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| On this Very Day |
September 13, 2003 |
By Jason Rodham
Paul Merrick is remarkably calm and well composed for a man who must ensure 130,000 packages are picked up and delivered to their intended destination today. As general manager of Purolator Courier Ltd.’s British Columbia and Northern Alberta operation, he’s a critical component in a business that fuses advanced technology, physical transport and human ingenuity with good old-fashioned elbow grease.
One of the chief cogs in the industry’s unending delivery cycle, Merrick works up to 13 hours a day, spends close to three months a year on the road and manages a workforce of about 1,600 people. One of his chief responsibilities is to preside over a unique and compelling junction in the information economy—Purolator’s western Canadian hub facility, conveniently located on the apron of the Vancouver International Airport.
A typical day for Merrick begins at 5:30 a.m. with a national teleconference that reviews the previous day’s activities and goes over any outstanding quality issues.
By 8 a.m. “the real day begins” and the hub is a hive of activity as dozens of couriers load trucks and prepare for the day’s first deliveries.
In the blink of an eye they’re gone and the facility is quietly reloaded for the next well-ordered rush. “There were times early on where I had difficulty with the pace,” the 16-year veteran of the company notes. “Now I couldn’t imagine working somewhere without that pace.”
THE RULE OF TECHNOLOGY AND OF PROCESS
Increasingly, it’s technology that rules the bleary-eyed schedule of both Merrick and the courier industry.
Certainly there are few businesses anywhere in the world that rely so heavily on technology and use it to squeeze more out of existing processes.
Over at UPS, which handles 13.6 million deliveries worldwide per day, “every incremental gain results in significant cost savings to the organization,” said Ramsey Mansour, UPS’s director of global electronic commerce. It’s no wonder UPS has spent US$15 billion on technology in the last 15 years.
It wasn’t too long ago, though, that the courier industry was governed by voice technology and radio dispatch, said David McRonald, operations support analyst with FedEx Canada. “Back in the beginning, of course, we had to schedule pickups a day in advance.”
Now the business is more immediate; most customers create shipments directly from their desktops and follow packages online as they travel through the delivery network—what’s known in industry jargon as “track and trace.” At Purolator alone three quarters of daily tracking requests come through the Web, taking a huge load off call centres.
The best symbol of the industry’s well-honed processes at work is those robust and ubiquitous scanners carried by modern couriers. They’re the key ingredient in the track-and-trace dynamic and every supplier is racing toward the ultimate solution.
And each—coincidently—touts its system as the very best.
Purolator has 150 of these new handheld units at its B.C. hub facility, and Merrick is clearly proud of their capabilities.
At $2,500 a piece, plus $400 for two-way communications upgrades, they represent a major investment in both process improvement and customer satisfaction.
The handsets run over an advanced new General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network from Rogers AT&T.
The network enables Purolator to update its system every few minutes, giving the company and the customer near realtime visibility.
Purolator couriers apparently enjoy the system so much they often scan a package and suggest customers go back to their desks to check the order status.
By the time the customer has opened a browser and entered the tracking number on the Web site, the pickup has usually been recorded.
Purolator goes so far as to claim its own GPRS handset deployment has actually helped drive the evolution of Rogers AT&T’s wireless network. The huge volume of data it pushes over the network has enabled the telecom carrier to accelerate its infrastructure roll out.
With breakneck speed, the whole courier industry will be “accelerating the flow of information, the flow of goods… and the flow of funds,” said UPS’s Mansour.
Tomorrow’s goal is to give both the customer and the courier total knowledge of a package—not just where it is, but what’s inside and what the contents might be used for. “We certainly [believe] the information that follows that package is as important as the package itself,” Mansour said.
Another challenge is to make this information ubiquitous across multiple technical platforms such as wireless devices or different computer applications.
Mansour said that in the past the delivery industry set a single viewing standard and asked its customers to adhere to that standard. The trend now is to allow customers to work in whatever standard they select. For Mansour, that means “taking that same information and knowledge and making it such that it’s convenient to the customer and not just (ourselves).”
OBSOLETE IN THE NEW ORDER?
Despite all its cool technology and highly refined processes, good old-fashioned sweat equity still remains at the centre of the courier business.
A senior sorter at Purolator’s Vancouver hub, for example, stands at a huge conveyor belt vaguely reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. In a single hour this individual will process between 1,200 and 1,800 packages.
New technical solutions might be coming on-stream all the time, however Merrick suspects it will be many years before large parts of his world are totally automated. Enabling technologies, he said, must be cheap enough and tough enough to work in the crucible of the hub.
Until then, it will still be people who do a lot of the grunt work. Merrick recently moved into a new house, but didn’t plan on the extra time it would take to keep up with the yard. Still, he only seems to lose composure when he talks about the strain gardening has placed on his tightly compartmentalized schedule.
“Mess with me,” he said. “Don’t mess with my routine.”
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