Strategic Planning at United Parcel Service

Before the $42 billion company, Universal Parcel Services (UPS) grew into a worldwide name, it was started as a small messenger company in 1907 by two teenagers, Jim Casey and Claude Ryan in Seattle, Washington with just $ 100. Today The United Parcel Service (UPS) delivers more than 15 million packages a day to about 6.1 million customers in 200 countries around the world, making it the world’s largest package delivery company. UPS’ slogan “What can Brown do for you” emphasizes the company’s ability to provide services to almost anyone in the world on their door steps. With such a giant competitors like USPS, FedEx and DHL, UPS has had the opportunity to reinvent itself throughout the years and continues to lead the industry of logistics, supply chain management and e-commerce. However, reinventing continuously a 42.6 billion dollar corporation is obviously not an easy task. The company made these remarkable achievements by a continuous process of evolution and growth and worked upon the strategies made by the expert’s planning and designing a road map for them.
Strategy has never been taken lightly for UPS. Monthly meetings of teams specifically formed to forecast the future and predict decisions have always played a large role in UPS’s approach to low cost (efficient) management and differentiation through quality customer service. The combination of these approaches creates a business strategy emphasizing quality as reliability. In early 1990’s UPS faced an aggressive competition from the other fishes in the pool like Fed Ex and Deutsche Post. At that time senior management felt the need of a proper course of action to develop strategies to address the issues regarding management’s ability to foresee the critical changes taking place in the environment. This laid the foundation of scenario planning at UPS. The basic process was to analyze the upcoming