Kind of funny to imagine UPS, FedEx and DHL vans hurtling down some small backwater dirt road, bobbing an weaving NASCAR-style all in the effort to make sure they deliver a package first. But that’s the scenario those companies faced recently in the Great Package Race put on by the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Last month A group of 60 GT logistics students, led by logistics expert John Bartholdi, a professor in the Stewart School, sent identical boxes bound for places like Lomé, Togo and Split, Croatia. With no indication that there’s a competition underway, each carrier picks up its parcel, and the race begins. The progress of the packages was tracked online and students followed the often Byzantine journey (across oceans, rivers and jungles and sometimes by bicycle) from Atlanta, Georgia, to a location that may not even have an official street address. A map of how the carriers routed their packages to Tikrit, Iraq, during the Great Package Race is here. DHL won this year, delivering first to three of the five locations and second to the remaining two. FedEx managed to deliver to three locations, and UPS delivered parcels to two. The remaining packages from FedEx and UPS went undelivered for a variety of reasons. In past races, the carriers traded wins in different locales. The locations were challenging, to say the least: * Apia, the only city on Upulu, one of the islands comprising the country of Samoa, in the western Pacific Ocean. Upulu has no street addresses. * Florianopolis, an island off the coast of southern Brazil just above Uruguay; considered by the carriers to be a “remote area.” * Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, which is currently experiencing hyperinflation and political unrest. * Tikrit, birthplace of Saddam Hussein and a center of Sunni insurgency in Iraq. * Yangon, until recently, capital of Myanmar, one of the most isolated countries in the world. The city was formerly known as Rangoon, Burma. While carriers usually have no trouble getting the package to the general vicinity of the package address, the last part of the package’s journey slows things down considerably. “The world’s not quite flat,” Bartholdi said. “The last mile is always the hardest.” The race results are often mixed and entertaining, the GT group stated. Two carriers once showed up at the exact same time to deliver their packages. One package was carried back-and-forth across the Atlantic nine times before delivery. Another was sent to Costa Rica instead of Croatia. And one carrier claimed that the destination country didn’t exist at all. Bartholdi started the Great Package Race back in 2003 as a fun exercise for his logistics students. Each package provided a window into how the carriers operate, revealing everything from which hubs carriers route packages through to what types of operations functions can go wrong when a package is shipped internationally. The carriers have been good sports about the race and sometimes communicate with the students about what went wrong and what went right, Bartholdi said. The packages, containing Georgia Tech goodies such as a shirt and mug, are sent to the group’s friends and acquaintances all over the world, provided that their addresses present a suitably sadistic challenge for the carriers, the group said in a release. By the way, to ship a package to Tikrit DHL did it for $125.26, and got it there in 4 days.
