UPS was awarded the 2011 Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award following a presentation and subsequent vote of more than a thousand delegates at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit held May 2-4 in Los Angeles. Jack Levis, director of process management at UPS, made the presentation and accepted the award on behalf of the package delivery and logistics behemoth headquartered in Sandy Springs, Ga.
The award recognizes the most successful recent BI implementations by organizations that demonstrate high levels of business impact and overall excellence in the integration of business, decision, analytical and information processes. Fifty-five organizations submitted nominations for the 2011 event. A committee of Gartner analysts evaluated the nominations before announcing 10 semifinalists and then three finalists –Yahoo!, fashion designer Elie Tahari and UPS – who were invited to present their BI case at the 2011 Summit.
Conference attendees, who packed the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel for the three presentations, were given ballots and asked to vote for the finalist who demonstrated the best example of BI excellence. Later that evening, after the votes were tallied, UPS was announced as the winner before another ballroom full of attendees.
In his presentation, Levis outlined how UPS used BI and advanced analytics such as operations research to build systems and processes that made its operations more efficient (including a 30-million mile reduction in annual miles driven) while offering more products and delivering better service.
Levis noted that one of the biggest challenges UPS faced was taking specific route and delivery information held only in each driver’s head and putting it into integrated databases that were used to run the operation in real time. As Levis noted, with this process change, UPS went from a “manual-, methods- and procedure-driven operations to a data-driven, scientific process.” Levis concluded his award-winning presentation with a video of UPS drivers – most of them 20- and 25-year veteran drivers – extolling the virtues of “optimization” to improve the way they did their jobs.