Under Carter’s leadership, FedEx jumps on new technologies and often adopts them as soon as they are ready. For example, the company deployed wireless networking as soon as it was available in 1999.

By contrast, Lacy focuses on the nuts-and-bolts factors that drive changes in UPS’s technology investments. Under his stewardship, UPS waited until this year to begin updating its various wireless technologies all at once as part of a larger program to improve package scanning and tracking. But the contrasts can blur a bit: UPS is willing to make intermediate changes as technology shifts present new opportunities, and FedEx is looking ahead to the likely long-term, beneficial technologies so that there’s a framework for its experiments.

Pickup and Delivery

Every second really does count when you handle 13.6 million packages a day, as UPS does, or even 5 million, as FedEx does. Wireless technology lets these companies shave off precious seconds throughout the delivery process. (Each is spending more than $120 million?spread over three to five years?on current wireless efforts, which is a relatively small portion of each company’s roughly $1 billion annual IT budgets.)

Both UPS and FedEx rely on near-real-time data to manage their operations, and the only way for the companies to get this near-real-time information is through the use of wireless technology in the field and in their facilities.

Their massive scale also favors the use of global standards, which provide more vendor choices and lower technology costs. That’s why both companies’ efforts revolve around the same technologies (802.11b, Bluetooth and GPRS), which they use to address similar challenges. One of three related Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standards for wireless networks with ranges of about 300 feet, 802.11b provides throughput of up to 11Mbps and requires that client devices connect to an access point, much like an Ethernet PC connects to a hub or router. Bluetooth is an industry standard for wireless networks, with a range of about 10 feet and a maximum throughput of about 1Mbps. Client devices automatically connect when they come in range, making it suitable as a replacement for wires between devices, such as connecting headsets to cell phones or handhelds to printers. And GPRS is a digital cellular technology that can transmit both voice and data, with a maximum throughput of about 100Kbps. Its range varies from several hundred yards to several miles, depending on the density of obstructions such as buildings. It is used on the global system for mobile communications standard cellular networks, which are the standard throughout Europe and widely deployed elsewhere in the world, including the United States and Canada.