Rapid Transit: UPS Speeds Ground Package Shipping for Chicago Customers; Transit Times Slashed...

CHICAGO -- The time it takes for a UPS ground package to travel from Chicago to New York City just got shorter.

Today, UPS (NYSE: UPS) announced the most significant upgrade ever to its U.S. ground package delivery network, accelerating the delivery of more than a half-million packages

The enhancements made to UPS's massive ground network over the past several months have improved service for some 1.2 million customers nationwide without changing pick-up and delivery hours.

More than 3 million ZIP code pairings nationwide are impacted by the improvements.

The faster deliveries will benefit daily package pick-up customers in Chicago as well as general consumers who ship via UPS or The UPS Store customers. For example, shipments between Chicago and New York City now are guaranteed to arrive in two business days instead of three.

In Chicago, about 31,000 regular shipping customers will benefit from the improvements. UPS operates 12 facilities, dispatches 1,700 vehicles, and employs about 16,000 in the greater Chicagoland region.

"Companies of all sizes as well as consumers in Chicago now can conduct business faster than ever before with the same UPS convenience and reliability they have come to expect," said Kurt Kuehn, UPS senior vice president, worldwide sales and marketing. "And the enhancements work in both directions because our customers will benefit from this network upgrade when they receive packages coming into Chicago as well."

Along with Chicago, the ground network upgrades will accelerate service for customers in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas / Fort Worth, the Los Angeles Basin, New York City together with northern New Jersey and the Tri-state Connecticut area, Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C.

This UPS change is the latest and most significant in a series of continuous improvements made in ground transit times over the past five years and comes nearly eight years after the company introduced the industry's first ground guarantee. Speeding up the UPS ground network has been enabled by the company's strategy of giving customers the ability to make packages "smart" by generating their own information-rich UPS labels. Not only does this allow customers to track every package in the global network, but it also gives UPS the ability to model more efficient transportation solutions using the information on each package's movement.

To ensure UPS customers understand the benefits of the accelerated delivery network, the company is launching national and local advertising campaigns made up of radio and TV spots, online and print advertisements and direct mail pieces to customers. Additionally, customers can view the improved transit times at www.ups.com and print both outbound maps as well as inbound time-in-transit maps. The latter option provides the recipient's view of delivery days and is another industry first.

UPS is the world's largest package delivery company and a global leader in supply chain services, offering an extensive range of options for synchronizing the movement of goods, information and funds. Headquartered in Atlanta, UPS serves more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. UPS stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange (UPS), and the company can be found on the Web at UPS.com.