On Monday, December 22, UPS delivered 34 million packages, the largest number of deliveries on a single day in the company’s history. UPS invested about $2.5 billion this year to avoid repeating its disastrous month in December 2013, when many holiday gift shipments were delivered after Christmas. Much of this $2.5 billion went toward a new package sorting system that allows anyone, with minimal training, to properly direct a package to the correct location.
The Wall St. Journal wrote a report about this new sorting system and UPS’ holiday season strategy, stating that:
At the Atlanta hub, the new technology means UPS can get away with hiring about the same number of temporary workers—1,000—as it did for the 2013 holiday season, to supplement 2,000 permanent workers, even though they will be processing more packages.
UPS had already rolled out a similar small-package sorting technology to a number of locations in the U.S., something that has helped improve small-package processing efficiency by about 25%, UPS says.
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