Parcel Services Research Articles

Light Weight Vehicle in Natural Fibre Composite

Combined with shared service points in prime locations the use of Light Electric Vehicles (LEV) can help optimize the cost expensive „last mile“ of parcel service. [1] At the same time, a shared service point enables the switch from diesel driven engines to muscle-powered electric driving in cities. It is known, that in city operating courier services up to 80 % of actual used diesel fuel can be substituted by muscle supported electric driving. [2] To cover the needs of global operating parcel services a muscle-power supported LEV must meet the requirements of ergonomics (regarding usability in the modes drive and delivery) and parcel security. To gain economic benefits the construction of LEV for parcel delivery should be flexible enough to meet specific needs in cities - like the topography of the roadways, daily amount of goods to deliver and the legal provision at the local situation. Production of LEV in small and medium enterprises will unlock a niche for first industrial uses of Natural Fiber Composites (NFC) in load-bearing structures. By pre-impregnation a replicable quality will bring the structural light-weight construction with NFC to new fields of use, as the construction of a LEV will demonstrate. At the end of its life cycle, the vehicle proves further economic and ecological benefits due to the use of NFC: A cost effective thermal conversion under a reduced release of fossil CO2 is guaranteed. [3; 4]

Towards sustainable logistics: study of alternative delivery facets

The Courier, Express and Parcel services (CEP) sector is a constant growing one. The changes concerning e-commerce have impact in the industry which is looking for solution. This research, based on a web survey with 1019 computer assisted web interviews, presents e-commerce customer expectations in alternative delivery time frames and considers the impacts in the last mile of attended home delivery, reception boxes and collection-and-delivery points. The analysed alternative delivery time frames are Express delivery within 3 hours, evening delivery, Saturday delivery, Sunday delivery and customer selected time frame. Within these the focus is on e-commerce purchase habits, frequency of purchase, products, time of purchase, interest in alternative delivery time frames, usage or preferences and finally the willingness to pay for an alternative delivery. The results show a tendency of more than two thirds towards consumer selected delivery time frame, Saturday delivery and evening delivery, which is accompanied by easy accessible Reception Boxes (RBs). The research study also performs regression analysis and finds a significant impact of Alternative Delivery Time Frame (ADTF), and Delivery Methods (DM) on customer's willingness to pay.

Effects of Service Guarantee on Perceived Risk, Trust, and Service Value: Focused on Parcel Services

Effects of Service Guarantee on Perceived Risk, Trust, and Service Value: Focused on Parcel Services

Budgeting Time for Dynamic Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Customer Requests

Parcel services route vehicles to pick up parcels in the service area. Pickup requests occur dynamically during the day and are unknown before their actual request. Because of working hour restrictions, service vehicles only have a limited time to serve dynamic requests. As a result, not all requests can be confirmed. To achieve an overall high number of confirmed requests, dispatchers have to budget their time effectively by anticipating future requests. To determine the value of a decision, i.e., the expected number of future confirmations given a point of time and remaining free time budget, we present an anticipatory time budgeting heuristic (ATB) drawing on methods of approximate dynamic programming. ATB frequently simulates a problem’s realization to subsequently approximate the values for every vector of point of time and free time budget to achieve an approximation of an optimal decision policy. Since the number of vectors is vast, we introduce the dynamic lookup table (DLT), a general approach adaptively partitioning the vector space to the approximation process. Compared with state-of-the-art benchmark heuristics, ATB allows an effective use of the time budget resulting in anticipatory decision making and high solution quality. Additionally, the DLT significantly strengthens and accelerates the approximation process. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2016.0719 .

Postal Services: Survey of Competition Law Developments

The Court of Justice of the EU (‘CJEU’) has issued a significant judgment regarding grants of downstream access to the postal network of an incumbent operator in the bpost case, in which it concludes that differential treatment as between direct customers and consolidators regarding quantity discounts is not inconsistent with the non-discrimination requirement under Article 12 of the Postal Directive. The CJEU has also given a judgment under Article 102 TFEU concerning volume rebates given by an incumbent postal operator in a second case concerning Post Danmark. The European General Court has upheld a European Commission decision that certain Slovak legislative changes involved a re-monopolisation of hybrid mail and infringed Article 106(1) in conjunction with Article 102 TFEU. In the State aid area, the CJEU has ruled that Germany failed to recover State aid from Deutsche Post, with regard to business-to-business parcel services, while, in the case of Polish Post, the European Commission has approved the use of a compensation fund to finance the provision of a universal postal service. As regards the national competition authorities, in Germany the German Federal Cartel Office has found an abuse of dominant position by Deutsche Post concerning its tariffs for bulk mail customers by means of a margin squeeze, and in the UK Ofcom has issued a Statement of Objections in relation to Royal Mail's wholesale services for downstream access to its postal network.

