UPS yesterday announced that it expects to hire between 90,000 and 95,000 seasonal employees to support the anticipated e-commerce-driven increase in package volume that will begin in November and continue in the run-up to the holiday season.
It recruited a similar number of temporary workers for last year’s peak period.
“We have initial volume forecasts from our customers and are starting the hiring process for our temporary holiday season jobs,” said Myron Gray, President of UPS' US Operations. “We have needs for various positions on all shifts at UPS locations throughout the United States.”
The full and part-time seasonal positions primarily concern package handlers, drivers and driver-helpers.
As CEP Research reported earlier this year, UPS is planning a wide-ranging package of revenue and cost measures to ensure a successful peak season in 2015 after two years of misjudging demand.
Looking back at the 2014 lessons, CEO David Abney emphasised: “It was important to fortify the trust of customers and protect our brand. From that perspective it was successful.”
UPS claimed it had achieved high service levels in the late November-late December peak season despite the continued volume growth and emergence of new ‘spikes’ in demand, such as the long weekend covering Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But he admitted that UPS “erred on the side of caution” last year and built an operating plan for peak season “that would provide superior service if volume levels exceeded expectations, contributing to higher than expected costs.”
Outlining plans to increase revenues and reduce costs at this year’s peak season, Abney said the company would invest in technology and capabilities to tackle costs and launch revenue initiatives to improve yields and profits.
On the cost side, these would include ‘tighter dispatch’ and reduced overtime, while expansion of permanent hubs would reduce the need for temporary sorting facilities. Third-party transportation costs, which soared by 65 per cent in Q4, 2014, would be reduced and the rollout of the ORION software would be accelerated.
On the revenue side, UPS plans to introduce peak season surcharges on B2C shippers for residential deliveries, including via SurePost, “on a customer segmented basis.”
In addition, the ‘control tower’ system introduced last year to monitor capacity use, will again provide capacity management during peak season 2015 but will also be used more for revenue and yield management, Abney explained.
UPS has also said that this year it would not contract external transportation capacity so early and would take on fewer additional drivers to avoid some of the high costs of last year.
Over 70% of drivers would be using ORION by the end of 2015 to help reduce operating costs with more efficient routes and UPS would expand use of its new consolidated B2C delivery service as well as Access Points in the US.
