Ups Case

Halil KELEŞ / 115973-0

EMBA 5204 Case Project

United Parcel Service (A)

Case Summary

With the changes in the technology and due to new competitors in the market, there is a common acceptance of a required drastic change in the organization of UPS within the upper managements. According to the case, there was a hot debate happened between the top management members.

They need to make their Information System department stronger by recruiting new employees or gathering them from the internal resources by providing necessary trainings.

To improve the IT services in the company, some critical decisions should be taken. These decisions can cause impacts on the working environment of UPS and its traditional working culture. Because UPS is one of the oldest company in the logistic service sector and also UPS has some specific organizational implementations and differs from the other company very much in this sense.

First of all, UPS has a different compensation plan, which aims to decrease the turnover and has some incentives that increase employee engagement. There is equal pay across departments, management salaries are low and to discourage the turn over, it is providing a long-term bonus plan based upon annual stock grants. The company is distributing dividends as well.

UPS employees are mostly generalist who know everything about UPS' business and Being generalist is expected from the employees by the company. Joe Moderrow told his opinion in this way as he had done many different duties until he reached his managerial position. For instance, He started as a part-time clerk and now he is in corporate counsel. But it should be understood that in UPS, specialization is not so much welcomed, because of the company structure. This is an important problem, the necessary people for IS are highly specialized due to nature of the profession and they have spent many years to become specialist and it is not certain that new comers will accept becoming generalists.

Apart from these changes in the market and technology, UPS has a very long history full of with innovations. It was established in 1907 which tried to serve for the delivery of the notes, hand-baggae, even trays of food by collecting the request using telephone calls. The milestones of important innovations can be seen below;

-In "1907, company was established

-In 1913, UPS acquired its first delivery car which is Model T Ford.

-In 1919 Labor union was invited to established its organization in the company.