What Does ORION Stand For?

[tourists24]

It's not extra work.

It most certainly is when your management says it is. We are to be ORION compliant. If your mileage is too high you will be reprimanded. We are to look for missing pkgs but if no luck and is found later in a wrong location it becomes a misload. ORION does not allot for this. The decision becomes theirs. I'll gladly comply either way. Yes I know .... Stupid


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[toonertoo]

My loader is pretty good. Things I cant find are usually a 3000 loaded in the 8000 because the hin is slopped up, UPS cannot afford ink...............
Or a 1000 loaded in the 7000. That being said, Yes its my work and I will look until its futile. I will deliver it later, but I have some sections I never get back close to. Its their dime, and their call. I will deliver it or not makes no difference to me.

I get questioned every day about why my miles are up. I make sure to take them to the computers, and show them. And today I asked, "what do you want me to do, miles or trace, coz I dont care" . I showed him all the businesses, and schools loaded at the end of the day where they are going to be closed. And I want your undivided attention because I have no clue what you want. The sups are really not very knowledgable about Orion, other than their talking points.

So here is/are 8 businesses, bulk stops. If I run it to keep the miles down, where it should be in my Orion, every one is a trace break. If I go to the top and stay in trace, I add miles. "do you understand, do you see this, so you tell me what you want since no one has the power, or the intelligence to fix it. And I still have my letter dated June 3rd, 2014, about all these that are wrong, and your side didnt fix it so its yours to live with." I also said I dont want to hear about how I didnt follow it 85%, and thats why my miles are up like I heard the other day, when its right here in your face why I cannot. On the other hand I can be 100 and bring back missed business. You talk to your people, Im done.

 

[ArcherUTR]

it's extra miles

It is, but I doubt the center is going to instruct you or be pleased by the missed service. It's kind of our job.

IMO, our job is to not get in an accident our have an injury, but I digress.

It most certainly is when your management says it is. We are to be ORION compliant. If your mileage is too high you will be reprimanded. We are to look for missing pkgs but if no luck and is found later in a wrong location it becomes a misload. ORION does not allot for this. The decision becomes theirs. I'll gladly comply either way. Yes I know .... Stupid

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Who here has been disciplined for ORION miles when it came down to making service and has not won on protest?

 

[ArcherUTR]

This thread is not as fun as I intended it to be....

 

[ArcherUTR]

Obviously, Read Into Obscure Nuances

 

[AKCoverMan]

It is, but I doubt the center is going to instruct you or be pleased by the missed service. It's kind of our job.

It sure should be our job. I think the takeaway from what's happening in ORION centers is that the need to prove that ORION works is so great that management is willing to accept preventable service failures to meet the planned mileage. Sad because the only reason we have the money to try to build something like ORION is because we make service on packages and keep the paying customers happy.

In my (so far non-ORION) center, the pendulum has swung the other way. Misloads for towns 40 miles away that we would have been told to sheet as missed are now being delivered. Big push to go thru car for Misloads early so we can get plan to service them. I'm glad to see it.

 

[ArcherUTR]

It sure should be our job. I think the takeaway from what's happening in ORION centers is that the need to prove that ORION works is so great that management is willing to accept preventable service failures to meet the planned mileage. Sad because the only reason we have the money to try to build something like ORION is because we make service on packages and keep the paying customers happy.

In my (so far non-ORION) center, the pendulum has swung the other way. Misloads for towns 40 miles away that we would have been told to sheet as missed are now being delivered. Big push to go thru car for Misloads early so we can get plan to service them. I'm glad to see it.

In my suburban center, there is a big push to search your package care completely by 3p.m. And even when I message in a misload by 11a.m., most times nothing ever comes of it, sadly. Even if I were to have some sort of service failure as long is were about a once a month thing, nothing usually happens.

But if I decided to give ORION carte blanche, and sheet everything up missed that I could not find at the appropriate time, yeah I would be having some disciplinary problems, especially if I did not request instructions on what to do.

So basically what I'm saying is that miles and ORION are GOD, but answering basic integrity and service failure questions are still very much on my management team's mind.

 

[UnconTROLLed]

Orion= ostenibly ridiculously ignorant over-supervised network

 

[ZQXC]

You talk to your people, Im done.

