The art of shipping; UPS is flexing its muscle with two new Latin American cargo facilities at MIA - state-of-the

South Florida CEO, March, 2003

The chutes that sort the packages look like a maze of flume rides in a water theme park. Labeled "SSF1-S" and "1RR-1," conveyor belts deliver packages to curved slides marked "PS1" through "PS5." On a given day, 25,000 to 30,000 packages are sorted through these slots, each with scanners for the bar codes.

"Obviously, if you fly a package into Ecuador that was supposed to go to Brazil, it's very expensive to get it back," says UPS Americas Region vice president Hugo Paredes. "Every package is scanned, so there is no human error. Under the old manual labor, we'd make one error in every 5,000 packages. This is much more accurate."

Paredes manages UPS package operations for Latin America and the Caribbean, including this 46,000-square-foot state-of-the-art package-sorting facility, completed a year ago on the western skirt of Miami International Airport. Packages from across the US, first aggregated at the UPS World Port in Louisville, are shipped here for a final sort before the UPS fleet of 14 dedicated aircraft flies them to Latin America. Locally bound packages are also flown in, and picked up from 51 vehicle bays.

Opposite the package-sorting operation, across a bright rectangle of tarmac, sits the firm's 150,000-square-foot cargo building. It contains a huge (26,000 square feet) cooler for perishables--like flowers from Colombia, 3.5 million of which came in daily during the peak weeks before Valentine's Day. Next it will used for fresh bass from Chile and then asparagus from Peru.

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Upstairs in the package sorting building is a wall rack that holds book-sized DIAD computers, short for Delivery Information Activity Device. These are the portable devices drivers use to record delivery data. "I remember up north in the old days, when you had to blow on the pens to make them work," says Paredes, a 33-year UPS veteran who worked his way up through the ranks. "You can't take these [devices] away from the drivers now." --JF