Ups Communication

When you are the world’s largest package delivery company, the way you communicate can determine the well-being of your success. Companies must have good communication skills to be successful. Two of the main people companies should be able to communicate with are their employees and their customers. Ups does a great job of communicating with both of these because they have learned how to by developing their technology to make information much easier for the people to get. This is not something that you can just do over night. Since Ups has been in business for over 95 years, they have learned what it is people want and how to provide them with what they need in the simplest manner. Doing this is what is keeping them ahead of the competition

year in and year out.
Ups delivers millions of packages a day.

This seems nearly impossible but when a company is well organized and has excellent communication throughout the company, it makes shipping these packages a lot more simple. On a regular basis UPS has communication meetings between operation managers, and first line employees (Soupata, 2005, p. 97). Other than these meetings, employees communicates mainly through a communication channel called, UPSers.com. This allows employees to stay up to date on things going on throughout the company and allows easy access to contact information for the person of interest. They can also use UPSers.com to check the benefits the company provides for them.

“UPSers.com includes links to the medical, dental, vision, and prescription carriers, as well as other benefit providers for U.S. employees. It also includes links to the administrator for the UPS Savings Advantage (401(k) plan) and the Discounted Employee Stock Purchase Plan. There is also a site where employees can view executive speech sum-maries and biographies to better understand who the UPS leaders are and what they are saying to the public about the business (Soupata, 2005,

p.97).”

Another way communication is a main factor is with the employees that actually transport the packages from place to place.

The company uses a distribution system called the hub-and-spoke structure (Rodrigue, 2007). This process starts by them first collecting all of the packages through drivers assigned to specific routes. They have people who monitor traffic and road conditions so they can keep transportation time as low as possible. This first step usually consist of state to state travel. This is so specific states can get dropped off at the nearest hub so they can start to undergo the second part of the process. The start of the next step is the packages get unloaded and then sent up to the sort aisle to be sorted to the corresponding belt. This process usually happens quite fast because the unloaders and sorters have to move at 1,200 packages per hour. After the sorters send the packages to the corresponding belt, they are then sent to be loaded on a truck. Not all packages are sorted correctly so when the loaders get a miss sort they put it on a belt that sends it back to the sorters to be resorted. Once the truck is full it is then sent off for the last step of the process. The last step off the process is the dropping off of packages at its proper location. This process seems quite simple but it took lots of planning among upper level employees to get this system to

work.
After Ups implemented Track my package it changed the game. This allowed people around the world to follow their package step by step to its destination. It is not just provided for the person receiving the package but the person shipping it too. This Web tracking informs you of the estimated delivery date as well as the different distribution centers its stops by on the way to your home. Another benefit it offers is that it makes it easy to reschedule a delivery or you can even tell them to hold the package at the nearest Ups location. Customers have been using this ever since they found out it was a thing. It is so popular that the ups website in 2007 received an average of 18.5 million request to track their package a day (Rodrigue, 2007). This not only makes life easy for customers but decreases the stress of employees. This is because they do not have to worry about customers always calling them asking where their packages are. With 15.6 million packages be transported daily, it is surprising that it is that easy to use. All you do is put your tracking number in the website and then it will show you the breakdown n of where your package has already been and when it will eventually arrive at its destination.
E-commerce is the newest strategy Ups has started using. This happened in 1994 when they realized that customers were starting to use their services more than companies. As stated by Mitchell Levy, “They were the bridge between the physical and electronic world”. This was because ups was the main package company shipping packages that were ordered online by customer and delivering them to their door step. Ups started right away on increasing their technology because they knew it would play a key role in helping out customers. Plus, they needed to keep up with the data of the millions of packages being shipped daily. They were open to help the new B2C, Business to consumer, Companies who relied so heavily on them to ship their product.
“UPS also offered a set of transportation APIs called the UPS OnLine Tools that allow businesses to integrate tracking, rating, address validation, and a number of other valuable functions into their Web site. Now, through their eLogistics service, small B2C companies (as well as large companies) can have their own virtual logistics department hosted at UPS (Levy, 2001).”
Ups has done so much for the world over the 95 years it has been in business. The two most important things to ups are it employees and the customers it tries to satisfy every day. They have continued to improve their technology and services to keep their customers satisfied and loyal to their service. Without the help of ups the world would not be the same and for that we all say thank you.