UPS has named Daniel Carrera as the new president of UPS Europe. In his new role, Carrera will be responsible for managing operations and more than 50,000 UPSers across 56 countries and territories. In the response against the pandemic, the Europe region has continued to grow as a global hub in the UPS network, meeting the growing demands of e-commerce as well as playing a vital role in the delivery of vaccines from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, North America and Africa.

Carrera, a Spanish national, is the second European president of UPS Europe. He has held several senior leadership positions across the region, and was most recently president, West Europe District, alongside acting as the International Ambassador for Diversity & Inclusion. In these roles, he played a key role as the region completed a $2 billion, five-year investment cycle which improved speed, added capacity, and met increased demands driven by e-commerce, healthcare, and cross-border trade.

Before joining UPS, Carrera was the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) director of global accounts at Menlo Worldwide, a global freight forwarding provider. Following UPS’s acquisition of the company in 2005, he oversaw the successful integration of the sales teams of Menlo Worldwide and UPS Supply Chain Solutions.

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LEADERSHIP Q&A: UPS’s NEW Europe President looks forward to the next stage of evOlution through a customer lens

Daniel Carrera speaks about leading UPS’s largest region outside of the U.S. where he is responsible for managing operations and more than 50,000 UPSers across 56 countries and territories. The Europe region has continued to grow as a global hub in the UPS network during the pandemic, meeting the growing demands of e-commerce as well as playing a vital role in the delivery of vaccines from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, North America and Africa.

We sat down with UPS’s second European president and first ever Spanish national. He has held several senior leadership positions across the region, and was most recently president, West Europe District, alongside acting as the International Ambassador for Diversity & Inclusion. In these roles, he played a key role as the region completed a $2 billion, five-year investment cycle which improved speed, added capacity, and met increased demands driven by e-commerce, healthcare, and cross-border trade.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Customer driven, highly inclusive. I expect all of my team to share my mission to keep the customer front of mind in all that we do. The need for this mindset is one that encompasses all functions. Inclusion is critical. It occurs when everyone has the opportunity and confidence to fully participate in creating business success. Creating an environment where inclusion can thrive is essential and it’s an aim for my leadership. I have witnessed it countless times in my life and my work for UPS where I have been grateful for the opportunity to live, learn and work across the US and many markets in Europe.

You can see it every day in any UPS facility. Diversity expands our pool of ideas and makes us more creative and able to respond to ever-changing circumstances. It helps us pre-empt problems and anticipate the needs of our customers. Europe is linguistically and culturally diverse, and its cities are home to hundreds of languages from all over the world. In order to serve those communities, the diversity of our workforce is an asset – it’s what enables us to connect with an equally diverse set of customers and businesses who count on us to keep moving the world forward by delivering what matters.

Fostering an open, trusting workplace where we can celebrate and learn from our differences is at the core to making UPS stronger.

We have heard the term “inclusive trade” used by UPS as it grows its network. Tell us what that means to you.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) represent 99% of all businesses in the EU and in many sectors account for more than 50% of total exports, according to the European Commission. These small businesses are big sources of growth – and I want my teams to keep servicing that growth and helping that growth! I have worked to see UPS play an important role in supporting small business growth across the region over the past two years with initiatives such as the Women Exporters Program (WEP) in Turkey, which helped over 600 women entrepreneurs, manufacturers and cooperative ventures. My work has also supported major network enhancements in Europe, with the opening of new facilities in Prague in the Czech Republic, in Prato, Italy and the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified Barcelona hub, our first automated hub, in Spain.

There has been a lot in the press about vaccines. Tell us a little bit from the inside about how that has worked and how the smart global logistics network served the world from Europe.

UPS was involved in the fight against COVID-19 from the very beginning – really, the very beginning. The UPS Foundation shipped 2 million masks to Wuhan in January of last year while the rest of the world was considering the impact of what was yet to be declared a pandemic. Fast forward to the first vaccine deliveries to Canada and you see a commonality: Our smart global logistics network was up, running and ready. The shipment to Canada went through Europe region’s crown jewel, our air hub in Cologne. Imagining a global response to this pandemic without UPS’s European hub just isn’t possible. But it has made our global response possible.

Years of investment in our healthcare network and months of planning and preparation meant we were able to deliver the first shipments of the vaccines across the US, Canada, Europe and parts of Asia. Our partners trust the reliability and efficiency of our smart logistics network. We can provide real-time tracking and monitoring, with the ability to pinpoint the location of critical healthcare packages to within meters, which is incredibly important when you consider the value of every single vaccine.

Our European operations, including our UPS Healthcare campus and freezer farms in the Netherlands and our European air hub in Cologne, have been at the heart of this effort making sure we deliver what matters most at the right time, at the right temperature, to communities all over the world. Our expertise is what has driven our collaboration with COVAX and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to facilitate the initial delivery of 20 million doses for countries that have not had sufficient access to vaccines, including top priority groups like healthcare workers. We’re part of a global coalition delivering vaccines on an unprecedented scale. It’s an honor to be a part of the road to recovery.

