also,, you blame poor dispatch,, whats the normal training on a on road going into dispatch?
P-man, such a well written, lucid explination of the stops per car goal. Par for the course for you and I want to thank you again for the insight.
My questionnow becomes: does stops per car make us money? If the number says we should run 29 does it work? Or does running 30 make us more profitable because of less service failures and less overtime pay?
I ask this because everytime they chop a route in my center it ends in disaster. 5 drivers over 11, missed pieces, missed pickups and simply just frustration all around. What's the verdict P-man?
Why not just let 6 drivers come in at 8 hours instead of 5 at 11 hours with all the service failures? I'm just asking here...
Two great questions. I'll try and answer.... (The answer is long however)
Does SPC save UPS money? In theory, it really should not (at least not a lot). Its a planning metric to determine the number of drivers needed.
Take the 30 car center for example. Putting out 5 less SPC than planned means one more driver is on road than planned. Lets ignore AM time, To/from, and the vehicle which is extra cost.... In theory, the drivers should now come in 20 minutes (or so) early on average. Brownie, this is the example you gave, right?
In the real world unfortunately however, this doesn't happen. If it did, there would be less of a focus on SPC. Unfortunately, when an extra route is on the road, drivers do not come in early enough to offset the extra driver.
When I visit a center, its the last thing I look at. I look at the dispatch, service, EDD accuracy, misloads, the miles index (Stops per mile), Ov/Un. If all those are okay, I don't really care about SPC. Also, even when SPC is okay, those other metrics are more important.
When they hit a SPC and the other issues exist, its almost always due to the dispatch, and here is why.... Take my example of needing to go from 30 cars to 29 cars. To do this properly, many routes will need to be adjusted. CD principles demand this. Because this is difficult to do, dispatch supervisors try to make as few changes as possible to break up the route. Doing that causes a poor dispatch. I end up seeing pocket dispatches all over the place and that is ineffective.
My point is that the cause is NOT the planning metric of SPC. The issue is the dispatch. Some centers do this well, some poorly.
Hellfire, it used to be that a PDS was given a training class of about a week. They were first taught Control Dispatch principles. They then learned the planning and execution systems (DPS, AMS, PAS, ODSe, etc.) In the clase they would dispatch the Clarkville center.
Today, this training has unfortunately been watered down. Some districts train well, some train by word of mouth.
When I blame the dispatch, there is another piece. Its the loop layout. The PDS is allowed to change the trace, but not the loop layout. If a poor loop layout exists, cutting out a driver is even more difficult to do. I often see this when I visit centers.
So, SPC is just one of many metrics. Its a planning metric. PDS' are pushed to hit SPC, but they are also pushed to reduce miles. Monitoring all metrics is the right thing to do.
P-Man