UPS opened a $22 million, 172,500 SF facility in Skokie

UPS, the parcel delivery company, opened a 172,500-square-foot processing facility in Skokie in late September, which a spokesperson said would facilitate package deliveries during the holiday season.

The $22 million package center, located on Austin Avenue, is able to process up to 12,000 packages an hour. UPS spokesperson Karen Tomaszewski Hill said the facility also brought 250 jobs to the area.

The Skokie facility opened nearly a month after UPS opened a package center in Chicago’s South side Bridgeport neighborhood. Like the facility in Skokie, that facility has energy-efficient LED lights and uses automotive technology to process packages.

In a tour given to Pioneer Press, Sergio Rocha, an Industrial Engineering Manager, explained that nearly half the operations in Skokie are automated through levers, ramps, and conveyor belts that read microchips inserted in stickers placed on packages.

Rocha said there are package centers in Lockport, Addison and Hodgkins where everything is automated and that the only job left is loading and shipping the trucks.

“Our Hodgkins facility is the largest tractor-trailer operation in the country and is referred to as the Chicago Area Consolidation Hub,” she wrote in an email.

The point of automation is not to reduce the number of jobs, said Rocha, but “to put jobs in more productive areas” that can do the jobs that computers can’t do.

According to Rocha, the Skokie facility uses two cameras to inspect the stickers and has a 90% accuracy rate. What doesn’t get picked up is manually sorted out. Rocha said other facilities will use up to six cameras to read the labels and have a higher accuracy rate.

Packages come to the Skokie facility from Hodgkins Chicago Area Consolidation Hub. Packages are delivered to Hodgkins from just about anywhere in the world and are sent to packaging centers, according to Hill. The CACH facility is also fully automated, said Hill.

Once they get to packaging centers, the packages are sorted and placed into trucks with specific delivery routes. According to Rocha, up to 400 packages are placed in a truck with eight sections. If a package enters the wrong truck, the truck also has sensors that will detect the smart chip sticker and raise an alert.

Hill said the Skokie facility and 12 other locations around the Chicago area will hire up to 3,500 seasonal employees for the holiday season, from the first weekend in November to mid-January. Most of those jobs will be for package handlers, said recruiter Alexandria Heppner.