UPS is the world leader in parcel transport.
Below is a description of the integrations between the various aspects (collaboration / organization / systems).
It should be stressed that, given the size of the company, the nature of its business and the amount of technologies that it adopts, a complete description would have far exceeded the limits imposed on this relationship; we will therefore try to provide an overview of the main aspects.
Integrations
The first integration between facets that can be talked about is that between system and organization. UPS is a huge company, but they had the foresight to design their own right from the start data base as a central and monolithic entity. The New Jersey facility - like, of course, its twin in Georgia - hosts a series of which contain (among other information):
i data collected for personnel management;
i data collected, updated real-time, on warehouses and means of transport in use, distributed in the intermodal transport network;
information on partner companies and clients (the latter also updated real-time, based on information coming from the DIAD terminals and the site Internet);
i data collected for the preparation of the balance sheet (balance sheet, income statement, etc.).
As the company opera even outside the United States, some aspects were also distributed abroad. An example is the data base of personnel management, by its nature integrated with the analysis systems of the economic trend: personnel and operating costs are saved in the national, but the information is periodically aggregated and converted into US currency; any anti-productive activities are identified and resolved quickly. The need to automate cost tracking has enabled UPS to automate some processes, including payroll generation.
The management of shifts and rest periods has also been semi-automated: the staff is categorized in based on the type of role, curriculum and geographic region of belonging (we will see in the next paragraph how this already represents material
for an ontology); the request for leave - which must be made well in advance - is inserted into a software that submits the plan to the heads of the sectors. This mechanism, very efficient on paper, led to the start of a class-action against UPS by the employees, because it was not in any way "flexible" towards people suddenly subject to impediments or disabilities).
I data collected relating to warehouses and means of transport are the heart of UPS's business, which lives off the efficiency of its services by not producing goods. All the software was created by the company itself over the last two decades and is highly integrated: they all refer to the same data base and there is a continuous flow of information to and from applications.
For example, when a customer requests the shipment of a package, his information is inserted - from scratch or as an update - (especially the payment references, validated through the interfacing services with interbank systems). records with all data collected of the package (place of collection and delivery, any alternative place in case of non-collection, shipping cost calculated automatically and accepted by the customer, etc.). The credit is generated instantly upon receipt by the system of the delivery confirmation (received from the DIAD terminal).
The generation of the order triggers the creation of a record also in the shipment management system, which involves a notification to the operators involved. The UPS logistic support system is responsible for optimizing the shipments of packages, both in terms of the minimum route taken by the vans and the packages transported by them, also taking into account the operators available on the basis of the aforementioned vacation and rest scheduling. These are all examples of the high level of integration achieved by the company's systems.
As already highlighted in the previous document, and as emerges from what has been said so far on the flows of data collected from outside nations towards central, a large warehousing activity takes place. UPS has a of several terabytes which houses the operations information library (OIL), a huge collection of data collected, structured at different levels of granularity, which summarizes the activities of the group. OIL was initially created in order to improve the internal organization on American soil and to plan strategies in the short term, but starting from 1999 it incorporates all the information on planetary activity and only since the early 2000s has it been exploited for software integration. of intelligence and online analytical processing.
I data collected aggregates are available for consultation by the organization's management; as mentioned in the other document, many data collected of very fine granularity are also made accessible via API from clients, for example information on the status of the individual item shipped. THE clients they can integrate this information into their systems, in a very easy way thanks to the systematic adoption of UPS of open standards.
As described in the other document, in UPS there is a commission that takes care of undertaking technological innovations, collecting suggestions from employees. The ideas are submitted through a web application, which can be used through the company's intranet.
An ontology for integration
In hypothesizing an ontology behind UPS integrations, we can certainly start from the actors involved in its core business: parcel transport. Therefore, you have a Parcel class, transported from one Location to another; transport can be conceptualized with two relations "transportFrom" and "transportA", if excluded from
modeling transnational and multimodal deliveries. Parcel can have several specialized subclasses - depending on its characteristics - and must have an Instant Location, following geolocation.
The package is usually sent by a customer; considering the vastness of UPS's service offer - which does not only involve the transport of packages - great attention must be paid to the description of derived classes and attributes. Any service offered, of any nature, involves the "execution" of an Order of various types, such as a Shipment.
It may happen that a customer is also a Supplier. The ontology could define a super-class of CompanyPartner aggregation if it recognizes that it is at the same time a Customer and Supplier type company, or if it has made at least one supply and at least one order.
Big Brown, as UPS is called in jargon, is mainly composed of Employee entities organized in a vast and varied hierarchical structure (Organization chart). Here, too, the structuring must be accurate, with particular emphasis on aspects related to space / time: a worker will operate in a specific Region, or rather an aggregation of locations in the world network, will cover a specific timetable during his working week and so on . Such an ontology would make it very easy to make automatic inferences in the generation of rest shifts. By adequately modeling some attributes such as qualifications, titles, service status and years of seniority, management is given the opportunity to quantitatively - as well as qualitatively - assess staff performance.
Many of these data collected are already present in the legacy systems of UPS, deposited within the introduced in the last two decades. Others may emerge from appropriate "views" on the db or through data mining activities.
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