It was a rapidly growing company in the home state of Federal Express in Tennessee. They were known to be the largest typesetting house on the east coast and did the printing flats for over 30 magazine publications. They were shipping over 90 packages a night, now mind you this was over 30 years ago and to have that many packages moving through their carrier of choice, FedEx meant that all the other carriers were trying to get their business. Companies like UPS, Airborne Express, Flying Tigers, really everyone in the business was trying. As the shipping manager, my job was to help the company optimize their effectiveness while cutting costs if possible. With this number of time-critical packages being shipped each day and also having the consequences of where a missed shipment resulted in $10,000 an hour penalty from the magazine printer, any changes had to be not only carefully planned but stregically implemented. 

Changing carriers at this point made no sense because FedEx had an incredible delivery track record. The former Shipping Manager had seen the company grow from 100 employees to over 300 in a two year period. I had been moved from the Assistant to Vice President of Marketing to working in Purchasing since we were acquired by a Fortune 500 company and they had their own Marketing people who were going to take over. Spending any money unnecessarily was out of the question. Being that they were the 2nd largest account for FedEx in Tennessee, the first thing I noticed was the incredible time wasting of having to fill out Airbills manually. Yes, this was 1983 and 1984 when computers were just ramping up. 

When I approached FedEx and asked if there was any way they could help us streamline our system of preparing packages for pickup, they were able to accomodate us by setting up the following system. The SuperHub in Memphis, TN was already set up for barcode scanning and most all of the packages were being sorted through their automated system. The solution was simple: Label the package through the conventional means and peel off a tracking code from a FedEx manifest. We could get close to 20 packages per manifest and it streamlined the entire system. However, to save the company $250,000 took a little ingenuity. Sometimes being a tight wad of a Scott and an Irishman to boot pays off. Yes, I admit I am One! Really... watching pennies can pay off in the long run. 

Everynight after 6pm the courier for FedEx would come in and I began to notice after the first few nights that they were doing an unusual thing. He would pick up the packages and lift it up and down kind of like you do when you "DON'T Have a SCALE!" No way... was our company literally shipping millions of dollars worth of FedEx without having a scale. Now mind you the previous shipping manager was more of a fiscal conservative than I was. But to have NO SCALE... meant saving 300 to 400 dollars initially, however JUST How much was it costing the company in the long run. 

After I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of the weights of the packages before the FedEx courier estimated the weights and reviewing the invoices after they were charged, the tallies Were IN. 22% percent savings in a two week test and when you annualize the savings on over a million dollars worth of FedEx Overnight shipping a year, it amounted to a cost savings of over a $250,000 dollars. Needless to say my Boss and I were very popular people to the Corporate Executives ofWhittle Communications. My boss got a $27,000 bonus and I got a nice promotion, not bad work for a 25 year old. Sometimes it is a matter of making simple changes to transform your business and make more profit than ever before!