Jeff Wafford remembers a time, not long ago, when UPS’ massive, high-tech Louisville shipping hub was anything but. He spent most of his first month memorizing ZIP codes when he came to work for UPS in 2000. He worked on the line at a UPS sorting facility, and it was his job to glance at a ZIP code and automatically know exactly to which town within a 60-mile radius of Jackson, Tenn., a package was headed.

There were 10 pages of ZIP codes, and his girlfriend at the time faithfully quizzed him on them. “During the first month, we were tested every night,” recalls Wafford, who is now a welcome center supervisor for UPS. “At the end of those 30 days, you had to score 100 percent.”

Fortunately for him and other UPS employees, the package delivery giant automated its sorting facilities in Louisville at its Worldport hub, which handles all of the air mail packages sent via UPS every day. Worldport construction began in 1998 and officially opened in September 2002.

It is a sophisticated facility with a workforce the size of a small city, 44 docks ready to receive airplanes, its own communication room, and technology that synchronizes its every activity. With some 17,543 employees in the Louisville area, it could qualify for its own municipal government.

Like an airport, every aspect of how UPS’ planes land and where they dock – down to how individual packages are unloaded from planes – is planned. “It’s like planning the Superbowl every night,” said Mark Giuffre, a spokesperson for UPS.

At the heart of the system is a postcard-sized “smart” label that contains a bar code and a “maxi” code, a UPS-created code about the size of a thumbprint. Every box and envelope in the system has one, which is read by infrared scanners throughout the sorting process. “The smart” tells computers where to send each package. Grandma’s cookies coming from Boise to Shelbyville? The computer knows the name of the sender and where it’s going, just by the bar code.

No one has to memorize any ZIP codes.

Wafford tells his story to help visitors understand just how far things have come. Packages are delivered with more accuracy, workers are spared injuries and everything moves faster and more easily with UPS’ new system.

It’s simply how things are done these days in the shipping business, said Satish Jindel, a Pennsylvania-based transportation and logistics consultant. “It is a significantly enhanced automation process,” Jindel said. “Speed is so critical in this industry. That is what they sell you, is time.”

Jindel said UPS customers like it, too, because it’s the brain of the company’s tracking network, allowing customers to approximate where a package is at any time.

Economic development officials say the facility and the jobs it has brought are crucial for the local and state economies.

A significant portion of the world’s e-commerce purchases flows through Louisville, helping put the city on the map, said Eileen Pickett, senior vice president for community and economic development at Greater Louisville Inc.

“It is a nice intersection of our area’s strengths, which are technology and logistics,” Pickett said. “It is a high-tech business in one of our key strengths in logistics and distribution. It sets the framework for the key areas for this region.”

The scope of UPS
Overall, UPS handles some 14.1 million packages every day, sending them to 220 countries. The company can send packages to 80 percent of the planet in 48 hours. And Worldport has its hands on every package and letter shipped by air – they arrive there, are sorted, and shipped back out. That’s some 304,000 packages per hour, Giuffre pointed out. Worldport is the only automated UPS hub, though a second is planned for Cologne, Germany.

UPS has two key times when most of the packages that come into and go out of Worldport are processed: 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., when second-day air packages are sorted, and 11:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., when next-day air packages are sorted, Giuffre said. Ground packages go through the old hub and are still handled manually in another facility in Louisville.

The best way to take in the scope of the UPS Worldport facility is to take a tour, but it’s not something that happens often. The general public isn’t allowed; current and potential customers are offered a tour, but generally only from platforms situated above the working floors. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” Giuffre said. “By bringing them there, we can do more in two hours than a salesman can do in two hours out on the street.”

In the swirl of rushing packages and humming conveyor belts, UPS officials gave a Lane Report writer and photographer a tour on the ground for a look inside the logistics hub.

Planes, containers and packages
It all starts with the planes. Planes land and dock at the wings of the Worldport building, where containers of packages are unloaded and sorted, and still other containers loaded back onto the planes to leave again. The clear containers – about the size of an overly tall compact car – can weigh several thousand pounds when fully loaded. But workers tug them along the caster-covered floors with the ease of a toddler pulling a wagon.

Typically, two workers handle a container, shuffling packages from the container onto a conveyor belt. The packages run single-file at a steady pace through the system as an infrared scanner reads their labels, a camera photographs them, and a scale weighs and measures them.

Based on the scans, the parcels part ways, belts dipping or rising to push them onto the appropriate route like a noisy brown freeway system.

It takes all of 13 minutes, on average, from the time a package hits the first conveyor belt to the time it leaves the system on its outgoing container, Giuffre said. It is handled by humans only twice – once to be loaded onto the conveyor, and once to be loaded off of the belt. Small packages are loaded into crates and scanned and processed in batches.

It’s such a sophisticated system that UPS’ computers know where every package is at any time, Giuffre said. “We know every package that’s on it, what position they’re on in the plane and what container it’s in and where it’s going,” Giuffre said.

Not every package is sorted in the same way at the same time. “Irregular” packages, those that are particularly heavy or oddly shaped, are handled separately and in a more hands-on way. Giuffre said one of the main benefits of the new automated system for workers is that it is much more ergonomically correct. Formerly, irregular packages, which are some of the heaviest in the system, had to be lifted over workers’ heads onto a conveyor.

Now, the conveyor that routes those packages is waist-high. It may still be a little difficult to wrestle a poorly-packed, spilling-over box packed with heavy cloth hoses onto the belt, but at least no one has to swing it over their heads. Otway Mayfield, a full-time supervisor who worked in the former facility and now works in Worldport, said the job has gotten easier for everyone in Worldport. “Our injuries have decreased. This facility was built with employees in mind,” Mayfield said.

Keeping it all under control
So how exactly do you keep track of all of this? That would be in the operations and control center room of Worldport. This is the last stop on the tour, and journalists weren’t allowed in.

Giuffre explained that the communications brain of the center – rows of computers sitting on desks – is what tells UPS where the packages are, which planes have landed and which are ready to go, as well as which ones need a new crew so they can take off.

The systems also monitor which conveyors are up and running, and which have stopped or have a technical problem that needs to be solved. That’s crucial, since most of the conveyor belts aren’t being monitored by human eyes.

And neither are the ZIP codes. Like nearly everything but the packages themselves, it’s all in the computers.

“There is no way we could do what we do without technology,” Giuffre said. “We’ve invested $15 billion over 15 years in technology.”

Robyn Davis Sekula is a staff writer for The Lane Report.

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