Picking up packages and delivering them sounds easy enough. But it's once you get into the specific details, that you find it is more complicated than that. Overnite Express has built their company on these details - small and large. It is these details that their associates' work towards every day and what sets them apart from the other overnight shipping companies.
About 12 years ago, Rob Ukropina, a graduate of USC's Marshall Business School, started Overnite Express. After finding no alternatives to the inflexible schedules of large overnight companies, unreliable messenger services and expensive next flight out options, he started a company that directly suited the needs of successful businesses. A year later, Doug Schneider, a local business professional and a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduate, joined Overnite Express as Chief Operating Officer. Together, he and Rob continued to build the company, one detail at a time. When Phil Nabal joined the company as Vice President of Operations in 1994, it was the three of them that moved the company from a first-time entrepreneurial venture to a full-fledged competitive corporation.
With their "core values" hanging in every office, emphatically stating "Attention to Detail" as one of the four points, along with "Honesty, Integrity, & Teamwork, it is not surprising that the company has grown from two associates to over 200 in the twelve years that they have been in business.
Throughout California, Overnite Express is the preeminent leader in quality overnight shipping with their niche being their infamous 9:00 PM drop-off time. The extra processing time for their packages is one of the main things their clients love about the service, as well as the significant cost savings over competitors. By being more cost effective than national competitors, Overnite Express offers premium service at an affordable price.
Overnite Express is famous for their customer service as well. By providing the best service as possible, they believe they are not prone to the pressures of other industries where a competitor might find a better and less expensive way of doing business. The extraordinary level of customer service that is offered, through Overnite Express cannot be done by large overnight companies because their size does not allow it. It is because of this customer service that they have grown from having one client in 1992 to now assisting over 4,000 companies throughout the state of California with their overnight deliveries on a daily basis.
Because of the importance of their clients, Overnite Express offers certain things other overnight delivery companies do not. Such as, maintaining their 100% delivery guarantee by providing proactive address corrections for misaddressed packages. Every day they correct about three percent of the packages that are delivered. That is what they have built their business on, the 100% guarantee, at whatever cost to the company.
Overnite Express had just moved their corporate office to a 52,000 square foot building in Irvine. Inside the new distribution center, their state-of-the-art conveyor system sorts packages in milliseconds, memorizing the addresses and then moving them along the conveyor belt to the appropriate bin, which are sorted by destination zip codes. By picking up thousands of packages at 9:00 PM from their drop boxes and clients directly, Overnite has a 12-hour turnaround for their earliest delivery time. This time frame does not allow for mistakes or miscommunication. Their associates work around the clock to ensure that the packages are delivered by their determined delivery times: 9:00 AM, 11:00AM, 1:00PM and 4:00PM. As the only overnight shipping company in the country with a sorting system so advanced, Overnite Express is the technology leader in the industry. Their clients are offered real-time Internet tracking, instant e-mail confirmations, and sophisticated shipping software that downloads in seconds and prints out address forms on regular 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper.
Throughout the state of California there are now over 900 drop boxes conveniently placed inside professional buildings, street side and business parks. With a side door for architectural plans and tubes and a front door for all other packages, these time efficient drop boxes are the easiest way of getting your package from one city to another. Delivering over one million packages on an annual basis is not a small accomplishment, but by strictly servicing the state of California, Overnite Express can offer their clients extraordinary services and benefits and yet still manage the daily details that are required to make their customers happy, successful and committed.
Orange County Business Journal