...... and one final point to wrap it up. Yo mama

 

[joeboodog]

The more I hear about orion the more it saddens me. We used to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy on our routes to make adjusments to service the customer. To me, orion means the end of the UPS driver as we know it. We will just be bodies in a brown uniform.

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

The more I hear about orion the more it saddens me. We used to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy on our routes to make adjusments to service the customer. To me, orion means the end of the UPS driver as we know it. We will just be bodies in a brown uniform.

The end began with the DIAD, was enhanced by PAS/EDD and will be finalized by Orion.

The company is looking to lower their labor costs while providing "acceptable" service.

2018 will be one of more contentious contracts yet to date.

 

[tourists24]

Who here has been disciplined for ORION miles when it came down to making service and has not won on protest?

No one has actually. To me that's not the point. Ive been at UPS for 25 years now. I know how to provide the best service I can. Im simply not going to fight with management when they are hell bent on doing things the way they do when it comes from higher. They have decided that ORION (at least in my center) will be followed at 85% and mileage will be made. I quit caring a long time ago when they wont listen to drivers whose main concern is service first.

 

[wayfair]

It is, but I doubt the center is going to instruct you or be pleased by the missed service. It's kind of our job.

IMO, our job is to not get in an accident our have an injury, but I digress.




Who here has been disciplined for ORION miles when it came down to making service and has not won on protest?

Driver in my building had his "working termination" reduced to another "warning letter"

 

[toonertoo]

We had late air today, Orion shut off, It was heaven.

 

[728ups]

what amazes me is the INHUMAN amount of work and effort put in by Operation Supes to keep the DM and Operations manager from realizing what an incredible failure ORION is!!!!I am serious: my supervisors are terrified the Higher Powers that reside in Ivory Towers ( i'm a bloody poet and didnt know it) that dream this kind of crap up (while never setting foot in a package car ,much less an operations center) might get a whiff of the stench that is ORION. I am amazed. I;d love to see them say Forget This and let the entire charade come crashing down

 

[urbie4]

(PMJI, as an outsider doing some homework for a column I write on data analytics.) Does ORION help at all? Judging from the general discussion about ORION hereabouts, most of it is pretty negative. My question would be roughly this: How much of it is the system itself not giving you a good route, and how much is UPS riding your b*tt and making you follow it too closely?

The column I'm working on this month is going to look at a bunch of computing/software/analytics projects like computer chess tournaments, (somewhat) self-driving cars, and... well, I wanted to mention ORION. The general conclusion is that in many of these applications, the "smartest" decisions are made not by humans or computers alone, but by humans *using* computers -- for instance, in a recent run-what-you-brung wide-open world championship chess tournament, the winner was a team of non-master players using three strong computer programs, with the humans making the final decision as to each move.

There's a huge disconnect between what I read about ORION in press releases and in the media (Forbes, WSJ, tech mags, etc.), and what you guys are saying about how it works on the ground.

When I first got a GPS, the directions it gave were pretty bad, at times. Before that, things like MapQuest and Google Maps were also not very good. The problem that ORION is trying to solve is orders of magnitude more difficult, since you have packages that have to be picked up and dropped off (some by 10:30, some not, etc.), in addition to just mapping the route.

Does the system help at all? Is it something that could be useful if you had more flexibility to use your own judgment? Is the problem just too difficult to solve in software at this point, especially given real-world things that happen (car wrecks on your route, packages not there, having to run across a 4-lane highway to get to the destination, etc., etc.)?

 

[tourists24]

(PMJI, as an outsider doing some homework for a column I write on data analytics.) Does ORION help at all? Judging from the general discussion about ORION hereabouts, most of it is pretty negative. My question would be roughly this: How much of it is the system itself not giving you a good route, and how much is UPS riding your b*tt and making you follow it too closely?

The column I'm working on this month is going to look at a bunch of computing/software/analytics projects like computer chess tournaments, (somewhat) self-driving cars, and... well, I wanted to mention ORION. The general conclusion is that in many of these applications, the "smartest" decisions are made not by humans or computers alone, but by humans *using* computers -- for instance, in a recent run-what-you-brung wide-open world championship chess tournament, the winner was a team of non-master players using three strong computer programs, with the humans making the final decision as to each move.

There's a huge disconnect between what I read about ORION in press releases and in the media (Forbes, WSJ, tech mags, etc.), and what you guys are saying about how it works on the ground.

