Have you heard of the Orion System, what do you know?

[soberups]

...He told me that as of next week, the building would have 50% of the trips on ORION. At least in this division/district, that is the tipping point when the 85% compliance comes into play...

When I think of the term "tipping point"....I picture an old and decripit building that is leaning heavily and on the verge of falling over. All you have to do is to pull away one of the 2x4 braces that are propping it up, and the whole rotten structure just collapses in on itself. Seems like a fitting analogy for ORION.

 

['Lord Brown's bidding']

In my opinion it is unprofessional to solicit complaints to the 1-800 number or to actively encourage customers to seek refunds.

A better choice when dealing with an irate customer is to simply give them your center manager's phone number, prefaced by a statement to the effect that "we are experimenting with a new dispatch system and trying to work out the issues. Here is the name and number of the person in charge who will resolve this issue for you." Its polite, professional, direct and to the point, and you as the driver are not bad-mouthing the company you work for. You are also helping that customer to avoid wasting time on hold dealing with a useless 800 number. And, you are forcing your management team to personally speak with the customers they are screwing over instead of just continuing to hide behind a desk and a stack of compliance reports.

Remember that, in the first phase of ORION at least, your management team is going to be blindly chasing that compliance number to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. They arent going to give a rats ass about losing volume or complaints called in to the 800 number. Failing to generate the compliance number makes them look bad on the report; missed stops, missed pickups and late air make them look worse on the report. Giving them 100% compliance while shoving the resulting service failures down their throat is probably the only way you will be able to force them to back off and let you get your job done.

It is not bad-mouthing UPS reminding customers they can ask for a refund, that's good customer service. That is something UPS provides, just many aren't aware of it. Hit them in the pocket and that can effect change as well, but from way high up. I don't necessarily want my center manager to have to choose between his job and making my life more sane by not forcing compliance on me, I want those way high up with some skin in this game, too, and that would be their money.

Oh, and I don't tell people to call the 1-800 number; [email protected] is more effective.

 

[soberups]

When you're lost in the dark
And there's no place to park
Call ORION


You just shut off your mind
And get further behind
On ORION

When your boss throws a fit
'Cause your route's turned to sh##
Thank ORION!

Wer'e all filing 9.5's
To escape with our lives
From ORION

 

[soberups]

"Musn't break trace to pee"
Says some dunce from I.E.
Thats ORION

Breaking trace to go poop
Will screw up your whole loop
On ORION

 

['Lord Brown's bidding']

First the good news: every time I am able to snag an I.E. person wandering the building here they all say that at this time there are no plans to implement ORION at this location. So that's nice, I suppose.....

Orion scares me. I cannot look somebody in the eye and just tell them to deal with the bad service, or better still, go use FedEx. I cannot wrap my mind around the concept of not walking across the street to deliver a stop from the one ORION just had me deliver to, simply because it-that-does=not=have-eyes-or-common sense didn't say I could. I am not, nor ever will be a dumb truck driver; I can be subordinate, but I can't play stupid; I hate lying.

Maybe I should go back to the air hub. $40,000 paycut vs my sanity, dignity, self-respect......

 

[serenity now]

First the good news: every time I am able to snag an I.E. person wandering the building here they all say that at this time there are no plans to implement ORION at this location. So that's nice, I suppose.....

Orion scares me. I cannot look somebody in the eye and just tell them to deal with the bad service, or better still, go use FedEx. I cannot wrap my mind around the concept of not walking across the street to deliver a stop from the one ORION just had me deliver to, simply because it-that-does=not=have-eyes-or-common sense didn't say I could. I am not, nor ever will be a dumb truck driver; I can be subordinate, but I can't play stupid; I hate lying.

Maybe I should go back to the air hub. $40,000 paycut vs my sanity, dignity, self-respect......

just to be clear, if you were live on Orion, would you follow it or would you continue to manage the route?

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

just to be clear, if you were live on Orion, would you follow it or would you continue to manage the route?

This would depend upon whether his mgt team had common sense or were adamant about the 85% compliance metric.

 

[serenity now]

i'm asking him a direct question Chuckles, but you had to chime in because you need the attention so badly

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

i'm asking him a direct question Chuckles, but you had to chime in because you need the attention so badly

I didn't realize that Cheryl had renamed this forum "Serenity Now Cafe". My bad.

 

[serenity now]

I didn't realize that Cheryl had renamed this forum "Serenity Now Cafe". My bad.

nice attempt at a deflection, Chuckles

now reply to this, so you can hold the stage a little longer

 

['Lord Brown's bidding']

just to be clear, if you were live on Orion, would you 1follow it or would you 2continue to manage the route?

I am going with what's behind door number 3....

 

['Lord Brown's bidding']

I'll adapt....my family depends on it.

 

[soberups]

just to be clear, if you were live on Orion, would you follow it or would you continue to manage the route?

Im going to go live on Orion within a matter of days. There are already drivers in my loop who are on it. It isnt working very well. My #1 priority will be what it has always been, which is to make service on the route as efficiently as possible. To me that takes priority over generating a meaningless compliance metric.

