Category: UPS News

The brown elves at United Parcel Service relax after Christmas only a short while before getting back to work.

At the end of last year’s peak holiday season, UPS officials took a hard look at the numbers and decided it was time to increase delivery capacities to meet a growing demand.

“We realized we needed an opportunity to expand our flow per hour to accommodate the influx,” said Dave Roth, business manager for the Clarksville branch.

For the first time ever, UPS will be using a mobile delivery center at its Clarksville location during the holidays, enabling the carrier to handle 60 percent more deliveries.

Chief Financial Officer Richard Peretz said in a post-earnings conference call with analysts that while third-quarter U.S. delivery stops and volume increased 5.7% from a year ago, with the help of ORION, delivery miles traveled rose just 1.4%. He told MarketWatch in a phone interview, that for each mile saved per day, on average, annualized savings are about $50 million. “Orion is saving us about six and seven miles per driver per day,” Peretz said, which translates to annual savings of about $300 million to $350 million.

A little past 10 p.m., the first of United Parcel Service’s (UPS) Boeings begins its descent into a hub within the airport complex in Cologne, Germany, while the rest of Europe goes to sleep.

It is this hub in Cologne that not only serves as a centerpiece of the international logistics firm’s operations in Europe, but also a gateway to an extended express network serving the entire globe. It is this cohesive display of operations that allows UPS to handle day by day 2 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, or about 190,000 packages per hour, while half of the world is awake and the other half is asleep.

How will UPS be affected?

Industry veterans say it’s virtually impossible for AMZN to replicate the huge hub-and-spoke model that UPS has built over many years. Another view holds that AMZN’s e-commerce competitors may—or may not—trust AMZN’s delivery network for their own deliveries, which makes it the million dollar question. Presently, both Amazon and UPS are trying newer technologies, such as drones, to speed up and innovate their delivery process.

United Parcel Service Inc., Atlanta, is offering about 50,000 U.S. pension plan participants a lump-sum window, spokesman Glenn Zaccara said in an e-mail.

The population consists of former employees, from non-union and some union plans, who are vested in their respective U.S. pension plans but who have yet to retire, Mr. Zaccara said. The population is restricted to former employees who terminated their UPS employment between July 2003 and June 2016.

“Like many other companies, UPS is providing some former employees with the opportunity and flexibility to choose a lump-sum distribution, rather than having their money tied up in a pension plan. This common practice benefits former employees who voluntarily elect to free up their money, while also benefiting the company by simplifying plan administration,” Mr. Zaccara said.