on his days, is heaping garbage into the system. But lets say he picks what should be a set of perfect days to build the plan from. Perhaps, unbeknown to him, on the days he picks a cover driver was doing a route and grabbed the wrong DIAD, and wound up overriding most of the streets when delivering and when doing so abbreviated street names, all of those stops with their volume will not be in the history used to make the plan. Again, garbage goes in.
So a plan that looks like it should be golden, starts to fall apart even before a single package is processed on the preload. As the day progresses, it is the dispatchers task to watch the volume coming in to various routes and if need be, move stops from one to another to balance the work and keep every one within their targeted range. Ideally, if he has a good setup and has a huge amount of knowledge of all areas delivered by the center, he will move work subdivision by subdivision. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it does not because a subdivision that usually gets say 10-20 stops explodes to 40-50, and moving it as a group just transfers the problem of over dispatch to another route rather than balancing. More often however, it does not work because the dispatcher is not familiar enough with an area and picks several street ranges he thinks are together and they are not.
It does not help that he is dealing with dozens of routes and literally thousands of street ranges. I have often seen drivers try to get weird trace problems fixed, only to get completely frustrated because the dispatcher could not get to their issue in a timely manner. So the driver, somewhat understandably, gives up in frustration and says hell with it and stops trying. Many on this board have indicated they are in this situation. Sadly, now we have a wall built up between the one person who has the knowledge to fix issues and the one person who has the tools to implement the fix.
These are just a couple scenarios, as I said there are many more.

The good news- In my experience it is not as bad as it used to be from a redundancy in miles traveled by multiple drivers sense. It just seems worse. A neighborhood might get broken up more often on the preload than it used to and you see two drivers delivering in it which looks bad. But in the old days, if a drivers dispatch blew up, the usual fix was to have as many as 5 or sometime more drivers converge on a meet point, take a bunch of his stops and then fan back out and deliver to adjacent streets and neighborhoods.

 

[ymelord]

I call it embarrassing because we advertise logistics and I'm sick of being told I don't know anything, so now I don't let someone else worry about it

 

[cosmo1]

More often however, it does not work because the dispatcher is not familiar enough with an area and picks several street ranges he thinks are together and they are not.

Now I understand why I get 3 or 4 stops 7 miles diagonally across town at the end of my day just to get in range. (And see 3 other drivers in the same neighborhood.)

Actually, my dispatcher is familiar with all the routes in our center, but makes moves like this just to satisfy his boss. He has told me many times just to give air to an adjacent driver, rather than him add/cutting it, just so I would show in range.

What a system!

 

[satellitedriver]

After 25yrs of this know it all nonsense, one word comes to mind.
Whatever.
I punched out at 10pm tonight.
I will keep taking the free money UPS is throwing away.
The waste boggles my mind.
As in the movie,
" Paint Your Wagon",
I am just collecting the gold that slips through the floor cracks.