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Part 1.
Three years ago it was after the twin hurricanes - Katrina and Rita.
Not only did they continue to send trucks into New Orleans on Friday and Saturday and park them when all forecasts reported
1. N.O. being the primary target
2. N.O. levees would fail with a level 3 storm, while Katrina was at level 4
3. Much of N.O. lies 2 to 12 foot below sea level
Results, millions of dollars of shipments were destroyed by 1 to 6 foot of seawater filling the trailers.
Who was at fault - UPS declared it an "Act of God" and left the suppliers to eat the costs, or file a claim against their own insurance.
Part 2. The month after Katrina hit N.O., Rita hit SW Louisiana and ripped up a lot of geography. UPS was down for at least 10 days. Once the local warehouse had sufficient drivers, they started receiving and delivering as usual, with the exception of two coastal parishes that wouldn't recover for several months.
Despite the fact that our local UPS terminal was operating at nearly 90%, packages shipped to my residence and a number of customers was intercepted enroute by UPS instructions and returned to the shipper, even though the majority of SW Louisiana was open for business.
I had something interrupted twice and had to have it sent by US Postal Service the third time to insure delivery.
No explanation was offered why UPS blacklisted the entire delivery area, when their terminal was making deliveries across the area, and mostly on-time.
Part 3. At least partly due to the problem above, UPS created a system where a shipper could re-route a package while it was enroute.
Just this month, UPS decided to re-route several shipments of one ASI supplier, when they merged with another company. I don't have the whole story, but without notifying the supplier, they intercepted packages all across the country and had them re-shipped to the company's location in California.
I learned about this when one of my Louisiana customers contacted me to check on his shipment. Once we got the tracking number, we could see where the shipment had reached Louisiana and was due to be delivered, when UPS intercepted it and routed it back to CA.
After twelve days of travel round trip, the supplier re-shipped them by air to get them to my client. Unless UPS sent them overnight at no charge, I feel certain, the shipper probably switched to FedEx or DHL.
How many more errors can UPS make before they start losing customers in droves to the alternate sources?
If it were up to me, it'd be a long time before I used them again. They make the US Postal Service look like a great operation!
Dennis
Edited by DBeavers, 25 September 2008 - 12:19 AM.
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