Left: According to UPS, its new regional hub will have a lot of tractor trailer movement, along with an adjacent package center to dispatch UPS’s familiar brown trucks
UPS has unveiled its plans to invest more than US$400m in building a new regional sorting hub on the west side of Atlanta, in the state of Georgia. The new hub will be the third largest processing facility in the company’s US network. Construction will begin later this month with completion scheduled for late 2018. The development will generate 1,250 new jobs operating on multiple sorting shifts.
David Abney, UPS chairman and CEO, said, “UPS has proudly made its global headquarters in Atlanta for more than two decades. This strategic capital investment will feature state-of-the-art technology. When combined with the strong transportation connections and talented labor pool that Atlanta provides, UPS is building flexibility to meet the growing needs of our customers and our business in Georgia, and around the world.”
The 1,200,000ft² facility will be equipped with the latest sorting, processing and data capture technology, including six-sided laser label decode tunnels, enabling it to process more than 100,000 packages per hour.
In addition to sorting and processing, the hub will include a delivery vehicle center capable of dispatching more than 280 trucks for local delivery and pickup, and a UPS Customer Center for retail service. The facility will also operate on-site compressed natural gas fueling for delivery vehicles and large tractor-trailer rigs.
UPS has also announced that it will be investing US$196m in expanding its Jacksonville package center in Florida by an additional 260,000ft². When completed in autumn 2019, the center will be capable of processing more than 80,000 packages per hour, approximately a third more than its current capacity.
Kim Wyant, president of UPS’s Florida district, said, “Jacksonville is one of the larger US ground processing facilities and an important transit point to connect road and rail in the UPS network. We appreciate the state and local community support for the new technology and jobs that give UPS flexibility to meet growing needs of our customers.”
November 15, 2016