FedEx & UPS

7 Pages 1824 Words

hroughout the United States and in over 200 other countries and territories.

Competitive Structure and Strategic Outlook



IT’s Role in the Industry and the Companies in the Industry






Website Usage and Performance

Using Internet and web sites effectively has become critical to the success of the firms in the package delivery industry. The package delivery industry itself is a low profit margin industry. Through the cost-cutting ability of web sites and Internet, companies are able to increase their profit by reducing various costs. Also, the web sites can always provide valuable services to customers anytime and anywhere, such as online package tracking.

The FedEx web site opened in November 1994. Since then, approximately five million customers visit each month. Handling 900,000 online tracking requests each month is substantially cheaper than fielding them in the FedEx call center. Setup costs for the web site were minimal, because FedEx modified applications that were already in development for its proprietary InterNetShip network. 2 million of the current daily average of 3 million packages are shipped or tracked through the web site or through FedEx’s Windows software over a proprietary data network.

In the UPS web site, the customer can use the site to locate where a package is at a particular point in time. In 1998, UPS launched an Internet-based delivery service called UPS Document Exchange. It enables customers to send documents to anyone, regardless of the e-mail software package, operating system, or hardware on either side of the delivery process. An upgraded version also enables the document to self-destruct if tampered with. Also available is the integration of UPS package-tracking ...