UPS's New Machine-Learning App Aims To Reroute Packages Away From Snow and Other Trouble Spots in its Global Network

If a snowstorm hits Denver, it can delay thousands of packages that travel through the city before reaching their final destinations on the other side of the country. But if UPS knows a storm is coming, what is the most efficient way to divert all those online orders and holiday gifts around the bad weather? UPS grapples with this question every winter. From a report: To help, UPS recently built an online platform that combines machine learning and advanced analytics. The app -- called Network Planning Tools, or NPT for short -- lets the company's engineers view activity at UPS facilities around the world and route shipments to the ones with the most capacity. They can also see details about the packages in transit, including their weight, volume, and delivery deadlines. While UPS already has a system called ORION that maps out last-mile delivery routes, and a program called EDGE focused on upgrading UPS facilities, NPT gives its engineers a bird's-eye view of package volume and distribution across all its pickup and delivery operations.

The app gets some of its smarts from AI, which it uses to create forecasts about package volume and weight based on analysis of historical data. Rob Papetti, who leads NPT development for UPS, says the machine-learning algorithms also analyze decisions the company's engineers made and assess how they affected customer satisfaction and internal costs. '[The app] starts to learn from itself and suggest this option versus that option, based on what enabled us to give our customers better service,' he says.

That kind of insight is crucial during the frenetic holiday season. This year, UPS expects to deliver more parcels during that period than ever before --nearly 800 million, up 5% from 2017. In preparation, the company has used the NPT app to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, such as an Illinois facility that was struggling to process packages quickly. 'Within a few minutes, we were able to determine how to get around and relieve [the backlog in] that building and still make our service commitments to customers,' says Papetti. 'Before NPT, that would have taken at least a week.' UPS expects the program to save it $100 million to $200 million a year.

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