Nobody wants people to be laid off or lose their jobs to a machine, but in this day and age companies have to spend the big dollars in order to remain relevant and successful in today’s economy. The cost for this technology for UPS was not cheap by any means, in fact the upgrade from manual labor to automated machines cost an estimated six hundred million dollars. (Bennett, 2005) Besides the expense for rolling out this new system to all its distribution warehouses, UPS has the potential to still come out on top of this deal. When they devoted themselves to this newer way of doing things the results were less training time for employees and the ability to shift employees into areas that were lacking personnel or that demanded more personnel. The savings though in the year after this upgrade might even be greater than the initial cost and put the company further …show more content…
Instead of going through their trucks looking for packages, the packages are loaded into specific areas of the truck and that information is transferred to the handheld scan tools the drivers use. The drivers seem impressed with the new technology and somewhat relieved that they can do their job no without the added stress of locating mislabeled or lost packages buried in their trucks.
The future for this technology is not well known because it has seemed to rectify and solve all the problems that existed before. After all machines can do one thing that humans cannot, and that is do what it is programmed and instructed to do. The fact that a company is willing to spend this kind of money to hone their craft should speak volumes. At the beginning people were pessimistic but as the numbers started turning around and customer ratings increase, the company knew they made a wise choice. This was a turning point for UPS and the only thing they became concerned about was why they did not make the switch