ahh missing airs...are they like socks in the dryer?

'Lord Brown's bidding'

Well-Known Member
How can they even truly measure pph for preloaders since they don't use scanners?

They'll stand at the end of the belt/boxline and watch you load for a set period time, like 20 mins, and see how many packages you load in that time. Let's say in the twenty minutes they observe you 77 packages are loaded. 20 mins is 1/3 an hour, so 77pkgs is 1/3 of 230: there is your PPH (I think the standard is still set at 225PPH). Also, at the end of the day they can look at your total paid hours and divide that into the total number of pieces loaded by you (what the drivers actually scanned in their DIADs) to get the avg PPH. It is that 2nd method of getting the metric that makes mgmt rush people off the clock before they tighten their loads, clean them up. Another example-the details of which escape me-roughly involved a preload manager not going by the plan for his staff that day, realizing the circumstances suggest the plan will be inadequate, like not anticipating call-outs and no-shows when a city gets hit by some rain, with a flu bug going around. However, the manager runs the risk of having to answer to I.E. if they guess wrong and now they don't hit the number of hours per employee I.E. said they should have used, like a driver trying to explain why he delivered ground with his air, causing an air to be delivered late.. Rather than face that, managers/supes will just go with the plan, which turns out to be inadequate, preload falls behind, and at end of day you have belt supes tossing a hodge-podge of pieces into the middle of cars to let the drivers finish the job on area the preload manager and his operation weren't allowed to complete because of the metric I.E. came up with. I've loaded too long on the preload to really get angry at any of em; I've seen the sadness in their eyes as they tell loaders yet AGAIN to load air into the load, knowing a rash of FAILs will result, but I.E. wants preload hours down and can't have drivers loading their own air-properly-into their cars, raising their AM time. Even when I get a little agitated with a supe, at the end of our exchange I always tell em I know it's not their fault, and they are just working as directed, as I should. Yesterday, the FT belt supe on my car's line and I shared a sentiment of frustration with the havoc I.E. plays with all of our lives.
 

ovrdspatchd

New Member
It all starts at the top and crap runs down hill. From corporate to the customer. Sometimes the customer thinks we suck because we don't get there until 2045 or they think we're lazy because we ask them to come at least halfway down from the 4th floor to sign for their package. They don't realize the pressure we're under to perform just like the preloaders. It's easy to say the sups aren't doing their job but they feel the same pressure from the center manager as he feels it from corporate. I think UPS's whole system is flawed. This whole emphasis on doing the most amount of work in the least amount of time will eventually back-fire. From what I've read and heard, it gets worse as the years go by. I've been driving since 07 and just in the last few years, things have gone way down hill in my center.
 

'Lord Brown's bidding'

Well-Known Member
Doing the most amount of work in the least amount of time has always been UPS' mission, and they have gotten quite good at it, which is why they have lasted as long as they did and are where they are in the industry. Doing the most amount of work with the least amount of HANDS in the least amount of time, OTOH....that IS misguided. 'More hands lighyen the load' of delivering the most packages ontime. Sometimes you really do have to 'spend money to make money', not on buying back shares, but on making the product/service stronger, which will lead to the legitimate rise in value of the company.
 
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