Smart logistics: distributed control of green crowdsourced parcel services

This paper presents the development of an integrated decision-making framework for on-demand parcel delivery services that considers Just-In-Time delivery, fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Optimal policies based on the Markov decision process are established to allow for inclusion of parcel delivery requests. The framework’s integrated dynamic algorithm, based on a continuous variable feedback control, allows for unified processing of delivery requests and route scheduling. Computational experiments show that the integrated approach could increase revenue by 6.4% by reducing fuel and emission costs by 2.5%; however, the approach may incur more cost in terms of timeliness compared to a myopic approach.

Cooperative Traffic Control Management for City Logistic Routing

In city logistics, courier express and parcel services (CEP) deal with last mile deliveries in an urban environment. CEP route vehicles to deliver parcels to costumers distributed in the cities area. Customers expect fast and reliable services to reasonable prices. As a result, CEP have to plan and execute their routing efficiently. In a city logistic environment, CEP faces several challenges. Especially, travel times between customers are not deterministic but uncertain and differ during the day regarding traffic volumes and stochastic events like congestion. Further, city traffic flows are controlled by traffic control management (TM). TM decisions additionally impact travel times for CEP. This paper shows the impact of TM decisions to travel times and emphasizes the benefit of cooperational planning between CEP and TM.

Next Year's Sales Planning for the Wholesale and Retail Trade Services of Parcel Сompany Based on Its Real Date

The main aim of this study is providing of the short-term finanсial planning on the example of the wholesale and retail trade of parcel services сompany.

Amending the Americans with Disabilities Act

This research examines changing public human resources obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). During the first 12 years after ADA implementation, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several rulings that narrowly construed who qualified as disabled ( Albertson’s v. Kirkingburg; Murphy v. United Parcel Services; Sutton v. United Airlines; Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams). In 2008, Congress responded to these judicial interpretations by specifically rejecting the Supreme Court’s analysis and unequivocally stating the intent to expand the scope of protection under the ADA. This interbranch dialog over ADA interpretation challenges public employers to predict responsibilities under shifting ADA requirements. Furthermore, analysis suggests that both the original statute and the 2008 Amendments Act suffer from a lack of clarity regarding who qualifies as disabled. Public human resource managers must evaluate how best to meet their ADA obligations in this climate of legal ambiguity and fiscal uncertainty.

A beam search heuristics to solve the parcel hub scheduling problem

In this paper, a beam search scheduling heuristic (BSSH) is presented to solve the parcel hub scheduling problem (PHSP), which is a scheduling problem that is common in the parcel delivery industry (PDI). Companies in the PDI include the United States Postal Service, United Parcel Services, Federal Express, and Deutsche Post. Together, these companies move more than one trillion dollars of the United States’ Gross Domestic Product. The PHSP involves scheduling a set of inbound trailers each containing a set of heterogeneous parcels to a set of unload docks. At the unload docks, the parcels are unloaded, sorted, and moved to the appropriate outbound trailers at the load docks. At the load docks, the parcels are loaded onto the outbound trailers. The objective is to minimize the timespan of the transfer operation at the transshipment terminal. The BSSH is compared to various scheduling approaches: random scheduling algorithm (RSA), genetic-based scheduling algorithm (GBSA), and simulation-based scheduling algorithm (SBSA). While GBSA and SBSA offer solutions that are superior to BSSH for smaller size problems, BSSH outperforms these algorithms on larger size problems requiring much less computational time. The results show that for larger size problems the BSSH is able to produce solutions that are from 4% to 8% of the known optimum solutions. In contrast, GBSA and SBSA, respectively offer solutions from 23% to 38% and from 6% to 47% of the known optimum solutions. The contribution of this paper is a scheduling heuristic to solve the PHSP.

Comparing image quality of print-on-demand books and photobooks from web-based vendors

Because of the emergence of e-commerce and developments in print engines designed for economical output of very short runs, there are increased business opportunities and consumer options for print-on-demand books and photobooks. The current state of these printing modes allows for direct uploading of book files via the web, printing on nonoffset printers, and distributing by standard parcel or mail delivery services. The goal of this research is to assess the image quality of print-on-demand books and photobooks produced by various Web-based vendors and to identify correlations between psychophysical results and objective metrics. Six vendors were identified for one-off (single-copy) print-on-demand books, and seven vendors were identified for photobooks. Participants rank ordered overall quality of a subset of individual pages from each book, where the pages included text, photographs, or a combination of the two. Observers also reported overall quality ratings and price estimates for the bound books. Objective metrics of color gamut, color accuracy, accuracy of International Color Consortium profile usage, eye-weighted root mean square L*, and cascaded modulation transfer acutance were obtained and compared to the observer responses. We introduce some new methods for normalizing data as well as for strengthening the statistical significance of the results. Our approach includes the use of latent mixed-effect models. We found statistically significant correlation with overall image quality and some of the spatial metrics, but correlations between psychophysical results and other objective metrics were weak or nonexistent. Strong correlation was found between psychophysical results of overall quality assessment and estimated price associated with quality. The photobook set of vendors reached higher image-quality ratings than the set of print-on-demand vendors. However, the photobook set had higher image-quality variability.

