Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Package precision

Millions of packages move seamlessly each night through the UPS Worldport hub to the rest of the world.

By STEVE HUETTEL
Published December 19, 2005

	[Times photos: David Zentz]
	Half circle-shaped containers, nicknamed ""igloos,'' are designed to fit in a jet's cabin.
	Employees in the Global Operations Center near UPS Worldport oversee aircraft, weather, news and other factors to ensure smooth operations.
	Employee Benjamin Dixon, 22, handles packages at UPS Worldport in Louisville, Ky. The 4-million-square-foot hub has 122 miles of conveyors.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The airport here comes alive shortly before midnight.

UPS jets touch down on both of Louisville International's parallel runways about every 90 seconds. Tugs pull lines of cargo containers across the apron, dodging squat, yellow fuel trucks, belt loaders and other traffic.

One night last week, 1.1-million air express packages at the UPS Worldport hub zipped along the 122 miles of conveyors and were separated by destination, scanned and loaded back on planes for morning delivery - all in about four hours.

Volume is building with the holidays and will peak here Wednesday at more than 2-million express air items during the hectic late-night and smaller afternoon "sort."

The world's largest package delivery company, UPS moves the bulk of its 14-million average daily deliveries by truck. But for the company's growing overnight service, Louisville is the crown jewel.

UPS completed a $1-billion expansion in 2002 that more than doubled the hub's size and introduced new technologies making it far more automated. About 100 company jets fly shipments into Worldport nightly, reload and fly back out across the country.

They bring through a vast array of stuff: human tissue for transplants, guppies from a Hillsborough County fish farm for a PETCO store in Colorado, a fire plug-shaped container of the kind that typically carries bull semen for breeding cattle.

Eighty-eight companies have moved to Louisville to ship products faster and cheaper, UPS says. They include drug manufacturer Amgen and a Nova Scotia seafood company that operates "the world's largest inland lobster distribution facility" from a nondescript warehouse.

UPS also routes express packages through six regional hubs in the United States. The network gives UPS flexibility to send flights elsewhere if bad weather closes a hub. When an ice storm hit Dallas on Dec. 7, the company rerouted deliveries to Louisville and Rockford, Ill., and drove the packages into the region.

Worldport, however, handles so much volume that other facilities can't pick up the slack during the four-hour, late-night sorting window, said Mike Bowman, contingency operations manager at the UPS air operations center.

"Sometimes we don't do as well as we'd like," he said. "But Louisville does not shut down."

Built on 550 acres between Louisville International's two runways, Worldport dwarfs the airport's passenger terminal. There are 4-million square feet under roof, the equivalent of 15 Louisiana Superdomes, UPS likes to say.

Jets park at 44 docks, where lifts rise up for unloading half circle-shaped containers designed to fit the rounded sides of the main cabin. The standard A-2 container, nicknamed an "igloo," is the size of a backyard storage shed.

A fully loaded igloo can weigh 11/2-tons or more. Each floor they move across - on the lift, the dock and inside Worldport - is embedded with upside-down caster wheels or roller balls. One worker can push an igloo. Usually one grabs a handle on a corner while another pushes.

Workers unloading containers choose separate conveyor belts for three types of items: standard, six-sided boxes; small packages and overnight envelopes of less than 10 pounds and "irregulars," such as rolls of cloth or tires.

Ideally, regular boxes are touched by human hands only twice, during unloading and loading. Seconds after hitting the belt, they are automatically weighed and measured. An infared scanner records the tracking number and bar-coded ZIP code.

If there's a problem, a photo of the package appears on a computer screen in another building. An employee called a "telecoder" tries to fix the glitch electronically by, for example, adding a ZIP code written on the label to the item's computer file.

A package is scanned as many as six times while being directed along a series of belts based on the region, state, city and ZIP code of its destination. Black plastic "pucks," triggered by a computer that knows an item's size and weight, slide across a conveyor to shove it to a different belt or down a chute where workers load it into the right igloo.

Small packages arrive in sacks. They're dumped on a belt and slide down chutes to workers stationed beside a conveyor line of plastic trays. The job is simple: slide one package into each tray, label side up.

A scanner links the package to the tray. Computers tip the tray at the right moment so the package slides into one of 2,852 sacks, each designated for a city, a ZIP code or even a single block for a big city like New York.

