PARSIPPANY — The United Parcel Service building is complete at 10 Upper Pond Road and employees have been moving into the new four-story building since August.
UPS broke ground on its new construction on February 15, 2016 and excavators were at work on the 20-acre site off Cherry Hill Road. The four-story building is outfitted with enhanced communications systems to connect UPS technologists and business units around the world.
The building will house about 1,000 of 15,000 UPS employees in New Jersey, most of them coming from a facility in Paramus that will be vacated.
Benjamin Swanson, Information Services, said “We are already enjoying our location. We thank the support we received from the Township of Parsippany-Troy Hills. We are looking forward to a long relationship with the Township.”
The Christie administration helped pave the way to keep UPS in the Garden State with a New Jersey Economic Development Authority “Grow New Jersey” grant of $40 million covering 10 years. Other large Morris County employers have received similar incentives, including $40 million in tax incentives to Honeywell Corp. in 2013 when it announced a move from its longtime Morris Township headquarters; it moved to Morris Plains instead of leaving the state.
“We have a lot of great talent here in New Jersey and we want to retain that talent,” said Andy Dotterweich, senior vice president of technology at UPS. Consolidating software operations into a state-of-the-art facility will help to do that, he added. UPS employs more than 4,500 technology workers worldwide.
Some of the applications that have been developed in-house for UPS by developers in New Jersey include UPS My Choice, UPS CampusShip, UPS WorldShip and visibility tools such as UPS Tracking.
New Jersey coders also supported the development of UPS Package Flow Technologies, the company’s suite of solutions that has streamlined UPS’s scanning, automated sorting, driver dispatching and load-assist processes throughout its integrated delivery network.
“We also have a lot of projects related to telematics. …We have sensors on our trucks that allow us to manage our fleet more efficiently,” Dotterweich told us. “We can keep track of idle time and gas mileage. It’s all in an effort to reduce mileage. As an example, our telematics project cut over 280 million minutes of idle time in 2014, which is about two million gallons worth of fuel.
“We also have project ORION, which is a progressive way to manage drivers’ routes to make sure they are efficient. It will be managed out of the Parsippany location,” he added.
ORION, or “On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation,” uses fleet telematics and advanced algorithms to gather and calculate data to provide UPS drivers with optimized routes, according to a UPS backgrounder. The technology helps UPS drivers determine the optimal way to deliver and pick up packages within a set of stops defined by a start time, commit time, pickup windows and special customer needs. The system relies on online map data, customized by UPS, to calculate miles and travel times in order to plan the most cost-effective routes. ORION is expected to be implemented in 2017.
The building is located at 10 Upper Pond Road. Parsippany is already home to a gigantic UPS warehouse and customer center at 799 Jefferson Road.
