UPS has announced the addition of a new sorting facility and the expansion of its existing building at Ontario International Airport, in California, in response to recent growth in e-commerce and traditional retail businesses.
The new air sorting facility will handle urgent, time-definite UPS Next Day Air packages and feature automated sorting capabilities. The construction of the facility was completed in September 2015. The 38,648 sqm facility includes staging for tractor trailers and employee parking. UPS flies 38 daily flights to and from Ontario International Airport, which lies east of Los Angeles.
The expanded ground sorting facility will be retrofitted with automated sorting systems and handle twice the amount of packages per hour, with the building footprint to increase around 15% to nearly 83,613 sqm. It will sort packages originating from and destined for areas in and around the Inland Empire.
Over the next few years, UPS plans to add over 500 new jobs at this location and will start hiring new staff in 2018, with jobs including delivery drivers and part-time package handlers.
The expansion of the existing ground sorting building is currently underway, with the addition of new automation technologies.
The automated sorting systems of both facilities are designed move parcels through the sorting process capturing package data and routing volume to proper load positions. Six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to capture parcel information from address labels. Label applicators will place “smart labels” on parcels for local delivery.
“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,” George Willis, president of UPS’s West Region, said. “We are expanding UPS’s integrated network to meet the needs of customers as they grow their businesses in the USA and around the world.”
