Worldport, the worldwide air hub for UPS, has made Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, Kentucky, the third-busiest cargo airport in the US. The 5.2 million square feet facility boasts more than 20,000 employees, 580 aircraft (290 of them large-body UPS jets), and moves about 560,000 packages per hour.
“It’s a very intense operation,” says Alp Kayabasi, president of IT at UPS.
Until recently, asset tracking at Worldport involved labor-intensive, error-prone, and inefficient manual processes. Moreover, communication between load planners and ground crews relied on land mobile radio and was severely constrained. It required close proximity, from ramp to building, Kayabasi says, meaning decentralized planners had to be physically that close to facilitate any contact. Such a setup limited UPS’s visibility, hindered efficient operations, and prevented centralized management.