When I first got a GPS, the directions it gave were pretty bad, at times. Before that, things like MapQuest and Google Maps were also not very good. The problem that ORION is trying to solve is orders of magnitude more difficult, since you have packages that have to be picked up and dropped off (some by 10:30, some not, etc.), in addition to just mapping the route.

Does the system help at all? Is it something that could be useful if you had more flexibility to use your own judgment? Is the problem just too difficult to solve in software at this point, especially given real-world things that happen (car wrecks on your route, packages not there, having to run across a 4-lane highway to get to the destination, etc., etc.)?

There are sooooo many ways to give you how bad this system is. Hopefully there will be some good feedback on here

 

[brettskiee]

Your all wrong Orion is a Metallica song sillies

 

[toonertoo]

On some days it can be almost spot on, and do things differently that may save a mile or a half, than the way I would do it, but it seems to me as smart as it is it should recognize bulk. Bulk is the biggest problem on a tighter route that used to go 70, now goes 49........or so they want.

Since all the info, weight etc, and size when oversized, is in the bar code, it should recognize that you cannot crawl over a pile of 80 or so pkgs in the middle of your truck to get to an envelope at 4900.

You seem pretty knowledgable so here goes. Shelves are marked 1000-8000. Each shelf has two sections. They start passenger side top is 1000+5000, bottom passenger is 2000+ 6000. Driver side top is 3000+7000, and bottom driver is 4000+8000. The above picture is my truck today, and the stuff you see was my 84th and 85th stop. I assure you it was the same from the back door. This is from the front of my truck just inside the door, I could not even get in between the door and the packages. Yet it expected me to fight this load and deliver sections 5-6-7-8 before I attempted to deliver this bulk. And it would have been delivered after I picked them up, and after they closed. I think Orion was on crack today.

I was told by my Orion trainer, when I had bulk like this they would move work so I could walk through the truck, and/or they would have a utility driver meet me at the bulk stop with the work. That happened exactly once, the day he was with me.

Also there are other mistakes that could have easily been fixed, but the gypsy show moved on and now its up to me and others to deal with it. So we do. It is unsafe, and stupid to deliver businesses last. It is also impossible most days.

So I hope this info helps you in some small way. Maybe you will be the one to write an article that shows, the other side of this ingenius invention. Could it work...Yes, but it needed input from the people who do it, not from some guy with a pencil, and a phone, and a pc, who drew it up.

 

[ArcherUTR]

(PMJI, as an outsider doing some homework for a column I write on data analytics.) Does ORION help at all? Judging from the general discussion about ORION hereabouts, most of it is pretty negative. My question would be roughly this: How much of it is the system itself not giving you a good route, and how much is UPS riding your b*tt and making you follow it too closely?

The column I'm working on this month is going to look at a bunch of computing/software/analytics projects like computer chess tournaments, (somewhat) self-driving cars, and... well, I wanted to mention ORION. The general conclusion is that in many of these applications, the "smartest" decisions are made not by humans or computers alone, but by humans *using* computers -- for instance, in a recent run-what-you-brung wide-open world championship chess tournament, the winner was a team of non-master players using three strong computer programs, with the humans making the final decision as to each move.

There's a huge disconnect between what I read about ORION in press releases and in the media (Forbes, WSJ, tech mags, etc.), and what you guys are saying about how it works on the ground.

When I first got a GPS, the directions it gave were pretty bad, at times. Before that, things like MapQuest and Google Maps were also not very good. The problem that ORION is trying to solve is orders of magnitude more difficult, since you have packages that have to be picked up and dropped off (some by 10:30, some not, etc.), in addition to just mapping the route.

Does the system help at all? Is it something that could be useful if you had more flexibility to use your own judgment? Is the problem just too difficult to solve in software at this point, especially given real-world things that happen (car wrecks on your route, packages not there, having to run across a 4-lane highway to get to the destination, etc., etc.)?

When is you blog or article due? Because after a week of UPS I don't have the time or energy right now. I might be up for a phone conversation someday if you are interested.

As graduate with a Computer Science degree I am impressed with ORION, but it has many faults. The biggest problem though is the simpletons in the management chain that don't understand the intractability of the problem and how valuable their driver's on-area knowledge is in regards to speed and customer service. They just want to push fake results upstream to please people and be promoted.

So if UPS wants to spend a dollar to save a nickel in order to show shareholders some bull charts...fine pay me the triple time in excessive over-time penalty pay.