The U.S. Postal Service has hired Matt Connelly, a supply chain and logistics industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience at package giant UPS, as chief strategy and solutions officer, Postmaster General David Steiner said Friday.
At UPS (NYSE: UPS), Connelly developed air, ocean, package and third-party logistics capabilities and played a key role in reshaping UPS’s nationwide network to handle the rise of e-commerce shipping.
“Matt’s experience will help us improve the planning, execution and alignment of our network across operations, sales and marketing as we continue to drive service excellence,” Steiner told the board of directors while presenting the organization’s fiscal second quarter results.
Connelly has worked as a special advisor to Steiner for the past seven months, according to his LinkedIn profile. Steiner spent several years on the FedEx board of directors before becoming postmaster general.
The Postal Service lost $2 billion in the second quarter and has lost more than $30 billion since the close of fiscal 2021. Steiner has said the agency can’t simply claw its way to financial stability and has made growing package revenue a key priority.
Last month, the USPS named Pete Routsolias director of logistics, a role he has held on an interim basis since December. He joined the organization in 2020 after holding senior transportation leadership positions at Ashley Distribution Services, Univar Solutions and XPO Logistics.
In 2022, Connelly helped found Vesta Freight, a trucking brokerage based in Nashville, Tennessee, and served as its president. Before that, he spent nearly three years as CEO of the nonprofit Good360, which is credited with significantly expanding its reverse logistics capabilities. He was co-chairman of the board from 2011 to 2019.
From January 2017 to July 2019, Connelly served as vice president of network planning at UPS, where he was responsible for the design and performance of the North American transportation network. His duties included driving more than $1 billion in annual ground transportation spend and optimizing UPS’s private fleet and partnerships, developing e-commerce delivery strategies, and providing zone-hopping solutions for UPS’s 80 largest customers.
He also managed the UPS integration of truck brokerage Coyote Logistics in the middle of the last decade. (UPS has since sold Coyote.) Connelly spent more than 12 years as vice president and general manager of UPS Supply Chain Services in the Americas region, helping to integrate the acquisition of Menlo Forwarding and leading the company’s freight forwarding business.