Who's Stupid Idea Was "Stops Per Car"?

[pretzel_man]

Yes, this is frustrating for me too....

If you are already doing everything you say AND you have a good dispatch and trace, putting more stops on you will only raise your paid day. Of course this is true.

I have yet to find a center however where this is true for the majority of drivers. If it were, people here would not be complaining about their dispatch and trace.

So, I admitted what you asked (I think).

You also need to recognize that you cannot complain about inefficient management and stupid dispatch decisions and then also complain and say that fixing those things will not reduce time.

You rightfully want respect for your knowledge as a 25 year driver. I think I also deserve respect as as a 35 year UPSer who has dispatched many, many centers.

 

[Nimnim]

For those that might not have caught it, took me a minute to notice myself, pretzel_man quoted his last response and added the last line starting "You rightfully..."

 

[soberups]

P-man,

The center I am on is currently paying out over $5,000 per week in over-9.5 grievance penalty pay, and has been doing so for several months now.

A driver in my loop ran out of DOT hours yesterday. Two drivers were sent back out from the building at 7:15 at night to try and make service on the package he didnt have time to deliver. Every other driver in the loop, myself included, worked at least 10.5 hours.

My building recently consolidated from 3 centers down to 2, and my loop was transferred to a different center on August 1st. Since that time, every driver in the loop has seen his/her stop count go up by an average of 25 stops per car, and his/her paid day has increased by an average of 90 minutes. Service failures have gone thru the roof, people are running out of DOT hours, people are working up to 14 hours a day, and people are getting hurt.

The only difference between now and one year ago....is that we have been transferred to a new center with a new SPC quota.

The new SPC quota isnt just flawed....it is completely and totally divorced from reality by several orders of magnitude.

Yes, I am sure there are "improvements" that could be made in the trace or in the dispatch....but nothing that will even come close to solving the underlying problem of the absurd and impossible expectations that are being piled upon us.

And making those "improvements" will take time and effort and resources....which my management team simply does not have. We are in a permanent and daily state of crisis, and our management is so busy running around putting out fires that they dont have the time to sit down and make any of the "improvements" to the trace or the dispatch that you claim are the solution to the problem.

My center is like the Titanic. Its slowly going under, and it wont stop until we fix the hole in the hull. The "improvements" you speak of are akin to trying to rearrange the deck chairs into neater and more orderly rows. There is nothing wrong with neat and orderly rows of deck chairs, but we need to solve the underlying problem first.

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

For those that might not have caught it, took me a minute to notice myself, pretzel_man quoted his last response and added the last line starting "You rightfully..."

I did catch that and he is exactly right on both points.

 

[barnyard]

I believe that the whole "stops per car" thing is a result of UPS going public. SPC is something that is easy to understand in a shareholder report and at shareholder meetings.

Management accounting is so flawed.

If a driver delivers out of a trailer, those 15 stops are included in the SPC numbers. When the same driver goes to do pickups, the stops and pieces go to the feeder department.

In our center, instead of having 3 trailers delivering, there is one. The stops that used to be trailer stops are shoe-horned into package cars. On the pickup side, we have drivers that are picking up 6 skids, sometimes more from one shipper, because if a feeder does it, the center does not get credit for the them.

I could not be a manager at UPS.

 

[Re-Raise]

You rightfully want respect for your knowledge as a 25 year driver. I think I also deserve respect as as a 35 year UPSer who has dispatched many, many centers.

What is your title and job description?

You actually go into centers and change their dispatches and traces after a period of standing around listening to drivers.

I have never seen anyone do anything even remotely close to what you are describing at our center.

How did you do this 10 or even 5 years ago before EDD.

Do you wear a cape or a crown so we can recognize you.

The only new management people that come through our building ask us what to do with a hazardous package or help us line up our mirrors. Not that that isn't important work...

 

[Catatonic]

How did you do this 10 or even 5 years ago before EDD.