Odd-shaped items or those weighing more than 100 pounds go on "tubs," Fiberglass sleds about 10 feet long that clatter on rails with plastic rollers. They require the most human handling to navigate through the multilevel maze of belts.

Before the new Worldport came online three years ago, a small army of employees hand-sorted packages by geographic area.

Jeff Wafford memorized 40 to 50 ZIP codes in and around Jackson, Tenn., for his first job at Worldport five years ago. He spent three days in class, attended five hands-on sessions and a week with a trainer on the line before he was qualified to work on his own.

"Now, it's two days in class, but they can teach someone in 22 minutes," said Wafford, who works at Worldport's welcome center giving tours to company clients. "The jobs were de-skilled."

UPS began the Louisville operation in 1981 when it entered into the overnight delivery business after the success of FedEx.

The city's location was ideal. Jets can reach any city on East Coast within 21/2 hours and the West Coast in 31/2 hours. UPS also likes flying into smaller airports where the runways and air space don't get backed up with heavy airline traffic.

Weather also is pivotal. Louisville's airport has closed for snow only once in the past 20 years, when 18 inches blanketed the city in 1994 on a day forecasters predicted a light dusting.

Competitors shared the same strategy, locating their big hubs in the region. FedEx, the leader in overnight delivery, sorts shipments at a hub in Memphis, Tenn. DHL uses an old Air Force base it owns in Wilmington, Ohio, southeast of Dayton.

UPS executives faced a big problem when deciding in the late '90s whether to expand Worldport or build elsewhere. Turnover for line jobs - nearly all part-time, late-night shifts - was comparable to that of fast-food restaurants.

State officials scrambled to keep UPS, which had 17,000 workers in Louisville and was Kentucky's largest employer.

They created a program where UPS and the state pay tuition at the University of Louisville or two local colleges for students who sign contracts to work the night shift. Most of the jobs are for package handlers starting at $8.50 an hour. The company recruits statewide.

About half of the 5,000 night shift employees are students. Most of the rest are working second jobs, attracted by company benefits like health insurance, said UPS spokesman Mark Guiffre.

At a quiet campus setting a mile south of the airport, a UPS division called Supply Chain Solutions fills orders for cell phones, U.S. Navy weapon systems and computer monitors.

UPS owns the warehouses, hires employees and arranges all aspects of shipping for companies that prefer to contract out the logistics of delivering products, and sometimes services, to their customers.

If your Toshiba laptop computer crashes under warranty, someone at the toll-free help line will direct you to the nearest UPS Store. The laptop flies to Louisville, where UPS technicians in clean rooms make repairs. Sometimes, they can get it back in your hands the next day.

At another complex an hour's drive south, UPS operates a parts warehouse for Bentley automobiles that stocks everything from engines and bumpers to small pollen filters. In another building, UPS employees fill orders for underwear, T-shirts, socks and the like on the Jockey.com Web site.

Other companies build their own distribution centers in Louisville for the convenience and speed of shipping so close to Worldport.

Clearwater Fine Foods used to be swamped completing U.S. Customs paperwork for each shipment of live lobsters to American restaurants and wholesalers from its home in Bedford, Nova Scotia.

For six years, the company has packed up to 30,000 pounds of lobsters each week in a tractor-trailer for the 30-hour drive to a Louisville warehouse. Inside are two, 25,000-gallon salt-water reservoirs where lobsters recover from the trip for a week or so.

A UPS truck arrives nightly to pick up boxes headed for customers such as a Seattle grocery called Kustom Foods and Allread's Restaurant in Telluride, Colo.

The paperwork is easier - it takes as much for a truckload as a 30-pound box, said Michael Middleton, operations manager of the distribution facility. He doesn't worry about a shipment held up by an inspector or misplaced during multiple flight connections.

"Our customers can't book a wedding and not know if the lobsters will show up and they'll have to give them steak," Middleton said.

Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or 813 226-3384.

Avg. Daily Deliveries: 14.1-million

Avg. Daily Air Shipments: 2.2-million

Est. Peak Daily Deliveries: 20-million (Dec. 20)

Est. Peak Daily Air Shipments: 5-million (Dec. 21)

Worldport Avg. Daily Package volume: 1.1-million

Est. Peak Worldport Package volume: 2-million (Dec. 21)

Worldport sort capacity: 304,000 packages per hour

Worldport miles of conveyers: 112

Source: UPS

[Last modified December 16, 2005, 21:31:03]