Yellow Freight System is now offering faster service to 247,500 delivery points throughout North America, thanks to an expansion of its Standard Ground Regional Advantage network.

The network has been created through a series of changes of operations beginning in March 2000. The latest five changes, improving operations in Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Lancaster, Pa.,, and St. Louis, were effective June 10. Additional changes of operations were implemented earlier in Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland and Nashville.
Since implementing the program 14 months ago, Yellow has reconfigured local pickup and delivery, shipment handling and over-the-road transportation operations at 172 terminals that feed into the nine Regional Advantage distribution centers. More than 400 dock workers and 130 drivers are currently scheduled to exclusively work shipments moving through the Regional Advantage network in the Upper Midwest, Midwest, Northeast, Eastern Canada, Atlantic Seaboard and Southeast. Yellow has reduced standard transit times by one and twodays on more than 6,500 metro-to-metro service lanes in those regions.
"We have essentially created a high-speed shorthaul network that emphasizes direct, point-to-point service coverage as a complement to our traditional hub and spoke longhaul network and our sleeper team network for expedited ground shipments," said Yellow Freight System President James Welch. "We are now in position to compete with anybody."
Currently, nearly 70 percent of all shipments handled by Yellow are delivered in three days or less, a 12 percent improvement over the past two years.
Standard Ground Regional Advantage two-day shipments will move between large and intermediate size cities in the 400- to 1,000-mile range. Three-day shipments will move primarily in the 1,000- to 1,800-mile range.
More rigid inventory controls by manufacturers and distributors and shorter shelf lives of products stocked by major retailers have led to a significant increase in the demand for fast, highly reliable ground transportation service. The market for two-day ground service is among the fastest growing in the industry, according to the company.