The Space of a 48-hour Time Frame: FedEx Delivery Infrastructure

As the world’s largest express transportation and delivery company, FedEx cargo industry consists of three market segments: express or “time definite” packages (weighing less than 100 lb.), heavyweight freight shipments (packages greater than 100 lb.) and mail transport through its sub-companies FedEx Express, Ground, Freight, Custom Critical, Trade Networks and Supply Chain. However, since the company promises to deliver anywhere in the world within a 48-hour time frame and based on a more specialized system for this, it is mostly associated with express delivery service FedEx Express. As it can be deducted from the two-day delivery frame, FedEx’s network is based on time and arranged according to temporality rather than geography. The service infrastructure does not depend on distance; however, it produces space by organizing this flow and requires a material existence for its activities.

The Flow

The understanding of the infrastructure depends on the network and activities in between the pick-up and delivery points: 1) Customers take packages to a FedEx Office where the package is weighed and labeled. Alternatively, they can print out smart labels from fedex.com and schedule a pickup when a delivery truck is in the area or drop the package in a local drop box. These smart labels contain tracking codes that are tracked throughout the delivery cycle. 2) At designated times, all of the accumulated packages from a given location travel, usually by truck, to a local or regional sorting/distribution facility. If packages are destined further than 200 miles, they travel by air. Otherwise they travel by truck to the local receiving sorting facility. 3) Packages that travel by air are placed into cargo containers that often weigh more than one ton, and then they head to the SUPERHUB Memphis for further sorting. 4) At the main sorting facility, humans touch each package only twice – once to unload and once to load the package to/from the aircraft. During unload, employees scan the package labels and place them on one of three conveyors with the labels facing in any direction except down towards the belt. An array of lasers scans barcodes on all sides of package while dividing them according to their destination points. 5) After approximately 15 minutes, the package travels through the FedEx hub to its intended destination pile. Similarly-destined packages are placed on cargo containers which are then placed onto aircraft which travel to another regional sorting facility. 6) When unloaded, the package is scanned yet again to tell employees which package car it should be taken to, as well as which space on a given shelf the package should be placed to optimize drivers’ time. 7) The FedEx drivers use route-planning software which allows them to conserve time and fuel to execute the most precise delivery route. A remote delivery device is used to scan a package and receive a signature upon delivery. This entire process takes less than 48 hours.

SuperHub

To eliminate errors or delays and to increase air fleet performance, FedEx uses the hub-and-spoke model by centralizing control in one or a few strategic sites. The company’s first and biggest hub in Memphis serves as a single processing hub before packages are shipped to a final destination. The hub’s location in the US’s Central Time zone, at the intersection of seven U.S. highways and its suitable weather led a decision which now makes the city the global hub for freight transportation. Although FedEx recently established two additional main hubs (Indianapolis and Guangzhou, China), still the Superhub in Memphis International airport remains as the world’s busiest cargo airport as it processes approximately half of FedEx’s shipments, 3.5 million packages per day, and it attracts the world’s largest warehouse and distribution space for U.S. corporations that benefits the proximity to FedEx’s last-minute delivery service. Among the four runways and the terminal in the airport, the main processing center of FedEx is the Sort Center where packages are received, processed and delivered to their final/next destination. The sort center processes the packages by a software controlled set of conveyors and re-routes them to the planes for delivery. During this 30-minute operation packages travel for 482 km on the conveyors. The sorting center and airline activity is rather intense two times during the day for the early morning priority mails and later for the overnight deliveries. During these periods a plane lands or takes off every 30 seconds and if it is a busy night, 86 incoming flights can be operated per hour. Express Air Hubs/International & Regional In addition to the world hub in Memphis, there are nine other air hubs serving for particular zones of the world with similar infrastructure to the Superhub. Among the international ones Guangzhou International Airport in China operates for Asia Pacific; Toronto I. A. for Canada; Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Cologne Bonn Airport for Europe, Middle East and Africa; Miami I.A. for Latin America-Caribbean area, Ted Stevens Anchorage in Alaska for a part of Asia Pacific. On the other hand, for the internal deliveries in U.S., the company has regional hubs that are located at Oakland International Airport (CA), Newark Liberty International Airport (NJ), Fort Worth Alliance Airport (TX) and Indianapolis Airport (IN). To complete the network until the very specific locations, FedEx also operates cargo terminals that are located at most city airports and receive packages that have already been sorted at the Superhub.

