UPS has announced the addition of a new sorting facility and the expansion of its existing building at Ontario International Airport in Ontario, California.

The new building will process urgent, time-definite next-day air packages and will feature automated sorting capabilities. The expanded ground sorting facility will be retrofitted with automated sorting systems and have twice the package processing capacity.

When complete, the existing UPS ground sorting facility will process twice the amount of packages per hour. The building’s footprint will increase approximately 15 percent to nearly 900,000 square feet.  It will sort packages originating from and destined for areas in and around California’s Inland Empire.

The expansion is driven by growth in ecommerce and traditional retail businesses. UPS plans to add over 500 new jobs, including delivery drivers and part-time package handlers, over the next five years at the location.

“These investments in UPS’s air and ground network illustrate UPS’s commitment to customers in the Inland Empire and abroad, and are part of an ongoing, network-wide investment the company continues to make in hub expansion and automation,” said George Willis, president of UPS’s west region. “We are expanding UPS’s integrated network to meet the needs of customers as they grow their businesses in the U.S. and around the world.”

Both facilities’ automated sorting systems are designed to move packages through the sort process capturing package data and routing volume to proper load positions. Six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to capture package information from address labels. Label applicators will place smart labels on packages for local delivery, providing UPS loaders faster instruction of proper loading. This enhancement is part of UPS’s suite of package flow technologies.

Construction of the air sorting facility was completed in September 2015.  The 416,000 square foot air facility sits on more than 30 acres of land that includes staging for tractor trailers and employee parking.  UPS flies 38 daily flights to and from Ontario International Airport.

The expansion of the existing ground sorting building and addition of new automation technologies is currently underway.