UPS makes expansions at its Inland Empire-area airport facilities

UPS said this week it has added a new sorting facility and expanded its existing building at the California-based Ontario International Airport.

Company officials said that the new sorting facility will process urgent, time-definite UPS Next Day Air packages and include automated sorting capabilities, with the ground sorting facility to be retrofitted with automated sorting systems and double the package processing capacity per hour (UPS would not disclose the amount of packages processes per hour, due to competitive reasons).

Upon completion, UPS said that its facility’s footprint will increase by about 15 percent to almost 900,000 square feet and will sort packages headed to areas in an around the Inland Empire. This effort is being spurred on by e-commerce growth and traditional retail businesses. On the personnel side, UPS said that it plans to add more than 500 new jobs at this facility over the next five years for delivery drivers and part-time package handler positions, with hiring to begin in 2018.

“These investments in UPS’s air and ground network illustrate UPS’s commitment to customers in the Inland Empire and abroad, and are part of an ongoing, network-wide investment the company continues to make in hub expansion and automation,” states George Willis, president of UPS’s West Region, in a statement. “We are expanding UPS’s integrated network to meet the needs of customers as they grow their businesses in the U.S. and around the world.”

A UPS spokesman told LM that the company is seeing increased demand for our services in and around the Inland Empire, which has been driven by business and consumer growth in the area. These two projects at Ontario are part of a larger initiative, as UPS continues to add advanced equipment to scan, measure and weigh packages and affix labels for processing efficiency, he explained.

What’s more, the spokesman added that UPS’s air hub serves customers throughout most of the western third of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii. And the ground hub processes packages originating in and destined for the Inland Empire.  Both the new air hub and the expansion of the ground sorting facility support UPS customers’ future growth needs.

Other benefits of the facilities’ automated sorting facilities include:
-how they are designed to move packages through the sort process capturing package data and routing volume to proper load positions;
-six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to capture package information from address labels; and
-label applicators will place “smart labels” on packages for local delivery, providing UPS loaders faster instruction of proper loading, which is part of UPS’s suite of package flow technologies

UPS said that construction of the air sorting facility was completed in September 2015, adding that the 416,000 square foot air facility resides on more than 30 acres of land that includes staging for tractor trailers and employee parking.  UPS flies 38 daily flights to and from Ontario International Airport. The expansion of the existing ground sorting building and addition of new automation technologies is currently underway, UPS said.