FedEx SUPERHUB in MEMPHIS AIRPORT, TN

Why Memphis? Memphis Airport as an international trade hub with the establishment of the FedEx Express SuperHub in 1973 is located three miles south of Memphis’ central business district. This SuperHub with its infrastructure resembles a city all its own, employing more than 15,000 people, while maintaining a fleet of 75,000 trucks and 684 jets.The Memphis Super Hub is strategically located as a key distribution point for both central North America and the east coast. The proximity of Memphis led FedEx to choose the airport as its main American point and site for its super hub. Besides the geographical location, the infrastructural facilities of the city as it is adjacent to Interstate 240 in the north, Interstate 69 in the west and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Rail Depot in the east render the city also a convenient location for ground connections as it makes 75 per cent of the country within reach with an overnight drive from the city. Therefore, this huge hub in Memphis has universal connectivity to all major global markets. From this hub in Memphis, airfreight is sorted and routed to one of four major North American sorting facilities either in Newark, Oakland, Fort Worth or Indianapolis. Cargo destined for locations within less than “one day’s truck drive” or approximately 400-500 miles of the sorting facility is trucked via Interstate to a local FedEx facility, while air freight bound for destinations farther than one day’s truck drive is flown to regional airports, via a contracted cargo airline and delivered to a local facility closer to its final destination. On the other hand, international cargo is routed to one of five major global sorting hubs in Narita Japan, Guangzhou China, São Paulo Brazil, London England or Paris France and delivered to either regional FedEx facilities or contracted out to other air freight couriers and flown to the country of destination. Since the express delivery is based on air transportation, the other effective reason to locate the main hub in Memphis is due to the site’s weather conditions. To service efficiently and fast the company needed a place far enough south to escape winter weather and far enough north to be spared tornados and hurricanes in summer. In Memphis, the airport seldom shut down, while other cities in the region had significant problems during winter months, therefore, it was particularly suitable for a continuous air flow. As a consequence of the geospatial logic of FedEx’s decision, Memphis has been the world’s busiest cargo airport since 1992 and transforming the city into an aerotropolis as FedEx’s existence in the site leverage strong economic development in growth and prosperity from the airport.

Aerotropolis

As the airport allows distribution to 300 national and international destinations and has an economic impact for the region of US$20.7B dollars, the economy of this mid-sized city relies on the airport. However, Memphis is not a place of arrival – a terminal of the end – but a location to be passed through; it is a place of layover as packages are being distributed elsewhere as a result of the efficiency of the hub-and-spoke model of aviation. In its transitory nature of goods, vehicles, employees, the urban logic of the Aerotropolis Memphis is in a way the reflection of FedEx in the transposition of technological logics such as the flow of bodies and the interface of machine, the land and the human occupant. This layover hub of FedEx therefore becomes a gravitational point for many businesses to benefit from its essential infrastructure of connectivity, especially for the e-commerce companies to locate the physical footprint of their virtual companies. Many major franchises have warehouse space close to Memphis International Airport for easy shipping of mail order requests around the country such as Medtronics, Williams and Sonoma, Hewlett Packard, Ford Motor Company (Uptime Critical Parts Program), Nike, Disney Store distribution center, Sears distribution center. These adjacent businesses which excess 12 million square metres (130 million square feet) of warehouse space are located within a 10 sq. mile region that serves as Memphis’s aerotropolis zone; as housing, highways, railways provide a highly efficient network for transportation and distribution for goods to pass through. FedEx Sorting Facility FedEx’s facility is informed by the essential dimensions of the aircraft, the conveyor system within the machinery needed for the highly specific functions. Within the SuperHub of FedEx, conveyor belts organize a facility that has a perimeter of over five miles, parking spots for 175 aircraft and around 8000 employees at night. The 862-acre facility is organized as a linear progression of packages within the primary matrix where spaces are organized to efficiently move packages from jet-side through customs and the sort facilities back into the appropriate plane bound for destinations around the world. SuperHub Process The aircraft land every two minutes per runway, and there are three runways. 150 aircraft parked on the ramp is an impressive sight. After block in, the maintenance crew releases each plane and the flight crew is taken to the flight operation center. The packages are then unloaded, by size, shape and weight, into the sort operation. Boxes (those bigger than one pound) are unloaded at a rate of 160,000 boxes per hour. Documents and small parcels are sent to another more automated facility where they are handled at a rate of 500,000 packages per hour. The boxes then are moved via conveyor belt to an area called the primary matrix, which is the start of the automatic conveying system. It typically takes a package 30 minutes to pass through this intestinal arrangement of conveyors, which if unfolded would measure 482 km(300 miles). In this area, packages one after another move under an infrared scanner that routes them to another area of the hub. This process is repeated before packages reach a collection slide for similar shipments going to like destinations. The packages undergo more scanning and finally are loaded back onto aircraft for their destinations. And to deliver the packages “Just in Time” the airfield also accommodates a Control Center where advanced weather forecasting technology is run to view across its vast network surface. The continuous cycles of labor, transportation and goods in Memphis mirror the truly global mechanics of the FedEx network, constantly at work at an international level. At any given time somewhere in the world, day-time labor and movement corresponds with night-time operations somewhere else, literally dissolving the physical and geopolitical boundaries that identify and locate the operations. Both time and geography are conflated by FedEx’s network, making the only barriers relevant in this system the ones created by the aviation and auto infrastructures that enable FedEx’s operation. Regional Distribution Centers Before transferred to the air hubs and after sorted and sent from the air hubs, the deliveries are processed in regional distributing facilities which either accumulate packages before sent to hub or perform a finer sort and load packages onto trucks for final delivery. The main component of these centers is the conveyor belt system; once the packages are on the belt, they are measured, weighed, scanned and finally sorted depending on their final destination. ‘UNBUNDLED’ Locally, Integrated Internationally: FedEx DISTRIBUTION CENTERS in FedEx Network Global-Local Flow FedEx, with its hub-and-spoke model, employs a top-down planning model that is hierarchical and strategic; yet at the same time the company recognized that some procedures needed to be customized at short notice, such as re-routing flights, ground route changes according to weight, flight delays as a result of weather changes. As an infrastructure straddling and interconnecting urban, interurban and international scales, FedEx’s global-local flow requires more strategic, flexible and responsive transport and delivery system to cope with frequent movements of small quantities in between urban and national territories. As a result, the network emerges as seamlessly connected global-local technological and organizational webs and nodes of infrastructure; it is centrally controlled yet has the flexibility to deal with unexpected circumstances. This flexibility of the network allows multiplicity and redundancy within the system, while enabling the company to negotiate changes demanded by climate and package volume when necessary. Through these processes, the global-local connections of cities and spaces are increasingly examined by FedEx as they search to locate in areas with maximum infrastructural capabilities, lowest costs, and maximum flexibility and mobility potential as they might enable companies to quickly and seamlessly reach domestic and international markets through interconnected airports, seaports, rail and roads. In these areas, FedEx locates its regional sorting facilities/distribution centers to perform a finer sort and load packages onto trucks for final delivery. These strategically located facilities are synchronized with the FedEx transportation hubs, therefore, reduce the risk and are able to respond specific conditions while still serve for the main assembly line of the transportation hubs.

