Question

how has UPS Implemented supply chain management concepts to gain competitive advantage?

Answer 1

How has UPS Implemented supply chain management concepts to gain competitive advantage?

Answer: UPS is mainly dose business in logistics with various kind of services. They are working with advanced technology, method, process and other resources. They are biggest market player in their field as per the data available.

Yes, they are gaining competitive advantage as they have improved in process of logistics to just fulfill the costumer requirement and purpose. They are giving all logistics solutions with quick responses and qualitative, quantitative and timely deliveries. The sub areas are like Data processing, Automated shipping by linking order entry to fulfillment process, less billing and shipping time, automatic delivery alerts etc. Below are the main factors for UPS to gain competitive advantage,

• Costumer focus: They consider costumer wants and needs when making business decisions. UPS thought process is “How we can contribute for win of our costumer”. “What should we do to fulfill their all requirement together?” UPS has worked on all are requirements of costumer and upgraded their services to best fit on requirements. Unlikely, other competitors were only focusing on the main business as logistics (only deliveries), UPS started to work with 'just in time' responses, fast billing, staff developments, value stream mapping etc. They are taking frequent and actionable feedback from costumers on how we’re doing. They are ensuring tailors our offerings to meet the needs of customers.
• High Performance culture: They worked and even working on the High performance culture which includes Operational discipline, supportive leadership, role clarity, Talent development, rewards and recognitions to employees, capturing external ideas, Bottom-up-innovations, inventions. Ultimate plan to have this organizational culture is to win costumer and win business. With this culture, they were able to identify the market demand, market trends, and improvement areas. The proven things are that they are having complete solutions for logistics for variety of materials and for numerous demand of costumer. As per their records, they rarely failed to solve the delivery issue.
• There values (Diversity and Inclusion): They are also supporting the disaster relief effort which is creating the value for Corporate Social responsibility (CSR). This is giving them Provisional competitive advantages.
• Strategic clarity: Their understating for costumer’s “Plan-to-win” has played an important role. Their strategy to frame themselves in costumer plan gave them the best competitive advantage. They were very clear on goals and milestones which they have to achieve as team.
• Supportive Leadership: They have this with-in company and keeping motivated employees for innovation and inventions.
• Supportive environment: They have established a supportive environment for business partners and vendors. They have given their philosophy to vendors to align them with their (UPS) strategies.

With the above points, below are key implementation they performed in supply chain management:

1. They have atomized the process to reduce the chances of errors. They have implemented many software to do so. They are also having CRM (Customer relationship management) software to keep records of costumers, opportunities, complaints, feedbacks, inventory and billing. They have implemented this when the CRM concept was new for logistics business. It was very easy for them to handle repeated customers.
2. Empowered costumers: They empowered costumer to track the goods with small movement also.
3. Reliable packaging: They have given many customized solutions for the products which are difficult to travel for long distance.
4. Value for service: They have optimized service cost to benefit the costumer. They added many factor like travel time (apart from distance), way of transportation, packaging quality, discounts on large shipments.
5. Less lead time to solve complaints
6. Always worked on how the lead time can be reduced for shipment.
7. Opened branches on many locations with warehouse facilities (rented)