UPS has announced the opening of a new package distribution facility in Lockport, one of Chicago’s growing suburbs. The company’s $40m investment in the new building brings more than 273,000 sq ft of new capacity to UPS operations serving customers in the area. In March, UPS also completed a significant upgrade to its Addison facility. Together, these UPS infrastructure projects add almost 700 new jobs to support expanding customer needs in greater Chicago.
“The Chicago metro area is one of the country’s largest and most diversified economies. With its tremendous access to transportation as a hub for air, rail, interstate trucking and even commercial cargo shipping, Chicagoland is a strategic location for UPS,” said Rich Moore, president of UPS’s Illinois District. “The new building in Lockport and the Addison operations modernization are part of an ongoing plan to grow the UPS smart logistics network across the country and globally.”
Package scanning and sortation equipment installed in both facilities allow dynamic changes to be made to the flow of packages being processed, increasing flexibility for routing through the UPS network. The new operations technology also helps power the rollout of the UPS Saturday ground delivery and pickup service that began in late April. With increasing retail fulfilment demands and residential delivery growth in the area, metropolitan Chicago has been an early market for the new service.
Chicago is home to the 2m sq ft CACH (Chicago Area Consolidation Hub), the second largest package processing facility in the global UPS operations network, as well as the headquarters for UPS subsidiary Coyote Logistics.
Since early 2016 UPS has announced plans to construct eight new U.S. facilities that will create more than 5.9m sq ft of additional facility space for increasing package processing capacity. In addition to the new facilities, UPS has begun expanding and upgrading five U.S. locations during the same period, installing package scanning and sortation technology that increases processing speed, accuracy and efficiency, as well as enables package routing flexibility.
Source: UPS