I did this over 30 years ago and it had been around before that. We did it on paper and then keyed it in on a mainframe until the old IBM XTs came out in the mid to late 80's.
The overall label is "Controlled Dispatch" and I remember what a long and tedious process this was before all the technology.
All the technology has done is to make it easier to do initially, maybe a bit more accurate and definitely a lot easier to keep updated and to generate new dispatch plans.
I remember working on an assignment with a guy named Henry McMillan who everyone referred to as the grandfather of Controlled Dispatch. He foresaw back then that technology was the key to making Controlled Dispatch work because it was so labor intensive to generate and maintain dispatch plans as changes occurred.

 

[Overpaid Union Thug]

P-man,

The center I am on is currently paying out over $5,000 per week in over-9.5 grievance penalty pay, and has been doing so for several months now.

A driver in my loop ran out of DOT hours yesterday. Two drivers were sent back out from the building at 7:15 at night to try and make service on the package he didnt have time to deliver. Every other driver in the loop, myself included, worked at least 10.5 hours.

My building recently consolidated from 3 centers down to 2, and my loop was transferred to a different center on August 1st. Since that time, every driver in the loop has seen his/her stop count go up by an average of 25 stops per car, and his/her paid day has increased by an average of 90 minutes. Service failures have gone thru the roof, people are running out of DOT hours, people are working up to 14 hours a day, and people are getting hurt.

The only difference between now and one year ago....is that we have been transferred to a new center with a new SPC quota.

The new SPC quota isnt just flawed....it is completely and totally divorced from reality by several orders of magnitude.

Yes, I am sure there are "improvements" that could be made in the trace or in the dispatch....but nothing that will even come close to solving the underlying problem of the absurd and impossible expectations that are being piled upon us.

And making those "improvements" will take time and effort and resources....which my management team simply does not have. We are in a permanent and daily state of crisis, and our management is so busy running around putting out fires that they dont have the time to sit down and make any of the "improvements" to the trace or the dispatch that you claim are the solution to the problem.

My center is like the Titanic. Its slowly going under, and it wont stop until we fix the hole in the hull. The "improvements" you speak of are akin to trying to rearrange the deck chairs into neater and more orderly rows. There is nothing wrong with neat and orderly rows of deck chairs, but we need to solve the underlying problem first.

I can't believe that anyone that's been with the company long enough would actually believe that all of this is the result of, or even partially the result of, or caused by dispatch problems. My center ran pretty smoothly before the so called recession (I say that because it didn't touch our area at all) kicked in. I mean....the volume doesn't justify the actions of IE or management.

 

[barnyard]

My center ran pretty smoothly before the so called recession (I say that because it didn't touch our area at all) kicked in. I mean....the volume doesn't justify the actions of IE or management.

We lost some volume, but the recession occurred when we were implementing PAS/EDD. Shareholders were promised at least 10% more production with PAS/EDD. In our center, that meant 5 routes went away, 1.25 routes per loop. Dividing up those routes screwed up almost every route in the center.

It was easy for management to blame the recession. Things are coming back, but the routes are not.

PAS/EDD has also made it so that all the routes suck equally.

 

[Overpaid Union Thug]

We lost some volume, but the recession occurred when we were implementing PAS/EDD. Shareholders were promised at least 10% more production with PAS/EDD. In our center, that meant 5 routes went away, 1.25 routes per loop. Dividing up those routes screwed up almost every route in the center.

It was easy for management to blame the recession. Things are coming back, but the routes are not.

PAS/EDD has also made it so that all the routes suck equally.

Our volume has actually gone up. This is a fast growing area. One of the fastest in the country. The SPC metric combined with the fact that too many of our drivers are bonus babies is why routes continue to be cut. Your typical bonus driver doesn't understand that running 1.5 under on a route that planned 11+ hours is a bad thing in the long run.

 

[hellfire]

I did this over 30 years ago and it had been around before that. We did it on paper and then keyed it in on a mainframe until the old IBM XTs came out in the mid to late 80's.
The overall label is "Controlled Dispatch" and I remember what a long and tedious process this was before all the technology.
All the technology has done is to make it easier to do initially, maybe a bit more accurate and definitely a lot easier to keep updated and to generate new dispatch plans.
I remember working on an assignment with a guy named Henry McMillan who everyone referred to as the grandfather of Controlled Dispatch. He foresaw back then that technology was the key to making Controlled Dispatch work because it was so labor intensive to generate and maintain dispatch plans as changes occurred.

apples and oranges,,, now is a nightmare

 

[barnyard]

Your typical bonus driver doesn't understand that running 1.5 under on a route that planned 11+ hours is a bad thing in the long run.

