UPS Needs To Play Weekend Warrior To Catch Up To FedEx - Benizinga
At UPS Inc., a project aimed at cutting one day from transit times for all its U.S. ground parcel deliveries has been dubbed "Our Fastest Ground Ever." It is indeed an ambitious endeavor to merge UPS' network infrastructure and technology to shrink the time between pickup and delivery of 15 million or so daily shipments.
The program, which kicked in solidly late last year, has made good progress. Today, 90% of UPS' ground-parcel shipments move in one- to three-day transit times. More than half of the improvements under the initiative have come from shrinking two- to four-day transit times to one to three days. To speed deliveries, UPS has diverted millions of parcels from the railroads — it is a huge intermodal customer — to two-person, over-the-road sleeper teams.
But there's a hole in Big Brown's delivery net: Its weekend operations lag behind those of arch-rival FedEx Corp. which possesses an internally controlled seven-day-a-week delivery network. Until UPS can raise its weekend game to match its rival, it may not gain the traction it needs in the time-in-transit battle that will likely determine supremacy in e-commerce delivery.
At UPS Inc., a project aimed at cutting one day from transit times for all its U.S. ground parcel deliveries has been dubbed "Our Fastest Ground Ever." It is indeed an ambitious endeavor to merge UPS' network infrastructure and technology to shrink the time between pickup and delivery of 15 million or so daily shipments.
The program, which kicked in solidly late last year, has made good progress. Today, 90% of UPS' ground-parcel shipments move in one- to three-day transit times. More than half of the improvements under the initiative have come from shrinking two- to four-day transit times to one to three days. To speed deliveries, UPS has diverted millions of parcels from the railroads — it is a huge intermodal customer — to two-person, over-the-road sleeper teams.
But there's a hole in Big Brown's delivery net: Its weekend operations lag behind those of arch-rival FedEx Corp. which possesses an internally controlled seven-day-a-week delivery network. Until UPS can raise its weekend game to match its rival, it may not gain the traction it needs in the time-in-transit battle that will likely determine supremacy in e-commerce delivery.
