Some people read the Sunday paper for the extra features. Others, however, are more interested in all those advertising inserts.

And while it doesn't take long to spread the inserts out on the floor or kitchen table, it took much more time to neatly organize them for delivery to your doorstep. At The Boston Globe, in fact, that process starts the previous Sunday night and finishes late Thursday.

That work is done in a new 46,000 square foot addition to the Globe's publishing complex in the Dorchester section of Boston. The facility combines manual, powered and automated materials handling to move the pre-printed inserts from receiving to the second floor and back again for shipment to regional distribution centers.

While not physically large, merging the Sunday insert handling operation into the daily operation has had a big impact. It saves the Globe $3 million a year, says Luis Azeredo, executive director of production, while improving service to advertising customers. Return on investment for the operation exceeds 20%.

Previously, Sunday inserts were produced in a facility in the Boston suburbs. However, with an average of 16 machine shifts a week, costs ran high, and something had to be done.

In just 11 months, the $28 million insert facility was built and the operations moved to Dorchester.

The handling operation is easiest at the beginning. The inserts arrive neatly piled on pallets at five of the facility's 16 docks. Some arrive as much as two weeks before readers will ever see them. The majority get there seven or eight days in advance. As many as 200 pallet loads are received on a given day.

Lift truck drivers load pallets on the two vertical reciprocating conveyors (VRC, Westfalia Technologies, 717-764-1115) for delivery to the second floor. There, they are identified, checked against a list of expected advertising inserts and weighed to check that quantities are correct.

Putaway is by lift truck in three deep and single deep pallet rack. Bar codes identifying the 1,500 storage locations are scanned by drivers to link product to a specific location for the warehouse management system.

In a typical week, the Globe builds insert bundles for 480 different zones selected by advertisers, explains Rocky Carnahan, mailroom superintendent. Some zones are as small as 25 subscribers while others are for several thousand.

In addition, Carnahan says the number of inserts in the zones differs, ranging from as few as five to as many as 60. The actual size of the inserts differs too. That combination makes building bundles tricky.

As Azeredo points out, "most materials handling units are uniform. Ours are unstable and we work pretty hard to be sure they can be conveyed properly without damaging the bundles."

Once pallets are called out of storage and brought to lift tables along an inserter. Here, workers manually feed inserts into the inserter. Grippers take individual inserts, and carry them overhead to bundle building machines on the other side of the second floor.

Finished bundles are then discharged to accumulation conveyors for delivery to palletizers. As pallet loads are built, each layer is immediately stretch wrapped to ensure stability. Pallet load sizes differ significantly based on the size of the zone.

Finished pallets return to the first floor for staging. As delivery trucks making runs with other portions of the paper have space, the inserts are taken to the regional DCs around Boston.

"This Sunday insert center has worked well for us," says Azeredo. "It's allowed us to improve our productivity and our customer service as well."