Electric courier bikes, geotagging tracking on packages and 1,000 vehicles with smart technology are just some of the eco-friendly investments being made by Purolator Inc. as part of its $1-billion capital outlay announced Tuesday.
“Delivering with drones is a really good idea but hard to make it economically viable with packages. It is expensive and requires more energy to fly something in the air,” Opher Baron, professor of operations management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto told the Financial Post.
“This new hub will have almost triple the capacity ,” Ferguson said. “You can imagine 50,000 packages processed going to 150,000 packages per hour. That’s a big deal and that’s where the automation allows us to be more flexible and handle peaks.” “There’s very few transportation companies left that are Canadian-owned that will invest in Canada,” Ferguson said.
“The U.S. is our dominant trading partner. We have about 30 U.S. locations… we move all that product through customs, clearance and run it through our network in Canada,” he said. “It’s really a cross border solution that includes all the links and supply chain.”