UPS announced numerous new technology-enabled services and partnerships designed to support customer needs aligned with the company’s strategic growth initiatives.

“UPS is moving quickly to introduce a wide range of innovative new services designed to extend our leadership position in developing technology solutions to help e-commerce and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs),” said UPS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Abney. “We see enormous opportunities and unmet customer needs in several high-growth market segments.”

Drone Subsidiary UPS Flight Forward Announces New Customers and Future Residential Delivery Tests

Building on UPS’s industry first hospital network focused drone delivery program, UPS Flight forward today announced a series of new customers and future drone delivery plans.

“When we launched UPS Flight Forward, we said we would move quickly to scale this business – now the country’s first and only fully-certified drone airline – and that’s exactly what we are doing,” said UPS Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Scott Price. “We started with a hospital campus environment and are now expanding scale and use-cases. UPS Flight Forward will work with new customers in other industries to design additional solutions for a wide array of last-mile and urgent delivery challenges.”

The company today announced new drone delivery service in support of the University of Utah Health hospital campuses, in partnership with Matternet.  The University of Utah campus program will involve drone deliveries of samples and other cargo, similar to the program originally introduced at WakeMed Hospital in North Carolina.

Also today, UPS Flight Forward announced an agreement with CVS Health to develop a variety of drone delivery use cases for business-to consumer applications. The program will include evaluation of delivery of prescriptions and retail products to the homes of CVS customers.

UPS is also partnering with wholesale pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, a leading global healthcare solutions provider. The collaboration will initially deploy the UPS Flight Forward drone airline to transport certain pharmaceuticals, supplies and records to qualifying medical campuses served by AmerisourceBergen across the United States, with plans to then expand its use to other sites of care.

Additionally, UPS Flight Forward will soon develop drone delivery services in support of Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. The delivery applications will involve shipping healthcare shipments or other items on the company’s hospital campuses.

UPS Digital Access Program Embeds UPS Shipping Services in Leading E-Commerce Platforms

UPS today revealed its strategy to make its industry-leading e-commerce services even more broadly available through a series of strategic alliances and agreements called the UPS Digital Access Program.    

UPS has prioritized e-commerce growth by enhancing its network and services to enable faster deliveries, enhanced visibility and a broader range of delivery options. With the UPS Digital Access Program, UPS is establishing preferred relationships with leading digital platforms to seamlessly offer discounted UPS shipping rates and other shipping and logistics solutions to their merchant customers.

Under this program, UPS today announced the collaboration with Stamps.com to offer discounted shipping rates to its 740,000 e-commerce customers. Stamps.com offers a portfolio of Internet shipping software solutions under the brand names ShipStation, ShippingEasy, ShipWorks, Stamps.com and Endicia. These solutions help small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses run their shipping operations more smoothly and successfully.

 “UPS has extensive experience and sophisticated knowledge of the needs of shippers and platform players operating within the e-commerce ecosystem,” said UPS Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Warren. “As the e-commerce shipper of choice, we are putting that experience to work to help our customers do more, with greater ease, across every aspect of the e-commerce value stream.”

The UPS Digital Access Program helps e-commerce platforms provide a comprehensive suite of related order management, fulfilment and delivery services that can be utilized to simplify logistics complexity. This gives SMBs the opportunity to provide the same high-quality customer experience as large e-commerce companies.

Launches New Tech-Enabled Solutions and Healthcare and Life Sciences Customers

As UPS continues to grow its specialized set of solutions for healthcare and life sciences customers, the company today announced an innovative new technology-enabled supply chain solution for critical shipments and an enhanced global quality management system.

Using multiple next-generation sensor technologies, UPS Premier will provide the most comprehensive priority-handling services ever offered by UPS for time-and temperature-sensitive packages. It is part of a UPS undertaking to retrofit key parts of the company’s network with smart, IoT systems to track healthcare packages.

Additionally, the company is connecting all of its global healthcare and life sciences business under a single, dedicated UPS Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) unit. The new unit includes operations and over 5,000 personnel from Marken, Polar Speed, and all 114 UPS healthcare facilities. The unit will have a dedicated and healthcare-trained salesforce and customer support teams for customers across the global network.

UPS has also redesigned its Quality Management System (QMS) to reflect systems which exist today at many pharmaceutical companies. The QMS features a cloud based electronic document management system, global standard operating procedures (SOPs), best-in-class validation processes and global reporting tools.