INDIANAPOLIS -- More packages than ever will be shipped this holiday season – and that means more work than ever for the second-largest FedEx hub in the country, located in Indianapolis.
Indy’s facility has the ability to sort more than 2.3 million packages every single day. The Christmas season is the company’s busiest time of year.
“It’s a big facility,” said Tina Adams, managing director of Indy’s FedEx hub. “It’s exciting to see the airplanes come in every day, and excitement builds as the work goes on.”
FedEx calls this time of year their peak season. Plans for this month have been in the works since January.
“We do year-round planning,” Adams said. “As soon as peak is over, we do a post-peak-mortem and then really start in on the next year.”
Shipments from across the world come in by plane and truck and make their way onto a huge maze of more than 20 miles of conveyor belts, getting sorted automatically based on where they’re going.
The 1.5 million-square-foot facility is controlled from a room right in the middle of all the action.
“The control room is the nerve center, the nucleus of the hub operations,” said Guy Finn, senior manager for Indy’s hub. “We will monitor all the functions of the inbound, processing of the sort, and the outbound of the packages.”
To keep things moving, the hub stays in constant communication with the tower. Sitting high above the action, they coordinate planes and ground crews to make sure planes are getting unloaded and reloaded in a matter of just a few hours. They have to get 200 flights in and out every day during peak.
The facility is staffed by more than 4,000 people. While they try to keep every package safe, FedEx says a lot of that comes down to the customer.
Tina Adams, director of the day sort operations, says it’s important to make sure you’re packaging your gifts correctly so they get to their destination in one piece.
“From the pick-up through delivery, it can be in many people’s hands and the sort system, so we want to make sure they’re packaged right,” Adams said.
The entire FedEx system is expected to see 400 million packages this holiday season. FedEx says if you want items to arrive by Christmas, they need to be shipped by Dec. 21.
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