{"id":1283,"slug":"ups-orion-route-optimization-savings","title":"UPS ORION route optimization (INFORMS Franz Edelman 2016) — at full deployment ~$300-400M/yr savings, 100M fewer miles, 10M fewer gallons fuel","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","smb-owner","candid-team"],"topics":["open-data","data-infrastructure"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** **UPS ORION** route optimization — built on telematics, ~250M address data points, and map/GPS data (public and proprietary) — was estimated at full deployment to save **$300-400M annually**, **~100M fewer miles/yr**, **~10M gallons fuel/yr**, **~100,000 metric tons CO₂/yr**. Project cost **~$250M**; had already saved >$320M by Dec 2015; **6-8 mile/day reduction per driver**.\n\n**Source:** INFORMS 2016 Franz Edelman Award (https://www.informs.org/Impact); corroborated by bsr.org.\n\n**Confidence:** Verified.\n\n**Caveat:** UPS is a large public company, used here as a *mechanism illustration* of route-optimization-on-mixed-public-and-proprietary-data, not as an SMB.\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** Establishes the mechanism. For an Ontario SMB the same principle scales down: a delivery business that optimises routes against free map data + its own scheduling history is operating in the same shape, even if the savings are five orders of magnitude smaller. See [[rule-build-only-on-data-you-already-own]].","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-data-driven-tools-smb-june-2026","title":"Research brief: live data and data-driven tools for SMBs — when it's an edge, when it's overkill (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-build-only-on-data-you-already-own","title":"R2 — Build only on data you already own — transaction history, CRM, scheduling, no-show patterns; that is the only category with native defensibility","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-20T16:57:38.916Z","updated_at":"2026-06-20T16:57:38.916Z"}