For anyone that doesn’t like the Ground Saver program but uses it (holding up hand) just buckle up and wear protective gear since this story showed up this morning on the SupplyChainDive website –
“UPS ramping up Ground Saver deliveries handled by USPS”
Included gems –
“UPS sent about 977,000 parcels a day to the U.S. Postal Service for last-mile delivery in Q1…”
“UPS aims to increase its Postal Service handoffs in Q2, with roughly 1.5 million packages per day…”
““We’ve offered that volume to the market so that we can focus on the premium side,” she said.”
One of the places my wife orders her clothes from use to use FedEx SmartPost. It was horrible as FedEx would take 7 to 10 days to get to the last mile USPS site which was over by Dallas. That meant the last mile was 400 miles and would take USPS 3 days after getting it to get to us.
This year that company switched to DHL eCommerce where DHL hands off to USPS for last mile. Her packages are trackable on both the DHL site and the USPS site all the way through. DHL gets it to USPS in 4 or 5 days and USPS gets it to us the next day (because DHL gives it to the USPS distribution center that is 27 miles away and the one that processes our incoming and outgoing mail). We have been impressed with this program.
We brought this up as it would be the standard of comparison that we would be using when evaluating how well the UPS Ground Saver program is working.
Not surprising when taken in the context of all of the other strategic changes UPS is making. Hub closures, layoffs, and other major cost adjustments.
The last mile delivery is too expensive with Teamsters at the wheel. They will retain the option of delivery the last mile themselves when it carries no incremental cost because a truck will be in the area.
Logistics is a well thought out discipline and is supported by lots of software. Little need for AI to generate any new numbers.
Update,
we have not had any irregular issues using UPS Ground Saver for Amazon and eBay in the past 4 months. We are starting to use UPS Ground Saver on our website orders when the buyer selects Standard Shipping.
We have not used it for Walmart orders because we never adjusted our shipping template to allow that particular label on Walmart. Walmart has a metric for purchasing the shipping method on the template.