BrownCafe

One of the world’s largest parcel delivery services is redesigning its fulfillment processes to meet new challenges, inside and outside the warehouse.

Most of us know UPS from the brown trucks that deliver packages to our homes. One of the world’s largest parcel delivery services, UPS generated a total of $74 billion in revenue in 2019 and delivered more than 5.5 billion packages and documents. Perhaps less well-known is UPS’s Supply Chain Services, or SCS, a $13 billion division that handles everything from freight forwarding to e-commerce fulfillment services targeted at the small- to mid-sized (SMB) business community.

Matternet and UPS have expanded their ground-breaking hospital delivery network, adding North Carolina’s Wake Forest Baptist Health medical campus to their operations.

Matternet’s M2 drone system is enabling the new hospital delivery network, in collaboration with UPS Flight Forward (UPSFF).  “The service will use a hub-and-spoke routing model to provide rapid delivery of time-and temperature-sensitive medicines and supplies, including PPE for medical professionals treating COVID-19 patients,” says a Matternet press release.

While the novel coronavirus pandemic took a toll on the transportation sector, it actually boosted the e-commerce market. United Parcel Service is entrenched in both of those sectors. As a result, UPS stock has faced both headwinds and tailwinds during the first half of 2020.

Not everyone thinks of UPS as an e-commerce stock, but that’s a key component of the company’s business model now. Some folks just think of it as a dividend stock, and that’s fine. After all, UPS offers a forward annual dividend yield of 3.53%, which is nothing to sneeze at.

UPS delivery: We’ll take your address and your location data

Signing for a delivery: it’s the last step in the process, but it can be inconvenient for the logistics company and customer. The customer needs to schedule their day around a time window when the package might arrive so they can sign for it. And if the customer isn’t home, the delivery company has to make multiple trips. “This represents an inefficient use of carrier resources,” UPS wrote in a patent application published this week.

UPS already offers a couple of solutions to this problem, which include having parcels forwarded to a different location where someone can sign on the receiver’s behalf or sending the package to a UPS customer center. But the logistics company outlines another solution in its patent application that can allow customers to provide the location of their vehicle or another place where the package can be delivered. It all hinges on consumers sharing quite a lot of information.