vol. XVII no. 2

				Page 1 2 3 United Parcel Service turned 97 in August, and it was a happy birthday indeed. As the world's largest package delivery company and a global leader in supply chain services, UPS today ranks fourth among Fortune 500 companies in terms of number of employees: 355,000 strong. It delivers more than 13.6 million packages and documents daily with a delivery fleet of 88,000 vehicles and 574 airplanes. Recent expansions into new lines of business that complement its global package delivery operations are helping drive revenues for the company in excess of $33.5 billion in 2003 alone. For the sixth year running, UPS has been rated the world's most admired company in its industry in the annual FORTUNE magazine survey of 10,000 senior executives, directors and securities analysts. Of the attributes ranked in that survey, UPS received high marks for the quality of management, financial soundness, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, quality of products and services, employee talent and innovation. According to Chairman and CEO Michael L. Eskew, innovation is one of the most important things going for UPS. "It's a part of our DNA," he says. "We were forced to be innovative from the start." CUSTOMER CENTRIC SOLUTIONS A quick look at the company's history reveals the truth of Eskew's statement. UPS started in 1907 as a messenger company. When that venture was threatened by the telegraph and then the telephone, the company retooled itself as a package delivery service transporting goods from stores to shoppers' homes. By 1975, UPS became the first package delivery company to serve every address in the continental United States. When the air industry deregulated, UPS spread its wings and established next-day air service, soon launching the first intercontinental air service between the United States and Europe. Technology brought its own innovations to Brown as UPS moved beyond the delivery of small packages to take on end-to-end, global supply chain solutions. As UPS has gone about reinventing and retooling itself, worldwide consumers have become familiar with the "What can Brown do for you?" slogan. "People hear the Brown in that message," Eskew says, "but what they don't notice is the do." The doing is wrapped around customer needs. "Our customers drive innovation at UPS," Eskew says. "As their trusted broker and partner, we have asked those customers to challenge us to find new solutions that we don't have today. We try to anticipate what they want even before they know it. And we use innovation to find solutions that we didn't realize even existed." One result of this close working partnership is a program UPS created in response to customer requests called Service Parts Logistics. Companies came to UPS with a logistical headache: They were spending too much time shipping the replacement parts that keep global commerce humming. Typically, they were relying on four or five different contractors throughout the United States, Europe and Asia to facilitate the process of getting the parts from the point of origin to the warehouse and back again. And when something slowed delivery, each contractor blamed another for the problem. Top | Next Page

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