DC Velocity - October 2016

www.dcvelocity.com OCTOBER 2016 DC VELOCITY 39 to ride along with a UPS driver on his morning route in one of Boston’s southwestern suburbs. We witnessed the nitty-gritty of a driver’s day, the challenges he faces, and how technology has influenced every step of the process.

MORNING HAS BROKEN
Enter UPS’s Norwood, Mass., distribution center at
8 a.m. and you quickly realize that you missed a lot
of activity while you were downing that first cup of
coffee.

The day’s first tractor-trailers arrived around 2 a.m. and disgorged their stacks of packages onto webs of high-speed conveyors that crisscross the cavernous facility. The boxes fly past labeling stations, where adhesive stickers are applied to each one with a puff of pressurized air.

The pre-load function begins at 4 a.m., as workers prepare to begin loading the trucks. The company’s proprietary load-planning software generates a three-dimensional floor plan for every truck, showing workers where to stack each parcel. Done correctly, the boxes will be positioned in the exact sequence they’ll be delivered in, so the proper item is waiting at arm’s length as the driver pulls up to the next stop.

About 42,000 parcels move through the Norwood center during this overnight shift on a slow Wednesday in June. But volume can easily reach double that during peak periods, such as the winter holiday season. This particular DC also sees spikes in the summer when suburban homeowners order barbeque grills and patio furniture, and in the fall when students take up residence at the Boston area’s many colleges and universities.

UNLEASH THE ALGORITHMS

Even in the off-peak seasons, each driver delivers between 125 and 175 packages on his daily route, so experienced drivers will tell you that pre-load is critical. That’s where logistics technology makes its biggest impact on the process.

An overnight supervisor uses proprietary software
to calculate how many truck routes will be needed
to accommodate the day’s package count, to balance
driver workloads, and to arrange for enough drivers.

Big Brown keeps such a close eye on the bottom
line that managers see a column on their computer
screens that calculates the dollar impact every time
they change a route or reassign a package to a differ-
ent truck.

Once the loads are assigned, managers apply the routing software known as ORION. The acronym stands for “On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation,” but Mark Wallace, UPS’s senior vice president for global engineering and sustainability, calls it “MapQuest on steroids.” This proprietary application shaves precious minutes off every driver’s trip by calculating the shortest possible delivery route, even allowing for changes on the fly. The software is also what enables the carrier to offer enhanced services like flexible delivery times and, for those customers enrolled in its MyChoice program, the option to reroute their packages to a different delivery address or a “smart locker” location.

UPS launched ORION in 2013 and plans to deploy it to all 55,000 of its North American routes by the end of 2016. Ideally, the result will be a reduction in driving time, mileage, gas, and emissions. As UPS brass is fond of saying, “The greenest mile is the one you never drive.” In practice, some drivers complain that ORION fails to reflect real-time traffic and road conditions, with the result that they sometimes get stuck behind a school bus or funeral procession. UPS technology executives say the next release will address this by allowing real-time updates.