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Yearly Crunch Hits FedEx Hub

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By Matthew Bunk, BUSINESS WRITER

SEATTLE. Tucson. Colorado Springs. Denver.

Those cities and roughly a dozen others constantly run through the head of FedEx sorting team leader Tracey McCullough -- and at a much more rapid pace now that peak shipping season has arrived for the 1,700 workers at Oakland's FedEx Express hub.

Overnight service and on-time guarantees have trained a generation of holiday gift senders that it's perfectly all right to wait until the last minute to send packages. But for FedEx employees this time of year means lots of overtime, absolutely no dilly- dallying and not a chance of vacation.

On Tuesday, expectedto be FedEx's busiest day of 2005, McCullough wore a wry smile as she watched her team hastily sort packages coming in on a conveyer belt and agreed that these are definitely good times. It wasn't clear whether she was joking.

"Favorite time of year? Yes, it is," she said.

The hub at Oakland International Airport serves as one of five major FedEx distribution centers in the United States that play a central role in making sure up to 8.5 million packages per day reach their destinations on time.

FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service each see their shipping loads grow 50 to 100 percent in the two weeks leading up to Christmas, according to statistics released by the nation's two largest private shipping companies and the government agency.

The Postal Service expects to deliver about 1 million packages a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, some of them through FedEx.

Patrick Donahoe, USPS deputy postmaster general, said customers have depended on his network to deliver holiday cheer for the past 236 years.

"If I could sit down at the kitchen table with every American family this holiday season, I would share just one simple message: We're ready for you," he said.

At FedEx's Oakland hub, crews numbering several hundred employees rotate through four shifts to keep the complex buzzing 24 hours a day.

At a certain time every afternoon, about 250 people sort incoming packages in a warehouse that looks like an airplane hangar while another 200 workers stack full metal containers into cargo planes bound for big cities all over the country.

Robin Van Galder, managing director of FedEx's Oakland operations, said it's relatively simple to receive inbound freight, sort it by city and send it off. But it's complicated by the sheer volume of mail handled on any given day.

"As a consumer, when you ship a package you don't care if it's delivered by truck, plane or horse -- you just want to know it's going to get there on time," Van Galder said.

Every day, 85 flights land or depart from the FedEx Express hub, and crews reroute an average of 260,000 packages a day. Those numbers can double during the holiday rush.

Van Galder, who's in charge of the Oakland operation, has been known to help directly with his workers in times of tight deadlines.

"When you see the director down here sorting along with everyone else, you know you're busy," said Venus Bachicha, FedEx service assurance agent.

The shipping hub has grown considerably since it was established in 1987 at Oakland International Airport. The facility encompasses 350,000 square feet and features a new solar-powered rooftop. It may expand again in the next five years to handle the rising volume of shipments bound for China and other Asian countries. Memphis, Tenn.- based FedEx hasn't released further details.

Matthew Bunk can be reached at (510) 208-6468 or mbunk@angnewspapers.com.

Source: Oakland Tribune

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