I am sure many of you have heard the MEM Airport will be closing down one of its runways for repairs/resurfacing from March through November of this year. Let me spend a few minutes letting you know the actions we are taking to minimize the impact to our customers.
It's peak season here at the MEM World HUB which means we will be running at or near capacity. Capacity for us at the MEM HUB can be defined two ways. One is the number of boxes we can sort per hour and the other is the number of documents we can sort per hour.
We can sort about 325,000 documents (Overnight Letters, Courier Paks) per hour and tonight we will sort close to 900,000 pieces. For boxes, our capacity is 160,000 boxes per hour and tonight our plan is to sort 600,000 boxes. The volume then determines the length of the sort window.
It's 1:45 a.m. and on a Saturday morning and I am at the center of FedEx's World HUB. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, the World HUB is FedEx's original package sort facility in MEM which sorts over 1.4 mm packages a night. Tonight there are about 12,000 employees here who will take care of our customers shipments while most of our customers are sleeping.
I was fortunate to start here as a hourly employee 28 years ago and through hard work and our great promotion from within philosophy I am now the Vice President of this facility. This is home for me.
