Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The UPS WorldPort Tour!

















Hanging at the UPS World-Port with David Boon. What an incredible bunch of engineering this is. The number of packages moving on the miles of conveyors is impressive! Saw lots and lots of Amazon 'smiley face' boxes on the conveyors!

There were Electic Panels like this all over the place loaded with dozens of Progammable Logic Controls (aka, robot brains) in each cabinet. The world-port was loaded with PLCs that automate nearly every thing imaginable right down to how boxes 'merge' from two belts onto one and the boxes never jam or crash because PLCs accelerate/decelerate the conveyors to manage the package traffic!






There were hundreds of 'small sort' bagging stations like this. The system is so smart that it calculates the volume of packages in each bag and shuts down the feed into that bag when it should be full. It will keep that feed shut down until the operator puts a new bag in place.








This is the 'cardboard carrier return' slide. It's hard to imagine the scale of this operation from the pictures on this page, but it's MASSIVE! And cool, and imaginative, and clean!












p.s. I'm on Twitter at JeffFuson if you wanna keep up with what's going on that way. Jeff Fuson is a Leadership Keynote Speaker who serves as Point Leader for Phos Hilaron Church near Louisville Kentucky. Jeff's # 1 passion is being a husband and daddy. A close second is seeing people grow spiritually. As a Professional Speaker Jeff delivers Leadership Keynote Speeches & training events for Leaders, Executives, Supervisors, Entrepreneurs in Government, Banks, Credit Unions, NonProfits and other cutting edge enterprises. He's got one incredible wife and 3 awesome children.

2 comments:

Shawn Ann said...

good thing you weren't there a week ago...they may have put ya to work!
Clark has to go work there in the middle of the night when it snows and nobody else shows up for work....yuck!

Gnecht said...

How did you manage to get a tour? Their public relations people told me that they don't give public tours since 9/11.