UPS Makes Delivery Operations More Sustainable with New Software

(3BL Media/Justmeans) – The new ORION software from United Parcel Service (UPS) is helping the company further its goal to make its delivery operations more sustainable. The company has maintained a focus on optimizing delivery routes, which has helped save several millions of gallons of gas over the years. The new software is designed to institutionalize that process of sustainability.

ORION, which stands for "On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation," will help UPS shave one mile off each driver’s daily route, and thereby save 1.5 million gallons of fuel this year alone. The software will optimize 10,000 delivery routes by the end of this year. The goal is to optimize 55,000 routes by 2017, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save the company $50 million annually in fuel costs. When the software is fully deployed, it will run tens of thousands of route optimizations per minute.

ORION combines customer shipping requirements with customized maps that guide UPS drivers to their destinations. It makes use of 250 million address data points in the process. Nearly 500 employees at UPS are working on this software. Future versions of the software will employ real time data that considers the traffic, weather and other variables for better efficiency.

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Vikas is a staff writer for the Sustainable Development news and editorial section on Justmeans. He is an MBA with 20 years of managerial and entrepreneurial experience and global travel. He is the author of "The Power of Money" (Scholars, 2003), a book that presents a revolutionary monetary economic theory on poverty alleviation in the developing world. Vikas is also the official writer for an international social project for developing nations "Decisions for Life" run in collaboration between the ILO, the University of Amsterdam and the Indian Institute of Management.