As part of a global infrastructure expansion plan, UPS has announced plans to triple the size of its ground package sortation facility in Louisville, build a new package sorting center in the U.K., and expand another logistics operation in South Carolina.
UPS was the first tenant to occupy 50 acres in Louisville’s 790-acre Renaissance South Business Park, where the current processing center, known as the “Centennial Hub,” is located. The current footprint will increase from 257,000 square-feet to 838,000 square-feet with construction to begin next year.
The Centennial facility provides pickup and delivery operations for customers in Louisville and surrounding counties, and serves as a transfer point for trailers moving to destinations beyond Kentucky. It also supports end-of-runway express service, due to its proximity to the UPS Worldport facility.
The facility will be retrofitted with automated conveyors to move packages through the sort process, capturing shipping data and routing parcels to proper load positions. E-commerce and traditional retail package volume arrives in Louisville from area distribution centers. The expansion is expected to nearly double package processing rates at the facility.
Separate from UPS’s Worldport international air hub, the Centennial project will cost an estimated US$300 million and should be substantially completed by 2018. UPS plans to add more than 300 jobs at the site – a mix of full- and part-time positions – over the course of the project, with recruitment starting in 2017. Pickup and delivery operations will continue throughout the project.
Additionally, UPS will spend approximately US$185 million to build a package-sorting facility at DP World’s Logistics Park, adjacent to the London Gateway Seaport, which is only 39 miles from London-Stansted Airport. The 344,000-square-foot building is expected to be completed in the summer of 2017. This will be one of the integrator’s largest infrastructure investments outside of the United States.
Lastly, UPS will significantly upgrade its package sorting facility adjacent to Columbia Metropolitan Airport, in South Carolina. The building will be outfitted with fully automated sorting capabilities. Similar to Centennial, the Columbia structure will include six-sided “decode tunnels” that will replace traditional scanning to capture package information from address labels. For local deliveries, the packages will have “smart labels,” which will tell loaders and sorters the correct staging locations for each package prior to transport.
This 315,000-square-foot facility is on a 57-acre site, which includes staging space for tractor-trailers. The new upgrades should be up and running before the end of the year.