UPS adds air, ground capacity in SoCal

The parcel giant is expanding a ground facility next to Ontario International Airport after recently adding a facility to handle express air parcels.    UPS on Tuesday announced it is expanding its existing ground sorting facility adjacent to the Ontario International Airport in Southern California, following the September completion of a new air sort facility on the site.
   The new building has automated sorting machines to process UPS Next Day Air packages, a premium product. The 416,000-square foot air facility sits on more than 30 acres of land that includes staging for tractor trailers. 
   The Atlanta-based parcel carrier flies 38 daily flights to and from Ontario International Airport. It also receives truckloads of packages from regional terminals in its network. Those shipments are segregated by service level, with urgent packages going to the air sort facility for reloading on planes to a destination city and deferred shipments moving by truck handled at the ground sort facility.
   The existing ground facility  will be enlarged about 15 percent to almost 900,000 square feet and be retrofitted with automated sorting systems to process ground shipments, which will double package processing capacity per hour.
   UPS said the expansion is driven by growth in e-commerce and traditional retail businesses with operations in the Inland Empire. The company plans to add more than 500 jobs the Ontario sort facility during the next five years, including delivery drivers and part-time package handlers.
   Automated sortation systems capture bar codes and other data on each package to route them to their proper load position for delivery. UPS said six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to capture package information from address labels. Label applicators will place “smart labels” on packages for local delivery, providing UPS loaders faster instruction of proper loading.