Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.
Let's next meet Ken, the UPS deliveryman for our neighborhood. For over two decades, he has had a constant companion: The Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD), which guides delivery routes, gets delivery confirmations from customers, and helps the drivers in many other ways. Without DIADs, it is highly unlikely UPS could deliver over 35 million packages a day during the peak holiday season.
DIAD was developed for UPS in the late 1980s by Motorola, and first deployed in 1990, before the iPhone or the iPad was even conceived. Its battery lasts all day—much longer than the batteries in most Apple or Android devices. Now in its fifth generation, it can communicate with both CDMA and GPRS cellular technologies to stay connected with multiple carriers.
Sensors on the UPS truck track engine performance and simulate what the driver does all week long. That data has led to reductions in excessive idling, and the now-famous UPS "no left turns" dictum on the majority of their routes (to reduce time, fuel, and accidents). It has also allowed UPS to reduce reversing occurrences by a quarter. One mile per driver per day over one year can save UPS up to $50 million in fuel costs. One minute of time saved per driver is worth half a million dollars a year to UPS, so the technologies have made them highly productive workers. They are also much safer drivers, as they log nearly three billion miles per year with less than one accident per million miles driven. UPS inducts drivers who have 25 years of incident-free driving into its "Circle of Honor." In 2016, 8,700 drivers had reached that milestone,
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