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Boosted by an unexpectedly strong end to a tumultuous year, United Parcel Service Inc Chief Executive Carol Tomé is making defensive moves to keep Amazon.com Inc, regional delivery companies and other rivals from stealing customers.

Tomé, the first outsider to lead the 114-year-old company, plans to personalize customer pricing and modernize systems like billing and claims to make it easier for customers to do business with the world’s largest parcel delivery firm.

“Every morning I wake up looking around corners to see who is trying to get a piece of our pie,” Tomé said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

For a little more than 15 years, UPS attempted to shoehorn a less-than-truckload segment into its parcel delivery monolith.

Last week, the CCJ Top 250 No. 1 carrier announced the end of the experiment and the sale of its UPS Freight business to TFI International (CCJ Top 250, No. 8) for $800 million – about $400 million less than UPS paid in 2005 for Overnite Transportation, the acquisition that gave rise to the division.

While UPS at the time lauded its new subsidiary for its “extensive transportation network, a strong focus on operational efficiency and flexibility,” the parent company’s inability to leverage that efficiency and flexibility was ultimately its undoing, said Donald Broughton, Principal and Managing Partner at Broughton Capital.

“Every single transportation company has one thing in common and that is their biggest expense as a percentage of sales is labor,” he said. “When UPS acquired the old Overnite, they believed they could run it as a non-union silo and [unionized labor] has been a sticking point since the moment they bought it.”

In June last year Carol Tomé took reins at UPS, one of the world’s largest logistics companies, as its chief executive officer. Seven months later and two successful quarters behind, all in the midst of a global pandemic, UPS, under Tome, is only getting better.

Consolidated revenue in the Q4 of 2020 rose 21 percent from last year to $24.9 billion and operating profit grew 26 percent from last year to $2.9 billion. This is the highest quarterly operating profit in the history of UPS with record profit produced in each segment. For the year, UPS generated record revenue of $84.6 billion with growth in all three segments. It had its operating profit increase by 7 per cent to $8.7 billion and generated diluted earnings per share of $8.23, an increase of 9.3 per cent.

It has allocated $4 billion for capital investment for 2021. About 50 per cent of that is for growth that includes investment in its healthcare logistics broadly besides specific capacity building for Covid-19 vaccine distribution. For the Covid-19 vaccine roll out, the company built command centres and invested in setting up two large freezer farms, one in Kentucky and another in the Netherlands. It introduced a new technology, called PS Premiere, a label that is put on the package which allows it to be tracked along the supply chain.

Imagine ripping out the dashboard of your 20-year-old minivan and replacing it with the high-tech controls from a Tesla.

That’s pretty much what United Parcel Service Inc. is doing to squeeze two more decades of life from dozens of aging Airbus SE freighters by revamping their cockpit computers. It’s all part of new Chief Executive Officer Carol Tome’s strategy to “sweat the assets” by increasing efficiency while reducing investment.

The 52 Airbus A300-600 jets were purchased beginning in 2000 and the flight computer has such limited memory that it can’t store full navigational maps, forcing UPS to divide the U.S. into five regions to hold the information. Each update takes 45 minutes and has to be done each time a plan needs to fly to a different area.

Residents of Goldthwaite are mourning after COVID-19 claimed the life of beloved UPS deliveryman Bobby Suniga, whom, it seems, just about everyone in the small Mills County town knew.

Residents on his delivery route remember him for going above and beyond, and Suniga was just as popular with the town’s dogs.

“He would drive up every day and our dogs would get so excited,” said Lindsay Bellow.

“Bobby always had a treat for all the dogs.”