What?!?!?!
Hal wont Open the Pod Bay Door - YouTube
(Actually, this clip fits this thread on many levels.)
What?!?!?!
Cars may very well drive themselves within 20 years...on designated stretches of freeway or major throroughfares that have been digitally mapped and programmed with GPS coordinates. That doesnt mean that a car will be able to navigate itself thru gridlocked downtown traffic, or figure out the best place to park and break out a two-wheeler. Nor will a car be able to navigate some of the rural, backwoods goat trails that I encounter on a daily basis while delivering to the hill folk. The job of a package car driver is a lot more complicated than just connecting the dots in the shortest amount of distance.
We've been on orion for about a year now. It's only goal is to lower miles so that dispatch is lowered and then they cut routes. we are down about 6 routes from last year. So yes individually we are working more but ups is getting it done (center wise) with 6 less drivers.The issue isn't so much to make sense as it is to get bulk fuel savings along with cutting a route. Even though you get more miles, they cut a route which lowers everyones miles along with saving 4-7 miles per route avg. the pennies saved equals millions.
We've been on orion for about a year now. It's only goal is to lower miles so that dispatch is lowered and then they cut routes. we are down about 6 routes from last year. So yes individually we are working more but ups is getting it done (center wise) with 6 less drivers.
So you're saying Orion was a smart business move?
The same could be said for Rural Remote.
Do you even know what Rural Remote is/was?
Yes. Another cost saving measure at the expense of the customer. And it was used as a dispatch tool with instructions to deliver what you can or feel like delivering and bring the rest back.
I, for one, can't wait for this thing to show up where I am. My route, for the most part, is only about 5 city blocks. I deliver businesses and do pickups most days right up until about 4:15. My DOL is pretty much 100% with a few exceptions, most notable of which is a 400-unit apartment building that is early in my EDD that I skip and don't deliver until about 4:45 (after all commercial stops and pickups are done because it takes between 30-60 minutes to do).
I'm dying to see what happens when Orion tells me to deliver this building at 11:30 AM. The amount of missed businesses will be staggering.
That's one way to look at it.
When it first came out it made a lot of sense. The driver was tasked with making the decision and for the most part they made the right choices. Yes, there were the occasional "I have a ball game tonight so I will remote this town" but overall the drivers took care of the customers. It is when the center teams were taking entire towns off of pkg cars and not letting the drivers go through them to see if they could indirect them or somehow make service on them when rural remote began to fail.
I had a country run when rural remote first came out. One of my towns was 5 miles one way from another larger town. The larger town had a prison which is where most of the people from the smaller town worked. I would normally get up to 5 stops per day for the smaller town and could normally get rid of most if not all of them in the larger town. The stops that I couldn't get rid of I would save for a day or so until I had enough stops to justify making the 10 mile round-trip.
I covered a route that had orion for the first time today. What a joke. It had me driving past side streets I knew I had deliveries on then going miles away on a tangent then going back doing part of that dumb road then leaving again. It made no sense at all. It had me delivering both sides at once driving down a long road that it then had me going back down anyway so I was constantly crossing the road. It had me bouncing from shelf to shelf most of the day. It had me set to deliver a bunch of ground stops that made no sense before 1030 commits and grouped the NDAs as one stop with the ground even big bulk stops with different pals that were buried. I told a sup about how it easily cost me 2 hours digging and ping ponging around the town. He said they didn't care because other centers were seeing an average reduction of 7 miles per route. Spend a dollar to save a penny? I hope orion is scrapped but I have a bad feeling it will stay....
Initially we did not have the stops quota that you spoke of. The initiative worked until mgt screwed it up.