Building a Process Thinking Culture: UPS Case Study

In August 2018, APQC spoke with Christa Bol about building a process thinking culture at UPS. Bol has 19 years of experience with UPS and currently serves as its director of program, project, and process support. UPS has a long history in process dating back to the organization’s structured process engineering work in the 1940s and 50s. For decades, UPS promoted from within and as such, process became part of the company ethos. UPS embraced a culture of being “constructively dissatisfied,” which is the organization’s nomenclature for a continuous process improvement mindset. 

Recently, digitalization, mergers and acquisitions, and the development of specialized functions led to rapid growth and change at UPS. The organization could no longer rely on a built-in culture of process thinking, and yet there was more need for process work than ever before.