Bala Subramanian on organization
From UPS CDTO Bala Subramanian on Digital, Data, & the Network of the Future | Technovation 869 · · MetisStrategy
“Think of my role as having three teams under me: all the technology (engineering, IT, security), UPS Digital which we treat like a startup P&L that we are incubating and scaling, and the CX customer experience organization (ups.com, call centers, self-service).”
On , Bala Subramanian, EVice President and Chief Digital & Technology Officer at United Parcel Service, Inc., spoke about organization during UPS CDTO Bala Subramanian on Digital, Data, & the Network of the Future | Technovation 869 on MetisStrategy.
About Bala Subramanian
In a May 2024 interview on the Technovation podcast, Bala Subramanian discussed UPS's digital transformation and its goal of becoming a "logistics orchestrator." He described the "network of the future" as requiring real-time, flexible, and adaptable systems that move beyond component-level optimization. Subramanian stated that the company is creating a digital twin of its entire network and a package-level "twin of twins" to adapt routing based on each package's characteristics, such as the difference between a vaccine and a blazer. He noted that UPS is moving from a scanning network to "sensing at scale" with RFID, which he said would enable near-optimal routing and make the logistics network behave more like an IP network. Subramanian outlined his role as overseeing three teams: technology (engineering, IT, security), UPS Digital (treated as a startup P&L), and customer experience (ups.com, call centers, self-service). He said that customer experience cannot succeed without a superior employee experience)Skip, and that UPS is investing to make every agent a "super agent" capable of resolving issues on first contact. Subramanian also discussed a digital fluency program for senior leaders, which he said is now migrating to data fluency, and noted that the company uses generative AI to automate empathetic customer email responses, a project that won a CIO100 award. He added that UPS has about 20 petabytes of operational data and emits roughly a billion signals a day, which it uses to build services such as "delivery defense" to score address risk and help prevent fraud.