Annual parcel carriers’ delivery contest from Georgia Tech — 2009

This annual contest is a student project from Prof. John Bartholdi’s class.  Every year, students will send same content parcels via different parcel carriers from Atlanta, Georgia, to same destinations, in order to compare major parcel carriers’ performance based on their delivery time and charging fee.

This year, four major international carriers – USPS, FedEx, DHL, and UPS – were participated in this contest although all were not pre-notified.  Two destinations were chosen purposely for this particular delivery mission, one for domestic and the other one for international, and both seemed to be a bit challenging to reach.

Ula Bator – the capital city of Mongolia

Opp – located in Alabama, USA, a small town in southern Alabama

Who are the winners?

Domestic delivery – Winner was USPS priority mail, the cheapest and the first to deliver (amazing!).  UPS was the second one and then FedEx after it.  DHL did not participate in this part since it dropped its U.S. domestic service since Nov last year.

International delivery – Winner was DHL, UPS and FedEx came the second and the third respectively, and USPS was the last one..  Delivery charges varied a lot as well. The scorecard of time and cost was like this:-

The scorecard

Results
Carrier	Cost	Delivery		Tracking #	Comments
Ulan Bator, Mongolia
DHL	Estimate by DHL: $134.32		First!12 Oct at 1333	8066308250	Generally regular updates to tracking
UPS	Estimate by UPS: $319.04		13 Oct at 1113	46851522573	After departing Incheon, KR on 08 Oct, there were no updates for six days.
FedEx	$227.74		14 Oct at 1000	862815443400	Sent, mysteriously, from Japan south to Guangzhou, China and then back north again to Korea. Only one update to tracking between 12 and 16 Oct.
USPS	$68.25		04 Nov at 1135	CP072663035US	No visibility between leaving Miami (why Miami?) and arrival at the local post office in Ulan Bator.
Opp, Alabama, USA
USPS	$6.95	First!07 Oct at 1356		03090330000171326776	Cheap and surprisingly fast
UPS	$16.82	07 Oct at 1641		46851522582	A ceramic mug was broken during shipment.
FedEx	$17.58	08 Oct at 1624		828519026728

As a summary, this contest was a fun and exciting project.  This project provided us a unique and creative angle to appraise carriers.  It may be too rash to conclude the overall performance of these carriers based on one single delivery.  However, since the contest has been conducted annually since 2003, we indeed can draw some conclusion regarding the carrier’s performances when looking at the contest results spanning several years.

For details and past races, please click Prof. John Bartholdi’s website.

Advertisement