Every year, parcel delivery companies – think UPS and FedEx – hire tens of thousands of seasonal driver helpers to handle the deluge of presents that arrive with the holidays. At peak times, shipping firms depend on their helpers just as much as Santa depends on his elves. And those companies could save millions of dollars each year – and shave time off their deliveries – simply by tweaking the roles they gave those workers to be more efficient, my colleagues and I recently found.
As a a professor of supply chain management, I’m interested in how shipping companies can reach complex logistical goals. And there are few goals more challenging than getting 90 million parcels to their destinations every day, which was the industrywide average during the 2022 U.S. holiday season.
