Supply Chain Briefing

October 21, 2018

Recently, I went on a tour of UPS’s Ontario hub with the Inland Empire Economic Partnership‘s Regional Leadership Academy.  It was a blast seeing their 2nd largest hub!  The numbers are staggering as to the impact of e-commerce and therefore the holiday season peak.  One supervisor said he went from a daily throughput of 4 planes a day to 26 or 32 (now I forgot which but either is a massive difference!) during peak season.  Now that’s seasonality!   

UPS Ontario has a great retention rate.  If you add that with the HUGE seasonality peak, you know people must like working there!  Interesting how it always seems to go back to people, similar to our thinking with our original brand and newsletter, Profit through People!  

UPS handles 299 million packages per year!  The average package is handled 5.6 times, and here’s a shocking statistic: if you can save a tenth of a package handle, it is $25 million in savings.  That certainly puts efficiency gains in a new light! 

What Should We Consider and/or What Impacts Could Arise?

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that again and again, our most successful clients and the most successful and profitable companies put their attention on people.  Have you thought about your people lately?  Would they stay if the competition offered them a raise?  Remember, people leave people; not companies and so if you are in the same salary range, you better start thinking more about your people.  If you aren’t in the ballpark, you better start paying attention to your marketplace. 

For the peak season, UPS has to hire a HUGE amount of temps and ensure efficiencies aren’t harmed in the process, given the serious impact to the bottom line.  If that situation doesn’t require resiliency, I don’t know what does!  It is quite similar to one of our clients, QC Manufacturing/ Quietcool.  They have a HUGE summer season, and I’ve always thought their success can be traced back to their attention to people and innovation.    

To learn more about creating a resilient team as well as the rest of your end-to-end supply chain, we are thrilled to introduce our new series, The Resilient Supply Chain: Navigating Disruption.  Achieving Peak Performance

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