United Parcel Service, Atlanta, Ga., has announced faster delivery times in its U.S. ground distribution network.

The changes were implemented over the past four months and each modification slashes a day off the previous guaranteed delivery time without any change in customer rates or pick-up and delivery hours.
Shipments from Los Angeles to New York and vice versa, for example, now are guaranteed to arrive in four business days instead of five. Packages flowing from Dallas or Houston to Florida now take three days on the ground instead of four, and those moving from St. Louis or Kansas City to North and South Carolina now take two days instead of three.
Approximately 60 major origin/destination lane combinations, spanning some 20 metropolitan areas are affected, among them Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Some of the improvements, such as the four-day coast-to-coast delivery standard, were made in part through changes in railroad service. Others were made through modifications to UPS’s hub-and-spoke interstate trucking network and others through changes to package sorting times or locations. An estimated 370,000 customer packages are affected by the changes each day.
The service upgrade announcement comes two weeks after UPS unveiled the deployment of package flow technologies to speed sorting inside its package centers. The suite of package flow technologies is designed to improve the balancing of delivery loads between routes every day while speeding the actual loading of delivery trucks. That package flow project followed the unveiling of the fourth generation of the small hand-held computer used by UPS drivers, a model that will allow UPS drivers to offer substantive customer benefits.