How UPS Works

No matter how far you are from your closest neighbor, whether you live in the United States or Europe, Managed Ups Services can get you there. UPS can deliver 80 percent of the planet in 48 hours, so if you live elsewhere, UPS will likely find you to ship or pick up packages. There are many addresses and many packages. In fact, in 2005, UPS delivered 3.75 billion packages and letters. That's more than one bag for every two people in the world.

How exactly does UPS do all of this? What does it take to get a package from door to door in less than two days, even if that door is on the other side of the world?

It typically starts with pickup and ends with delivery - each weekday, UPS delivers more than 14.8 million packages and documents worldwide. But pickup and drop-off is only a small part of the process. A much bigger, more impressive and more complex step is the classification that separates and organizes all these packages. It is fully automated and turns a huge random stack of packages into many small, organized stacks.

To understand the classification, you need to know a little about what happens to the package before continuing with this step. So, imagine that three of your friends have moved to the other side of the United States. (If you live elsewhere, imagine that you also live in the United States.) You want to send some gifts to your friends. A friend receives a lightsaber in a box approximately 30 cm wide and 50 cm long. You bought your second friend a LEGO Batmobile in a standard rectangular box. A third friend receives a flat envelope with a pair of tickets to the One Man trilogy. To ship these packages via UPS, you can do one of two things:

Go to the UPS website, enter all required information about your packages, print smart labels, and schedule pickup.

Take your packages to a UPS store, where you or a UPS employee will enter the same information into a computer and print the required labels.

In either case, your packages will be labeled with normal UPS barcodes and maxi codes. Throughout the delivery process, UPS machines and personnel can use barcode scanners to read these codes and retrieve the information originally entered into the computer. That's why you can get real-time updates on the location of your packages on the UPS website. The label also includes important information, such as the shipping address printed for people to read. While not all packages have a smart tag, more than 95% of packages shipped via UPS do.

Once your packages are smartly labeled, they are shipped, usually by truck, to your local or regional sorting center. There, employees scan the labels to determine where the packages should be shipped. If the destination is more than 200 miles away, packages will be shipped by air, less than 200 miles away, and delivered by truck.

Since your friends live on the other side of the country, your packages are placed in a shipping container. This container is large and domed, so it fits perfectly in the curves of the aircraft cabin. These containers can weigh up to two tons. However, UPS employees can move them with minimal effort, as airplane floors and airport lobbies have built-in ball and roller bearings on which the cans roll. This video will give you an idea of ​​how ball bearing flooring works.