At UPS, Left Isn't Right

Watch a UPS truck make its way through a neighborhood and see if it makes a left turn. If it does, you will have witnessed something unusual.

The company plans its loop-shaped delivery routes in a way that minimizes left turns. Left turns use more fuel than right turns because the driver has to wait for oncoming traffic to pass.

"They work the right side of that truck all the way around that circle to where they started," said Heather Robinson, a UPS spokeswoman in Atlanta. "Unfortunately, it's hard to quantify (the fuel savings), but we are shaving millions of miles off the routes driven by our drivers."

The planning starts before drivers like Arnone get in their trucks. And a lot of that planning takes place in sprawling UPS centers like the one off Front Street in Yorktown Heights during the early hours of the morning.

Drivers wearing their brown outfits - or in the parlance of the company "browned up" - begin arriving while other workers use hand-held devices to scan the label on each package scheduled for delivery that day. That produces a second label that tells the worker the truck that will deliver the package. The second label also tells the worker the shelf in that truck where the package should be placed.

The scanning also produces the electronic manifest that drivers have on their hand-held computers, which are called Delivery Information Acquisition Devices, or DIADs. The driver scans each package with the device before handing the package to the recipient or dropping it at the door.

If Arnone is supposed to deliver, let's say, three packages to a certain business or residence and scans only two, the device will send a signal that there's still another package on the truck for that recipient.

If he parks his truck near a certain address and scans a package that's supposed to go to another address, the global positioning system in the computer will alert him that he's making a mistake.

Economizing drivers' time means the company does not need as many drivers on the road. The system reduces the number of truck trips out of the Yorktown Heights center by about three.

"Multiply that by the entire continental United States, and that's an incredible amount of fuel they're saving," Arnone said.

Just after workers finish plucking packages off moving belts and placing them in trucks inside the cavernous United Parcel Service Inc. distribution center in Yorktown Heights, a supervisor tells driver Chris Arnone to "Get Edd."

Arnone grabs his hand-held computer, which runs off software called "enhanced DIAD download," and looks at the list of stops he will make on his route in Bedford on this day, once he pulls out in a familiar brown box truck.

The small screen also tells Arnone, a 12-year UPS veteran, how many packages he has to deliver on each stop and where each package is located on his truck. The packages he'll deliver at the start of his route are on the shelves toward the back of the truck.

By making it easier for drivers to locate packages and bring them to the right addresses, the company reduces the chances of a driver's leaving a package at the wrong door or missing a delivery and having to double back to the home or business. Those kinds of missteps cost the company fuel.

UPS, the world's largest package carrier, saves millions of dollars a year in fuel costs with sage route planning, cutting-edge technology, alternative fuels and common-sense conservation. In an era when gasoline and diesel prices are always just a supply disruption away from shooting up to $3 and beyond, the company that asks, "What can brown do for you?" also spends a lot of time asking, "What can green do for our bottom line?"

Source: The Journal News