Dive Brief:
- FedEx upgraded its Memphis World Hub with a new automated sorting facility, the logistics giant announced last week.
- The Secondary 25 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, spans 1.3 million square feet and can handle 56,000 packages per hour. It can process more than half the volume from the hub's primary sorting operation, helping accelerate handling times and delivery speeds.
- Technology incorporated within the facility includes a six-sided package scanning equipment and new weighing and dimensioning systems. The facility also has a space dedicated to moving bulky, hard-to-handle shipments.
Dive Insight:
FedEx has ramped up its network's automated sorting capabilities in recent years to reduce manual touches and maintain an efficient flow of packages. Some of its upgrades and experiments have involved robotics, such as parcel-sorting arms and trailer-loading robots.
While the company's new Memphis hub facility is automated to increase throughput and efficiency, robots aren’t part of the equation, Kit Crighton-Smith, a FedEx project management advisor overseeing the expansion, said in an interview with Supply Chain Dive.
Robots can handle small packages in a timely manner, but it's generally harder for them to handle awkwardly sized items or heavy packages like employees can, she noted.
"We have not come across anything that's heavy duty enough, flexible enough and fast enough to move the freight," she said. "People are just much better at it."
Although employees remain key to the Memphis hub's operations, the high level of automation at Secondary 25 limits the amount of work they have to handle directly. For example, conveyor belt movements are computerized to position each package correctly before the scanning system captures its size and barcode information.
"The top three floors are pretty much fully automated," Crighton-Smith said. "You have people walking around checking things, but you have over 1,000 cameras watching everything on the sort."