UPS’s purpose statement “Moving our world forward by delivering what matters”, what does purpose mean to you and how you plan to run Europe?

Whenever you make any major change, in business or in life, you have to figure out what matters. The purpose statement was launched last year, in the middle of the pandemic, and we have been living by it ever since. It really typifies what we do for our customers in a world where delivering has never been more important.

And our purpose has never been so compelling. UPSers have operated as essential workers on the frontlines, from delivering laptops for students at home, protective equipment for front-line workers, products for small businesses who suddenly moved their sales online, to life-saving vaccines.

We’ve seen our European network continue to grow as a global hub, meeting the growing demands of e-commerce as well as playing a vital role in the delivery of vaccines from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, North America and Africa.

Looking to the future, we have an essential role to play in Europe’s sustainable post-pandemic recovery. The world class healthcare network used today for the movement of the COVID-19 vaccine is the network that will be used tomorrow to service the growing biopharmaceutical market. The need for technology-driven and temperature controlled supply chains will only grow and we have shown how quickly we scale to accommodate special needs in this growing sector. Continuing to accelerate digitalization of businesses, building resilience in global supply chains and creating a truly low carbon economy sit at the core of helping our customers not only recover but prosper. But to do so we must be ambitious in our thinking. And our actions!

We will also help the 50,000 UPSers across Europe reach their full potential and feel empowered to develop new strategies and solutions. We know we have a lot to do. The world is changing before us at an unprecedented rate and to keep it moving forward we must innovate our role as partners to our customers.

Lots of business leaders talk about it, but what does Sustainability mean to you?

Climate change affects every corner of our world, and we need to empower and accelerate climate action worldwide in the communities where we work and live. Europe is a leader here.

By setting our ten sustainability goals in 2016 we set ourselves an ambition to transform how UPS operates. Creating and investing in sustainable solutions, and the kind of innovative thinking that entails, plays an important role in any business, stirring creativity, efficiency and collaboration that helps us all.

We launched our first eBike delivery pilot in Hamburg, Germany, already back in 2012. Today, we are working on more than 30 urban logistics projects in cities worldwide. The Hamburg project dispelled myths that sustainability would come at the cost of performance and efficiency. Just look at our new hub in Barcelona, our first facility in Europe to meet LEED energy efficiency standards, which sorts 22,000 packages per hour—more than 2.5 times the facility it replaced. Through these initiatives and the work of UPSers, we succeeded meeting four of our targets a full year ahead of schedule, improving our business and customer offerings in the process.

Now we need to accelerate our efforts and continue our world leading work. I’m particularly excited by our partnership with Arrival and what the future holds for our fleet, but there are many other areas where we can find meaningful gains in terms of not only sustainability, but business performance too. Let me be clear: Climate action is not just the right thing to do – it makes business sense.

It seems far away in location and on the calendar, but with Expo 2020 Dubai starting up later this year, do you have any plans to get engaged given the high number of European countries with pavilions there and business in that region?

As I’ve said, UPS is committed to creating a more sustainable company – and world. The ideas of Expo 2020, opportunity, mobility and sustainability sit at UPS’s core and we’re proud to be the event’s official logistics partner. As part of the partnership we’re also working with a number of European countries as they plan and deliver their own pavilions and challenge what our ideas of tomorrow will look like.

When you consider the sheer size and scale of the Expo – the undertaking is set over 600 football pitches with over 190 countries taking part – you can understand the logistics challenges that go with it. We’re taking advantage of the entirety of our network over land, air and sea to make critical deliveries, including of the 21 x 30 meter, German engineered carbon-fiber structures that act as the entry portal to the entire Expo. Millions of visitors will pass through the massive iconic doorways that UPS delivered for a small German firm that hand built the first part of Expo that people will experience.

The importance of the event, and our partnership, goes far beyond logistics. It’s about promoting the very best of innovation and sustainability as well as private and public partnerships. We’re doing our part, from the electric assisted quad cycles and tricycles, to the display of the latest generation of UPS electric vehicles produced by European manufacturers.

For UPS, our work with the Expo is about one thing – bringing Europe, and the world, to Dubai.

Do you have any closing words?

There really aren’t enough words to describe how honored I am to be in this role. I am looking forward to my continued work with our amazing customers – we wouldn’t be here without them and that helps explain the sharp customer focus you will continue to see. With my wider team across Europe, you will see UPSers carry on moving the world forward by delivering what matters.

The world is changing before us at an unprecedented rate and to keep it moving forward we must be continually challenging ourselves to develop new strategies and solutions. In the last year, our European network has continued to evolve, leading the fight in the response against the pandemic and supporting booming e-commerce markets. Like I said, it’s an honor to lead the region and our people across Europe as we look forward to the future through the lens of our customers who rely on UPS and our world class network every single day.