What now?

UPS has the worlds ninth largest airline (may be even higher up the list now that the economy has tanked); we ship more via railroad than any other industry in the world....including coal, and we send millions of tons of cargo around the world via cargo ship every day.

In May of this year, UPS's Massman building required input from our air managers, rail managers, and our cargo managers. We were sitting on the water's edge, and needed to move 100,000 packages per day, without electricity; to a city that was almost totally under water, and Massman didn't have the convenience of having our Italian fleet available.

As "preloaders" started arriving on Monday May 3, 2010 they were directed to the parking lot where temporary tents had been erected during the evening and into the night of May 2nd. The biggest problem was, there was no was to scan the packages into the tracking system. If you can't track it, you can't deliver it.......

Technology to the rescue. A portable "command center" from our Nashville air ramp was delivered to the Massman parking lot, along with generators, and lights. Packages normally moved along via conveyor belts would now be moved via the "bucket brigade" method. Scanning, normally done by computers equipped with cameras would now be done by hand.

Hand scanning was the previous generation technology.......from 2008, so several scanners were readily available.

The process went like this, semi-trailers were unloaded to the bucket brigade which passed the package past at least one person with a hand-held scanner en-route to a preloader who placed the parcel into a package car that was illuminated by a generator powered halogen lamp. UPSers adapted.

Driver DIADs (Delivery Information Aquisition Device) were uploaded with information from the scanners via the portable command center, so it was business as usual, as far as package delivery.

Recovery, to business as usual is still to come.