How would you manage a business if you were the owner? Keeping in mind, customer, profitability, wages and benefits, captial expenditures, safety, labor issues, etc. The job of UPS management is to ensure everyone plays by the rules, including themselves.
If one of the rules is that everyone plays by the rules, then the rules must be obtainable without having to break them.
Example: It's been discussed before, but fits nicely here. If I had worked my way up the chain to the point where I could actually be one of the policy makers, I would know the cost UPS pays to maintain the "numbers". Let's say delivery volume is down, as is pickup volume, several stops in board but not on truck, and miles aren't quite up to norm. The driver calls the center and lets the supe know he might under dispatch. The supe calls other drivers near this one, and nobody can give up work without themselves possibly not dispatching. So far, this type of situation is beyond the control of the supe and completely unforeseeable.
Now, this is how it usually plays out in my building. Supe instructs driver to stop at several drop boxes to do "sweeps" and make sure they're coded a certain way. This is WAY before the posted pickup time on the box, so the regular air driver is going to have to hit the box again at normal time. Or "sweep" a UPS store that is well off area to gain miles and volume... again regular driver still has to come later.
Even more frustrating, is the instruction to go to a completely different part of town and take less than 10 stops off a driver that doesn't need help to stay under 9.5 but can afford to lose them without under dispatching. 30 minutes and 20 miles is tacked on to make 10 minutes worth of deliveries in a dense neighborhood.
So to answer your question (me being the manager of my own company):
I would encourage allowing the occasional under dispatch situation to happen for the sake of saving UPS all the extra OT and mileage
wasted to ensure the "numbers" are met. Bring the guy in, get him off the clock and stop using fuel. These occurances would be monitored to identify areas that are consistantly falling short so they can be studied and adjusted. In doing so, UPS actually takes a step forward in becoming efficient in places other than on paper. As it stands now, as long as the problems are "fixed" with busy work and nobody is in trouble... nothing gets fixed.
Relaxing the discipline mgmt faces for such issues would open up a whole world of areas that would turn into money saving possibilities. Discipline only forces the problems to be masked, and on paper everything appears to be running as efficiently as possible.
Over 9.5 is another. I spend an hour and a half driving to and from work now, so I look for as few hours as possible these days. In the past however, I'm one of the people who didn't used to mind the additional OT now and then. But "company policy" prevented mgmt from allowing it to exceed the 9.5 rule. I'm not an advocate for cutting routes unnecessarily, but if it were my company I'd look for ways to reduce the number of drivers on the road in a particular day... and one way would be to allow the drivers who love the OT the opportunity to earn some. Even if it meant a week to week sign up sheet for those people who wanted it.
I'm not trying to take away any of the skills you left with channahon, but it really seems the skillset endorsed by corporate doesn't include providing production mgmt the decision making options that could actually help ups become more efficient. So the threat of discipline perpetuates the need for dishonesty and "fudging" numbers, at least in the majority of those centers represented in this thread.
Would be interesting to hear from center managers and driver supes how they deal with playing by the rules, and how the numbers could improve if the whip was replaced by trust from the upper echelons.
