PARCEL PUSHER
Abney in the lobby
of UPS’s Atlanta
headquarters. Un-
der his leadership,
UPS has launched
delivery by electric
bike (shown here)
and drone.
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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
standanddelivereVERYONE KNOWS THE UPS delivery
service, with its ubiquitous
brown trucks that ramble
through every neighborhood in
America. But to really under-
stand what makes UPS tick, you must check
out the massive facility in western Atlanta
known as the UPS Southeast Metro Auto-
mated Routing Terminal (or SMART).
This whirling dervish comprises 18 miles
of conveyor belts, moving at 600 feet per
minute on three levels inside a single sprawl-
ing building the size of 19 football fields. To
an outsider it looks like the kind of thing car-
toonist Rube Goldberg would have dreamed
up as a machine to, say, fold the world’s larg-
est napkin.
But unlike Goldberg’s deliberately nonsen-
sical and wasteful contraptions, the year-old
super terminal is super-efficient, one of the
crown jewels in UPS’s global logistics and
shipping empire. It’s just one of six similar
highly automated, gigantic, spanking new
UPS package-sorting centers spread across
the U.S. It’s also one of the reasons theUPS’s $20 billion bet on
e-commerce is already
starting to pay off. Can a fleet
of drones and a seven-day-
a-week delivery strategy help
“Brown” and CEO David Abney
stay ahead of Amazon?