I do not work in a bonus center, thankfully. I can also see where it would be really hard to convince a runner that they are screwing everyone else. They look at their paychecks and cannot see anything beyond the bottom line. Kind of like UPS management.

 

[pretzel_man]

For those that might not have caught it, took me a minute to notice myself, pretzel_man quoted his last response and added the last line starting "You rightfully..."

I thought I was just editing my post, not quoting it. Sorry. I was in a hurry.

 

[pretzel_man]

P-man,

The center I am on is currently paying out over $5,000 per week in over-9.5 grievance penalty pay, and has been doing so for several months now.

A driver in my loop ran out of DOT hours yesterday. Two drivers were sent back out from the building at 7:15 at night to try and make service on the package he didnt have time to deliver. Every other driver in the loop, myself included, worked at least 10.5 hours.

My building recently consolidated from 3 centers down to 2, and my loop was transferred to a different center on August 1st. Since that time, every driver in the loop has seen his/her stop count go up by an average of 25 stops per car, and his/her paid day has increased by an average of 90 minutes. Service failures have gone thru the roof, people are running out of DOT hours, people are working up to 14 hours a day, and people are getting hurt.

The only difference between now and one year ago....is that we have been transferred to a new center with a new SPC quota.

The new SPC quota isnt just flawed....it is completely and totally divorced from reality by several orders of magnitude.

Yes, I am sure there are "improvements" that could be made in the trace or in the dispatch....but nothing that will even come close to solving the underlying problem of the absurd and impossible expectations that are being piled upon us.

And making those "improvements" will take time and effort and resources....which my management team simply does not have. We are in a permanent and daily state of crisis, and our management is so busy running around putting out fires that they dont have the time to sit down and make any of the "improvements" to the trace or the dispatch that you claim are the solution to the problem.

My center is like the Titanic. Its slowly going under, and it wont stop until we fix the hole in the hull. The "improvements" you speak of are akin to trying to rearrange the deck chairs into neater and more orderly rows. There is nothing wrong with neat and orderly rows of deck chairs, but we need to solve the underlying problem first.

Sober, while I certainly accept what you say as true, how do you know that the underlying problem is not the dispatch. Trace is only one element of the dispatch. Are the loop boundaries correct? Is the dispatch right? Add / cuts? Are the loads good?

If all those things are acceptable, then the paid day cannot reduce without more drivers. If they are all okay, then I would agree that your SPC target is wrong.

As I said before there are 1,300 centers in the U.S. Generally, going back to the basics and fixing the preload, dispatch, loops, etc. will improve many, many things.

Sure, people are busy. But fixing these things make long term impacts. I bet sups are shuttling misloads? If so, that time will be there forever until they work with the preload. Fix the preload and time frees up. This is the basics of the job.

 

[pretzel_man]

What is your title and job description?

You actually go into centers and change their dispatches and traces after a period of standing around listening to drivers.

I have never seen anyone do anything even remotely close to what you are describing at our center.

How did you do this 10 or even 5 years ago before EDD.

Do you wear a cape or a crown so we can recognize you.

The only new management people that come through our building ask us what to do with a hazardous package or help us line up our mirrors. Not that that isn't important work...

I work on special projects. I do a lot of training and auditing. My job is not to fix individual centers as much as it is to train and audit districts.....

I didn't do this job before PAS and EDD. I do other things, this is just one of them.....

Before PAS and EDD, the job was done manually. Its oulined in the 360 manual. DOL's were posted manually. DDR's were created manually. Load charts could be printed from Loop Detail.

The current systems automated and consolidated much of that same process. They have been around since 2003.

 

[Benben]

Our volume has actually gone up. This is a fast growing area. One of the fastest in the country. The SPC metric combined with the fact that too many of our drivers are bonus babies is why routes continue to be cut. Your typical bonus driver doesn't understand that running 1.5 under on a route that planned 11+ hours is a bad thing in the long run.

