UPS' Breakthrough A big problem in the transportation business is route optimization. You need to go from many places to many places, some of which are the origin of your customers orders, while others the destinations. (I'm really oversimplifying here.) In the mid 1990s, software available for such optimizations were just coming to market, and the computing power needed to drive them, were still years away. This wasn't a big deal for many transportation businesses, but for the courier business -- it was a big deal. UPS recognize the big deal. They had over 1,500 facilities. More than 10-million packages per day. They estimated that there was 15.5-trillion options in calculating a route of just 25-points -- the fastest computer of the day would 500,000 years to complete the calculation. Not enough time. So UPS went to work on the problem. Today, they're idolized in the transportation business for their supply chain optimization. But UPS isn't slowing down -- next steps -- putting this in the hands of their 70,000 drivers so they can make on-the-fly route modifications.

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