Parcel Hub & Sortation Capacity: Inbound Waves, Sorter Throughput, Cut-Off Times, Staffing per Shift, Missorts & Cost per Parcel

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn one night of trailer arrivals into parcels per 15 minutes, a cumulative arrival curve, pooled parcels per trailer and the peak arrival rate per hour: the demand side of every hub capacity plan.
• Turn a sorter's nominal rate into a realistic hourly capacity, find the bottleneck between sorter and induction, check whether the night's sortable parcels fit into the sort window and staff the manual sort for non-sortables.
• Put the cumulative arrival curve next to the sorter's cumulative capacity, calculate the backlog of parcels waiting in each half hour, find the peak backlog and the time it occurs and the moment the hub is empty again.
• Work back from each outbound departure to the latest moment its parcels must be sorted, measure the slack per route in minutes and count the routes and parcels that miss their cut-off.
• Turn parcels per half hour into unloaders and loaders, find the peak crew, add up the person-hours the night needs and see how much of a flat all-night crew would stand idle.
• Turn weekly uplift forecasts into nightly volumes, calculate the extra sort hours each week needs, find the highest uplift the hub can absorb by sorting longer and count the weeks that need a second sort wave.
• Measure the week's missort rate and damage rate the right way (pooled), price the rework and the damage and count the nights above the hub's missort target.
• Split the hub's monthly cost into labour, equipment and building, express each block in cents per parcel and chart the cost structure for the management dashboard.