>>So a fellow driver's desire to provide for his family is the one to blame? You blame the "bonus babies"? As a bonus baby who takes his lunch and break every day I blame the union clowns who hide behind the wording of the contract and who's life mantra has become, "I am not going to work hard and you can not make me."

After 5 years I am sick and tired of having to do other's work because they feel "entitled". For every clown out there, dispatch has to then overload at least the 2 adjacent routes around the clown. When every cover driver in a center can run a clown's route stone cold blind and 100+ better than that clown THERE IS A PROBLEM!! And that problem is NOT the stops per car metric!


Maybe the anger towards management's "stops per car" is misplaced. Maybe the anger being expressed is actually anger at management's refusal to, "cut the dead weight?"

 

[DS]

>>So a fellow driver's desire to provide for his family is the one to blame? You blame the "bonus babies"? As a bonus baby who takes his lunch and break every day I blame the union clowns who hide behind the wording of the contract and who's life mantra has become, "I am not going to work hard and you can not make me."

After 5 years I am sick and tired of having to do other's work because they feel "entitled". For every clown out there, dispatch has to then overload at least the 2 adjacent routes around the clown. When every cover driver in a center can run a clown's route stone cold blind and 100+ better than that clown THERE IS A PROBLEM!! And that problem is NOT the stops per car metric!


Maybe the anger towards management's "stops per car" is misplaced. Maybe the anger being expressed is actually anger at management's refusal to, "cut the dead weight?"

IMHO if this is what you are up against,you have a valid complaint,but from what I've see,the drivers that play games usually get caught.
Where I am, and probably where you are,every driver is overdispatched
and the bonus babies are the ones skipping their breaks to get it done,the
ones that are taking their breaks and calling for help,usually are the ones who have preload issues.
You have to remember that everyone is different,and some kids can run a route an hour under by cutting corners,and it's funny that their 15 paid sendagains are overlooked.
I don't believe there is much dead weight at the driver level,I think it starts
way before they even get to the hub.

 

[Re-Raise]

I work on special projects. I do a lot of training and auditing. My job is not to fix individual centers as much as it is to train and audit districts.....
.

You rightfully want respect for your knowledge as a 25 year driver. I think I also deserve respect as as a 35 year UPSer who has dispatched many, many centers.

The problem isn't the trace and dispatch that you either do or don't fix , I get confused.

The problem is , as everyone except you and Hoaxter know, the cutting of routes precipitated by trying to meet a Higher SPC number that is just pulled out of a hat by some guy behind a desk.

If the problem is trace and dispatch why not fix them first and then see if driver's paid days fall without forcing a SPC number on them?

 

[pretzel_man]

The problem isn't the trace and dispatch that you either do or don't fix , I get confused.

The problem is , as everyone except you and Hoaxter know, the cutting of routes precipitated by trying to meet a Higher SPC number that is just pulled out of a hat by some guy behind a desk.

If the problem is trace and dispatch why not fix them first and then see if driver's paid days fall without forcing a SPC number on them?

So, we have gone full circle.... As I explained before....

SPC is a planning element for a center, not an individual driver. It has been around as a planning element since before you or I started with UPS.

It is locally created, and locally controlled. There is no corporate creation of an SPC target.

Should the center know they can hit the SPC target before they create it? Yes, of course.

What I said and still stick to is that SPC as a metric is not the problem. The SPC number for an individual center may not be the problem, the issue is more likely the dispatch.

 

[tourists24]

So, we have gone full circle.... As I explained before....

SPC is a planning element for a center, not an individual driver. It has been around as a planning element since before you or I started with UPS.

It is locally created, and locally controlled. There is no corporate creation of an SPC target.

Should the center know they can hit the SPC target before they create it? Yes, of course.

What I said and still stick to is that SPC as a metric is not the problem. The SPC number for an individual center may not be the problem, the issue is more likely the dispatch.

may be locally created (not sure),,, but at least anymore is not locally controlled. Corporate level may not control things but center level does not either. They are dictated to. Problem lies that they have to react to it and rarely does a good job of it. Things may start with the best intentions, but never is translated correctly.