Information Technology Systems Deliver Competitiveness for ABC Parcel Services

ABC Parcel Services is a leader in package delivery via ground and air shipping. It has provided services internationally as well as in all the 50 United States for almost 100 years. At the beginning of 2001, the CEO and the management of the company were faced with an unusual fiercely competitive market and rapidly changing customer requirements. The automation implemented thus far did not justify premium prices from the customers anymore. Customers were able to receive the same services that ABC was able to provide using this automation, at competitive prices from other providers in the market. It was obvious to the management that a value added service had to be provided to keep the edge over the competition. Looking at the changing business landscape, one area that was identified as critical was a customer centric approach using automation. The results from the implementation of such a system were expected to be tremendous for the organization to counter the competitive pressure of rival organizations and maintain market leadership.

Image Quality and Cost Assessment of Print-On-Demand Books from Web-Based Vendors Offering One-Off Printing

Due to the emergence of e-commerce and developments in print engines designed for economical output of very short runs, there are increased business opportunities and consumer options for print-on-demand books. The current state of this printing mode allows for direct uploading of book files via the web, printing on non-offset printers, and distributing by standard parcel or mail delivery services. The goal of this research is to assess the image quality and relative cost of a soft cover book printed by various web-based vendors offering one-off printing. Six vendors were identified. Sixteen observers rank ordered overall quality of a subset of individual pages from each book. Observers also applied overall quality ratings to the perfect bound books. Objective metrics of color gamut, color accuracy, overall contrast, ICC profiling accuracy, sharpness, noise, and actual cost were obtained. None of the objective metrics was an indication alone of overall quality. For example, printers with smaller color gamut, lower color accuracy or lower contrast were still able to achieve high overall image quality. Photographic quality was highly correlated with overall quality assessments, more so than text quality. Overall image quality had positive correlation to actual cost. One publisher had a cost model that was significantly lower than the other one-off vendors.

Holistic Thinking Aproach: Case Study of Post Network in Slovenia

Modern complexity of management is associated with importantdecision making, confronting a great number of uselessinformation. Selection of information- the choice of only qualityones, i. e. essential ones, is a big problem in management decision-making. Implementation of systemic approach i. e. dialectical-network thinking (DNT) can help to deal with it. Thepaper presents a holistic thinking approach in a case study forthe Slovenian parcel postal problem. The volume of parcelflows at the Post of Slovenia between Posts is increasing rapidlyand it requires a new design of the postal network. This paperpresents a reorganization of parcel services between Postal LogisticsCenters and Posts by adding Regional Parcel Centersand Parcel Posts to the network. A case for the area covered byLjubljana Postal Logistics Center is given, which takes intoconsideration the sorting out and the retaining of parcels in thePosts, Parcel Posts and Regional Parcel Centers within their individualareas.

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 2)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 2)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 3)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 3)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 4)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 4)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 1)

Arbitral Awards (ICSID): United Parcel Services v. Canada, UNCITRAL (NAFTA), 24 May 2007 (part 1)

Temporal Elements in the Spatial Extension of Production Networks

ABSTRACT The spatial extension of production networks presents a significant challenge to managers accustomed to reducing lead times by geographically contracting supply chains. This paper extends the theory on time in transportation by defining the elements of transport time, order time, timing, punctuality, and frequency and elaborating on their characteristics. Structured along these elements, it analyses the consequences of extending production networks from within a mature economic region, mainly the EU‐15, U.S., and Japan, first to adjacent and then to nearby and finally distant low‐cost regions. Distance obviously affects the transport quality in all time dimensions. Except for air parcel services that globally match what road transport offers within an economic region, the longer the distance, the lower the time‐related performance. Distant, low‐cost regions, meaning China and India, also imply a polarisation between air and sea transport at opposite ends of the time, cost, and capacity scales. This supply gap restricts the types of products traded. The conceptual framework is illustrated in the setting of a global vehicle manufacturer spatially extending its sourcing. It demands that sequenced sub‐assemblies and small, cheap, and generic components are delivered from the vicinity of each assembly plant. Batched components can be sourced from adjacent regions, but deliveries from longer distances imply storage at pick‐up points to fulfil their time requirements. Hence, the suppliers must offer the manufacturing firm deliveries as if they produce relatively close to the assembly plants.

Courier, Express and Parcel Services in the new conditions

Courier, Express and Parcel Services in the new conditions