Scott Galloway cringes when you ask him about his 15 years in ERP Software – with Powercerv, then as President of a spin off focused on the metals industry, Verticent.
He traded that career for an investment in a UPS Store franchise. Store 4586, he says, is simplicity personified compared to the career in ERP.
Wait a minute – how can UPS be simple? That is the company which is described in my book with “15 mainframes, more than 11,000 servers, and 150,000 workstations… the world’s largest DB2 site…the largest user of mobile minutes in the world.”
In 2001, UPS acquired the Mail Boxes Etc franchise, rebranded it, and has steadily grown products in such stores. Besides the mainstay shipping, the stores offer copying and printing services, packaging supplies, mailboxes, notary services and plenty more. The shipping, of course, allows for a wide range of global destinations, multiple air, ground and other paths, zillions of rates, corporate discounts and taxes.
Few of the over 4,300 store owner-operators in the US have a technology background like Scott does. So, UPS continually strives to keep the processes and technologies simplified and standardized.
As the screen shot shows, the franchisee deals primarily with 4 software modules – the Customer Manifest System (CMS) , the Mailbox Manager, the Point of Sale (POS) and Quickbooks (Admin) from Intuit.
The CMS is constantly being updated by UPS for changes in rates, taxes, insurance, customs requirements etc and for new products like digital printing - which is increasingly emailed in and customers stop by to just pick up the finished job. The Mailbox Manager is being updated for integration with postal rules – as in form 1583-A to authorize them to deliver mail in your box. The Point of Sale is being updated to add more scanning and messaging formats - so package delivery status or mailbox renewal information can be emailed to customers. Quickbooks is the standard version that you and I can buy. But the chart of accounts is uniquely configured for UPS store franchises. And in an extremely useful and powerful service, UPS aggregates and shares regular financial information sent by franchises and other trends from its mainframes. You can see the massive leverage from the scale when it comes to such benchmark data and market trend intelligence.
More standardization beyond the software comes into play when you look at the equipment in the store. The scanner gun to read bar codes is from Symbol. The weighing scale from Metler-Toledo, the label printer from Epson.
All this also facilitates training. Scott is hugely impressed both at the range of web courses (hundreds of them in short, 5 minute modules ideal for staff training) and in-person training available. As part of his induction into the franchise he spent a week with another store operator, did a 2 week course at headquarters in San Diego, and then another in-person week in another store. (Scott runs the store part-time with his wife and one staff member).
Of course, these operators do not need to know how UPS planes are innovating with continous descent approaches or how their delivery trucks minimize left turns or what UPS is planning in their fifth generation DIADs that every truck carries.
Leveraging its massive scale and keeping up with technology trends while shielding the individual operator from that complexity is well, pretty innovative.
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Posted by: Alan Morley | September 14, 2010 at 09:10 AM