IT Ensures FedEx's Lifesaving DeliveriesIT Ensures FedEx's Lifesaving Deliveries

Within hours of the World Trade Center attacks, New York hospitals faced a shortage of albumin, a medication critical to burn victims. All U.S. airports were closed, and for a California biopharmaceuticals company, ground transportation wasn't an option. The CharterAir division of FedEx Custom Critical got permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to make an emergency flight, and within 24 hours of the attack, 54 Northeast hospitals were fully stocked with the lifesaving drug.

When rescue workers needed food, water, boots, and clothing, FedEx trucked one of the first shipments of relief supplies into lower Manhattan from a stockpile at Americare Ambulance in Bridgeport, Conn.

For FedEx Corp., Sept. 11 was a nightmare that could never have been planned for. But in the 24 hours after the attacks, the $20 billion logistics and shipping company raced hundreds of tons of emergency supplies to Ground Zero, moved air shipments onto long-haul trucks for companies whose assembly lines depended on just-in-time inventory replenishment, and worked to get normal ground shipments to their destinations on time.

FedEx, in Memphis, Tenn., is clear that the credit goes to the 215,000 hardworking employees who kept the company running. And those employees praise the IT systems that made it possible for them to do their jobs. Executive VP and CIO Rob Carter, a 21-year IT veteran who's been with FedEx for eight years, gets much of the credit for the smooth operation under the immense post-attack load. Carter acknowledges his team's focus during the past several years on systems that provide absolutely accurate information about every package no matter where it is in transit. "This technology really came in handy after the attacks," he says.

Shortly after Carter saw TV footage of an airliner hitting the World Trade Center, he realized that his company's IT systems would be tested as never before, says Winn Stephenson, FedEx's senior VP of IT. FedEx was accustomed to handling local or regional problems such as blizzards or floods that close highways and airports. But it had never been forced to deal with the multitude of supply-chain problems caused by a nationwide shutdown of air traffic, U.S. border closings with Canada and Mexico, and a shutdown of many Northeast highways, including bridges and tunnels into New York.

Vinod Khosla, a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers who in the past year has appointed Carter to the boards of two companies managed by his firm, calls Carter a strategic weapon. "Rob is definitely one of the people who has led the drive to make the CIO position a strategic and significant weapon for the company," Khosla says.

Carter's strategic view of the business was never more critical than the morning of the attacks. He repeated one thought so many times it became almost a mantra, Stephenson says: "Our mission right now is to do everything we can to make sure FedEx systems work flawlessly. What we do for FedEx is what we can do for the country." Carter says although his group couldn't go to Ground Zero to help with rescue efforts, it leveraged its expertise to help in other ways. "We had the information systems that could make life-and-death supplies flow to where they were needed," he says.

To make sure relief agencies tracking delivery of supplies, and companies awaiting supplies, would get real-time information, Carter and his staff made rapid changes to FedEx.com so the site would be updated in real time. The IT

staff worked closely with operations staffers to automate the switching of air-freight packages to ground shipping. Without integration of the package-tracking systems--one of Carter's pet projects--switching air packages to ground would've been a tedious manual process, Stephenson says.

Dennis Jones, president of Commerce One Inc. and FedEx's former CIO, says it's Carter's way to take positive action in response to tragedy. Carter faced a personal tragedy in 1997 when his only child, 9-year-old Philip, died unexpectedly while Carter was on a business trip to Asia. Carter was devastated. Not long after, he and his wife, Brenda, decided to take in abandoned children as foster parents. They're now adopting four children--a 3-year-old boy, and three sisters, ages 7, 9, and 10.

Carter says the death of his son has made him focus more on losses suffered by others, and that FedEx's corporate culture makes it easy for him to do something positive with those feelings. "Somehow," he says, "emotionally, FedEx people respond in a time of crisis."