Parcel Protection: Inside UPS Capital’s Defensive Strategy with Striim & Google

Amidst the pandemic-fueled surge in online shopping, porch piracy emerged as a prevalent concern, with over one in 10 adults falling victim to package theft within the previous year, according to a 2021 Consumer Reports survey. This modern-day menace, epitomized by the term “porch pirate,” underscores the vulnerability of unattended packages to opportunistic thieves. UPS Capital recognizes the challenges faced by its customers in securing their package delivery ecosystem and is harnessing digital capabilities and data access to redefine traditional approaches, ensuring improved customer experiences and combating shipping loss.

About UPS Capital

UPS Capital, a subsidiary of UPS, specializes in providing financial and insurance solutions tailored to businesses engaged in shipping and logistics. Established in 1999, it offers risk management services including cargo insurance and trade credit insurance, along with trade finance solutions such as supply chain finance and export financing. UPS Capital provides customs brokerage services to navigate import/export processes, supply chain optimization tools like supply chain analytics and inventory management, and technology solutions like the UPS Capital Merchant Services platform and UPS Capital Cargo Finance platform. These offerings collectively support businesses in mitigating risks, optimizing operations, and facilitating smoother transactions within the global trade and logistics landscape.

Challenges

The surge in online shopping has led to an unprecedented rise in package deliveries and, correspondingly, package theft. This upsurge has dramatically outpaced traditional security measures, exposing significant operational vulnerabilities within UPS Capital. The sheer volume of data generated from the increasing package deliveries overwhelmed existing data management systems, underscoring a critical need for more advanced data handling capabilities. The absence of real-time data processing capabilities hindered UPS Capital’s risk management and rapid response efforts. This deficiency affected not only operational efficiency but also eroded consumer trust and impacted the financial performance of the company. These multifaceted challenges highlighted the urgent need for a sophisticated solution capable of addressing the complexities of modern package delivery and logistics.

Solution

risks by rerouting packages or adjusting delivery protocols based on the calculated confidence scores, thereby streamlining operations and enhancing security.

The UPS DeliveryDefense program utilizes a sophisticated technical setup, starting with the direct upload of varied datasets into BigQuery. This platform acts as the primary structured data repository in Google Cloud. Concurrently, SQL Server data is thoroughly cleaned in Link Data, which also extracts images and email attachments from different systems, ensuring data integrity and availability. These enriched datasets are merged in BigQuery for seamless Google Cloud integration. Vertex AI then becomes pivotal, running advanced machine learning models like route anomaly detection and fraud detection for shipping transactions. Using Vertex AI’s extensive tools, these models are trained, refined, and implemented to discover insights, predict trends, and extract valuable information. Firestore, a flexible database suitable for various development environments, stores insights, confidence scores, and analytical details, all accessible via the Looker API.

Results

• Improved Customer Experience: The integration of Striim not only secures deliveries but also optimizes routing and delivery strategies, resulting in heightened reliability. This reliability, in turn, boosts customer trust and satisfaction, as customers receive their packages safely and on time.
• Cost-Savings: UPS achieved significant cost reductions by implementing advanced strategies to minimize losses from theft and optimize delivery routes, employing proactive risk management alongside sophisticated analytics and route optimization algorithms.
• Advanced AI and ML Implementations: Utilizing Striim in conjunction with Google Cloud technologies like BigQuery and Vertex AI, UPS can deploy complex machine learning models. These models are crucial for detecting routing anomalies and preventing shipping fraud, thereby enhancing the security and efficiency of the delivery network.
• Improved Data Processing and Analytical Accuracy: Striim’s implementation of AI-driven innovations, such as embedding vectors into streaming data, markedly improves the efficiency and accuracy of data processing. This technology allows UPS to perform real-time analytics, yielding quicker and more accurate decision-making in logistics.
• Upgraded Protection Against Evolving Threats: Striim enables UPS to continuously adapt and enhance its defense models through ongoing analysis of real-time data and dynamic vector generation. This approach significantly strengthens UPS’s capabilities to mitigate evolving threats such as package theft and delivery fraud.