 

[Signature Only]

I have the same problem. center manager threats because I was running 60% - 65% in trace (EDD). So I ran strictly by EDD for 3 weeks, 95% -98%. Sphor went down, 10 to 12 extra miles and 13 hour days. Finally the On-Road tells me to go back to using my brain until my trace could be redone.

I agreed only after he e-mailed the local detailing his instructions.

We have some "interns" preparing Orion now.

My problem is that my give-a-crap has a faulty on/off switch. It keeps turning back to the "on" position no matter how many times the company in all its abject stupidity keeps switching it "off". Something tells me that, in a few more weeks when I actually go live on ORION, that entire circuit will get torn out and the switch itself wont be a problem any more.

 

[soberups]

Approximately half of the drivers in my building are now live on ORION with the other half (myself included) being in various stages of the implementation process.

At its very best...on the few routes where it has really been implemented well with ample input from the driver...it is a marginal improvement over PAS/EDD and of some benefit to a relief driver who is unfamiliar with the route.

Overall, however...the system is worthless. It is of no benefit at all to a driver with any amount of area knowledge, and the few miles that it does save for for the relief drivers (on the handful of routes where it does work properly) are more than offset by the extra miles being wasted by the people who go ahead and follow it 85% in order to generate the compliance metric. Overall miles are up; overall SPOHR is down. Its not working, and its only going to get worse once the whole building goes live and the "request" to run 85% compliant becomes a "demand." So far I am not hearing about any harassment over compliance, and drivers are still being told to use their best judgement if ORION wont work, but we all know that will change soon enough.

 

[norcal87steward]

The ORION team is leaving my building this week and they are blaming the dispatch sup for it not working in our center but the same story miles are up and so is the paid day I am hard presses to see how this is saving money at all. I have also been told that they are going to take my resis away to give me something else so that ORION will work better not real happy about that at all going to give some of the roughest resis in town and send a baseline split care over my route to do the resis I've been doing for four years. The center team has also started changing the original edd sequence pattern so that drivers can't simply go from ODO to RDO trying to totally supersede driver route knowledge so that they have no choice but yo run ORION. I've heard management tell drivers if they don't like it move on to greener pastures. Hate to bring doom and gloom but this is hands down the worst investment by UPS since they decided to by full electric trucks for the tax write off but that's a whole different problem

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

What is your issue with alternative fuel package cars?

 

[Hellio]

All of you that have gone live with ORION has there been many routes that have been eliminated? All I have ever seen with the new technology that UPS brings in is that we all get more and more work and less time to do it in. When they brought in EDD and PAS we lost routes and now that ORION is being talked about we hear that they want to take even more routes out.
​

 

[soberups]

All of you that have gone live with ORION has there been many routes that have been eliminated? All I have ever seen with the new technology that UPS brings in is that we all get more and more work and less time to do it in. When they brought in EDD and PAS we lost routes and now that ORION is being talked about we hear that they want to take even more routes out.
​

The geniuses who are implementing ORION have this fantasy that so many miles and time will be saved that entire routes can just be eliminated with a few mouse clicks and the work will just flow into and out of the remaining cars as if by magic. Its pretty easy to buy into that fantasy when your world view of UPS consists of "stops" that are nothing more than colored dots on a map connected with lines viewed through a monitor. Its a little more complicated to maintain that fantasy when those monitors and dots and lines all go away and you are dealing with real packages, real stops, real pickups and real time in the real world. Yesterday, for example, it was my turn to experience the joy of their fantasies running face first into the brick wall of reality. I wound up having to give 2.5 hours worth of work to another driver (who will make triple time for his efforts since he is on the 9.5 list and has now been violated 4 times this week) so that I could clock off by 8:15 last night. I have averaged approximately 11.5 stops per hour on my rural route for years now so it doesnt take a PHD in higher mathematics to figure out what will happen when you send me out the door with 140 stops. These guys are great at playing Pac Man on a computer screen, but they apparently cant do simple arithmetic.

 

[Signature Only]

​What the devil is happening to this company?

The geniuses who are implementing ORION have this fantasy that so many miles and time will be saved that entire routes can just be eliminated with a few mouse clicks and the work will just flow into and out of the remaining cars as if by magic. Its pretty easy to buy into that fantasy when your world view of UPS consists of "stops" that are nothing more than colored dots on a map connected with lines viewed through a monitor. Its a little more complicated to maintain that fantasy when those monitors and dots and lines all go away and you are dealing with real packages, real stops, real pickups and real time in the real world. Yesterday, for example, it was my turn to experience the joy of their fantasies running face first into the brick wall of reality. I wound up having to give 2.5 hours worth of work to another driver (who will make triple time for his efforts since he is on the 9.5 list and has now been violated 4 times this week) so that I could clock off by 8:15 last night. I have averaged approximately 11.5 stops per hour on my rural route for years now so it doesnt take a PHD in higher mathematics to figure out what will happen when you send me out the door with 140 stops. These guys are great at playing Pac Man on a computer screen, but they apparently cant do simple arithmetic.