The objective of this project is to improve the efficiency of the irregular (irreg) package system at the UPS Carlisle facility through the use of cart redesign through CAD, OPLs, and simulation.
Sponsored by: UPS
Team Members
Nathan Zajdowicz Rachel Bartuska Amanda Kurtz Karsen Meck Abby O’Connell Navya Suri
Project Poster
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Project Video
Project Summary
Overview
This capstone project is focused on the automated sorting facility in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that was purchased by UPS in 2017. Since its construction, the facility has encountered several issues related to the irregs (irregular packages), which are not able to flow through the regular conveyor system. Irregs are either oversized or overweight leading to the need for additional labor or equipment to deliver the packages to their specified area. The Carlisle facility has encountered increased downtime stemming from improperly sorted irregs or loaded carts. Currently, instead of solving the problem, automation has led to more issues such as inefficient routing and unnecessary stops.
Because of the oversized nature of the irregs, they often fall off the Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs), which travel along a path stopping at all four metros in the facility. This also leads to damaged packages and increased time to the outbound doors. The UPS team has requested a redesign of the carts to help mitigate this problem and decrease the travel time.
Although the facility is autonomous, the irregs require additional labor. Currently, there is a lack of proper training within the facility on how to handle irregular packages. The team plans on providing quick and easy training materials to give to new and existing employees, which handles multiple stages of the irregular package process.
Objectives
To address the problems found in the Carlisle facility’s irreg process, the team created several objectives:
Decrease number of damaged packages
Increase training of employees
Increase throughput and decrease cycle time of ireggs
Approach
Design an attachment via CAD modeling to the current UPS carts to reduce damage to irregs by creating a barrier to keep them on the carts.
Increase readability of the Irreg Methods document by creating One Page Lessons (OPLs) so information can be found more easily during training and beyond.
Simulate the current irreg process and experiment with possible improvements.
Outcomes
During the past 4 months, the capstone project has been completed regarding a cart redesign, OPLs and simulation to help increase the overall efficiency of the UPS facility. Based on this project, the following has been concluded and recommended:
Add the recommended safety features to the carts to decrease the number of damaged and lost packages using a 3-inch-wide pole for the loading end of the cart as a result of the force testing and a 4-inch-wide pole on the leading end of the cart to accommodate the retractable belt casing. This will help in limiting some common problems in the transportation of packages such as carpet rolls rolling off carts, packages falling out of carts, and employees needing to pick up packages that have fallen off and manually take them to the correct shipping metro.
Place the four OPLs (irreg identification, cart lifting, safety manual, and lifting guide) around the facility to serve as a visual reminder to employees to help increase training and decrease facility wide shutdowns from incorrectly sorted irregs. Shutdowns occur at least 10 times per day, slow production by 300-400 packages per day, and result in high costs of approximately 5% of the asset’s replacement value (Fox, 2009).
Only address the rerouting change if volume increases significantly as currently cycle time saw decreases across each package type by almost 75% but less than 1% increases in throughput. This 1% throughput increase is due to the results of the simulation showing that all package types handle at least 99.09% of the packages created during the original systems evaluation window.
Address a coding issue causing carts to stop at a certain area called C110, if considered nuisance and if there are available resources to fix as there is no statistically significant change to the irreg system with this change.
Increasing the speed of the Automated Guided Vehicle that delivers packages to the outbound stations also known as Metros, is not currently being recommended as it is not statistically significant to either the throughput or cycle time of the irreg system.