Can eliminating left-hand turns in your delivery routes save you serious money? UPS reports that eliminating the time-consuming left-hand turn for its 95,000 delivery vehicles has reduced fuel consumption by roughly 3 million gallons per year--not to mention the saving in driver time waiting for traffic to clear.
UPS is using a package flow optimization technology which, among other efficiency enhancing processes such as packing and sorting shipments and mapping out driver routes, dramatically reduces the number of left-hand turns drivers need to make across traffic.
No word on whether the software is yet available to other fleet operators, but I am sure that UPS would be willing to speak to other fleets about licensing the software, which they have done in the past with other technologies they have developed or purchased.
Interesting.
How did UPS determine they are saving 3 million gallons per year by eliminating left-hand turns?
What if a left-hand turn is the shortest direction to a customer?
Whats more interesting is if there is any impact on reducing accidents?
Can you get a UPS engineer to elaborate on this?
Posted by: jmobley | December 20, 2007 at 05:07 PM
UPS is big on Industrial Engineering, and I once visited a UPS facility, they mentioned at all their software is built in house, I think they have a facility in the DC/Virginia area that works only on Operations Research and Data Mining Algorithms!
Posted by: Raghav Rao | December 22, 2007 at 11:05 PM