UPS’s Christmas Eve Snafu (December 24, 2013) UPS’s worldwide main air hub or Worldport is in Louisville, Kentucky where packages are sorted and then rerouted. About 7000 packages are processed per minute at this hub with packages arriving from more than 200 countries and territories. UPS monitors for inclement weather or breakdowns that may potentially affect its operations. It has a fleet of hot spares, planes that are fueled, staffed and ready to be used, at different locations, to be immediately pressed into service in case of any mechanical failures. The reason for UPS’s Christmas Eve Snafu On December 24, 2013, the UPS Worldport at Louisville started receiving the packages scheduled for the next day delivery and thousands of workers were busy sorting and handling the incoming packages. …show more content…
Even those that could be shipped reached their destinations so late that they were not picked up by the delivery trucks. There were many reasons why so many packages were stranded in the Worldport. Severe weather in Dallas area affected the company’s operations adversely. Another contributing factor was that the 2013 holiday season, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, comprised of six fewer days. The internal forecast based on which it made all the arrangements, turned out to be wrong. The packages that arrived at its Worldport at Louisville, Kentucky far exceeded the capacity that was forecast internally. The internal forecast was for nearly 8 million packages at the Hub on Dec 23 and a forecast of slightly more than 130 million packages in the week before Christmas 2013. UPS had to handle a record 31 million packages on Dec 23, worldwide. Amazon Prime offers next day delivery and this resulted in last minute glut of packages arriving at the hub. The shopping patterns had changed with an increase of 10% in online shopping for the period Nov 1 to Dec 22 and the