If you ever have an opportunity to tour the UPS Hub in Richmond, Virginia, I would highly recommend it.
I would like to give a special thanks to the CSCMP Central Virginia Chapter for putting last weeks tour together and to Rob Mason, Industrial Engineering Manager, and Adriana White, Industrial Engineering Supervisor for the Twilight Shift, for taking time from their busy schedules at UPS to provide the tour.
The UPS facility in Richmond is what they call a Hub that also has five centers as part of the facility. The Richmond Hub sits on 46.6 acres, is 327,000 square feet, with 4.4 miles of conveyor. It processes over 44,000 packages per hour, and does this through 35 inbound bays and 103 outbound bays. The Richmond Hub handles over 76 locations in the US. The five centers handle over 60,000 packages per day for the Richmond area.
The brain of the operation is in the Flow Control Area. One controller is responsible for the entire process within the facility to ensure that packages continue to move throughout the facility while meeting daily goals. The UPS Hub is currently running at 97% accuracy with a goal of 98%.
There are two shifts that process packages at UPS. The Twilight Shift runs from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM and has approximately 310 employees processing over 120,000 packages per day. The Midnight Shift has approximately 215 employees that runs from 10:00 PM till 2:00 PM and processes over 90,000 packages per day. Each shift runs for 4 hours without break.
The Hub has the five centers that service the Richmond area along with the Unload, Sort, and Load areas. The Unload area unloads the incoming trucks at a rate of 1,000 packages per hour. The Sort area is the next step in the process and they too are processing packages at a rate of 1,000 per hour. The final stage, called the Load area, loads the trucks at a rate of 300 per hour. It is at this stage that each individual will scan the packages with a scanner attached to their wrist.
As I learned at the end of my tour, to maximize efficiency in the UPS world, always turn right. It is more efficient!
Rich Bennett
Regional Director