Distribution Center: Warehouse Processes

When a FedEx package is picked up, the company immediately forwards it to the nearest distribution center for sorting and processing. The company has distribution centers strategically located around the country, and the millions of packages that arrive at these centers each day are removed from incoming trucks and introduced into the facility on automated conveyor belts. As a package works its way through the distribution center, advanced bar code scanning technology automatically routes the package based on the label applied when the package was shipped. The package is grouped with other packages destined for the same geographic area then loaded onto a truck for delivery or transport to another distribution center. If a package is travelling a long way--from the west coast to the east coast, for example--it may have to pass through several distribution points before being delivered to the final destination. At each distribution center, the same scanning technology groups packages together based on the destination and the packages are loaded on a truck for additional transport. In most locations, FedEx uses a proprietary staging process to ensure the packages are properly routed and grouped with other packages with similar destinations. If the package is to be sent to another distribution center, it is staged for and loaded on a truck headed for the next center en route to the destination. If the package is ready for delivery, it is loaded on a truck designed for local delivery along with other packages destined for that truck's delivery route. The FedEx’s planning model is strategic and precise to be able to deliver large-scale transformation, but at the same time this hierarchical network is open to anticipate unexpected events and feed the system from its separate components. During the flow of the packages the network integrates buildings with airport runways, vehicles, conveyors or drop boxes; infrastructure, architectural form and landscape, therefore, perform continuously, merge into each other and create space through their organizational roles. The industrial and spatial scenario of FedEx rests on the idea that its network has been an ‘integrated network’ both geographically and technologically, thus, it can simultaneously be ‘unbundled’ locally whilst being integrated internationally. This fundamentally challenges the modern notion for the city or the nation as their territorial coherence as a spatial container for economic activity is somehow separated from surrounding spaces and blend into each other in varying scales. Exploring how new mobility/delivery systems, that organize the flow of goods, information and people across nations, regions and the world with their distinct set of operations and attendant spaces shape the built environment, FedEx Infrastructure appears as a strategic planning model which is sufficiently precise and integrated to deliver large-scale transformation (a hierarchy) while also being sufficiently open to anticipate unforeseen events (a network). By merging these two distinct strategies in a single vision which concurrently incorporates self-organization, FedEx infrastructure conceives the legibility of globally centralized system with distributed responsiveness.