UPS is Bluetooth enabling its $1B Louisville Worldport

UPS is spending $20 million to replace old scanners with Bluetooth-enabled devices.

Each of the 304,000 packages sorted per hour at the 4-million-square-foot facility must be scanned so that UPS can provide customers with accurate tracking data.

Beginning in June 2003, UPS will start a $20 million project to replace wearable Symbol Technologies scanners at 1,700 hubs worldwide, including Worldport, with 55,000 devices that use Bluetooth wireless technology.

This system handles 6,000 messages per second and has to run at all times, says Donna Barrett, a manager at UPS. “If you can imagine an automated facility of that size, if that system went down the whole facility would stop,” she says. The majority of UPS’s packages come through Worldport, which is UPS’s largest infrastructure investment in its 95-year history.