A recent article in Sweden’s leading daily; Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish); turned me onto this rather amusing (and ingenious I might add) supply chain story. As I dug into the story, I realized that it had been floating around for quite some time, but it’s still worth highlighting.
In 2007, UPS drivers saved 11 million liters (that’s about 3 million gallons for those of you who are uncomfortable with the metric system) of fuel by favoring right turns during their routes. Now, the turning right philosophy has been leading UPS for years, but recently they’ve developed new software to guide drivers; and recent reports for 2007 actually prove them right.
Commenting the amount of right turns a UPS driver makes in an ABC interview, industrial engineering manager Tasha Hovland at UPS is quoted saying: »A guesstimate, I would probably say 90 percent. I mean we really hate left turns at UPS«.
Now for all of the other drivers on the roads this might seem rather strange but planning the routes and avoiding left turns have cut route distance by 48 million kilometers (UPS estimates that this corresponds to 1000 less trucks necessary on the road); and at the same time idling has been minimized (especially in some US states where right turns on red are allowed). Accident risks are also lower, and carbon emissions are reduced.
High tech, low tech, call it what you will; it’s efficient and it’s saving fuel. For a company where fuel costs are 6 percent of their turnover, it proves that even the simplest innovations can become success factors. And to keep that chunk of cost down, this Monday UPS announced that they had placed the largest commercial order so far on hybrid electric vehicles.
