In
Every Language Announces Free Translation Services for Refugees
www.ineverylanguage.com
In
January of 2007, In Every Language, a Louisville-based translating
and interpreting service, will offer free translations to French-speaking
refugees now living in Louisville. "There are many refugees
living in our area with strong educational backgrounds and wonderful
work skills that could enrich the Louisville business climate
on so many levels," says company owner Terena Bell. "Unfortunately,
the documents that prove they have this knowledge aren't in
English. So they find themselves in a Catch-22 of sorts--unable
to get a job because their transcripts and other papers aren't
translated, but unable to pay for translation because they don't
have a job."
In
order to help these refugees obtain the jobs they're qualified
for, In Every Language is translating any French-language educational
documentation presented to the company by January 8th for free.
Documents eligible for translation include French-language transcripts,
diplomas, degrees, attestations of attendance, and marriage
certificates.
To receive the service, drop off your documentation at either
Gateway Community Church or Kentucky Refugee Ministries. Translations
done on a first-come, first-serve basis and will be available
for pick-up on or after February 1st. Three notarized and certified
copies of each translation will be provided free of charge.
"It's
just a little thing--making sure that people have English-language
copies of their documents to provide potential employers,"
Bell says, "but it's the kind of little thing that could
make a big difference in whether someone finds a job in America
or not."
The
company intends to make this an annual program, with free services
in a different language each calendar year.
Located
in the Highlands, In Every Language is an international service
providing translators and interpreters in more than 60 different
languages. More information about the company can be found on
their website, www.ineverylanguage.com.
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D.D.
Williamson Wins Kosher Compliance Award
www.ddwilliamson.com
Left
to right: Kirk Johnson, D.D. Williamson Plant Manager; Avrohom
Litvin, Kosher Administrator presenting the Kosher Compliance
award to Ted Nixon, D.D. Williamson CEO; and Edie Nixon, President
of D.D. Williamson Colors.
LOUISVILLE,
KENTUCKY, USA -- (December 4, 2006) -- D.D. Williamson received
the first annual Kosher Compliance Award from the Louisville
Vaad Hakashruth for its outstanding commitment and adherence
to Kosher guidelines and standards. "Observing all governmental
and religious requirements has always been critical to our values
and beliefs, so we are thrilled to receive this prestigious
award," said Ted Nixon, CEO.
The
Hebrew word 'Kosher' means fit or proper as it relates to kosher
dietary law. It covers the ingredients, production techniques,
and preparation of food in a very thorough and traceable way.
Foods are kosher when they meet all criteria that Jewish law
applies to food. "Beyond maintaining high standards of
Kosher throughout the year, D.D. Williamson is also the world's
largest supplier of Kosher for Passover caramel color,"
noted Avrohom Litvin, Kosher Administrator of the Louisville
Vaad Hakashruth. "Kosher for Passover requires adherence
to all of the Kosher standards and also prohibits use of any
grain or legume source." The Louisville Vaad Hakashruth
is the kosher certifying organization that supervises D.D. Williamson's
caramel color production in the United States and United Kingdom.
"To
consumers, the Kosher symbol has become synonymous with the
'Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval' recognized for a high degree
of cleanliness and quality control," added Litvin. Beyond
the Jewish faith, other religious groups and the lactose intolerant
have come to rely on the Kosher symbol. Demand continues to
increase for kosher foods and beverages in the United States
and around the world.
*
* *
D.D. Williamson, the world leader in caramel color, now offers
a broad spectrum of natural colors. A trusted and recognized
provider of color solutions to the food and beverage industry,
the company operates nine manufacturing sites on five continents.
Visit www.ddwilliamson.com
for more information.
*
* *
The Louisville Vaad Hakashruth can be reached at 1 502 235 5770
or by email at rabbi@ansheisfard.com.
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Brown
Town: UPS Airlines Has Put Louisville on the Map as an International
Distribution Hub
By Brent Adams, Business First Staff Writer
www.ups.com
Because
United Parcel Service Inc. chose to locate its fledgling air-cargo
transportation unit in Louisville two decades ago, Louisville's
primary airport later was able to adopt the "international"
moniker. In some respects, the maturation of UPS in Louisville
during the past two decades has broadened the perspective of
Louisvillians, helping them think and operate beyond the borders
of the United States. UPS has ground, brokerage, business financing,
truckload and less-than-truckload transportation and third-party
logistics operations in Louisville. But when people in Louisville
think UPS, they think airplanes and Worldport, UPS's largest
international shipping hub. People
who have seen UPS Airlines grow from its inception in 1987 marvel
at the astonishing growth the division has experienced in 20
years.
Today,
it is the eighth-largest airline in the world, with 268 aircraft.
It serves 400 domestic and 377 international airports and flies
1,071 domestic and 767 international flight segments daily.
"What is amazing is the complexity of the network,"
said UPS Airlines chief operating officer Robert L. Lekites.
"UPS has a presence everywhere. You'll find 'Brown' at
just about every major airport in the world."
From
humble beginnings
Atlanta-based
UPS owned seven planes and began outsourcing next-day air service
through contractor Orion Air in September 1982. "When I
started, we had one ramp to park jets, and pilots and mechanics
didn't work for UPS," recalled Jeff Straub, operations
division manager, a 23-year UPS veteran who oversees the daytime
package-sorting operations at Worldport. "We processed
about 30,000 packages a day. Now, on the day sort, we process
about 550,000 packages a day." It wasn't until August 1987
that UPS decided to bring its airline fleet and maintenance
operations in-house. After
listening to an aggressive pitch from state and city leaders,
UPS officials decided to locate the headquarters for UPS Airlines
in Louisville.
The
first UPS Airlines flight lifted off from Louisville International
Airport, then known as Standiford Field, in February 1988. At
that time, UPS Airlines employed 2,120 people in Louisville.
Today, UPS Airlines has 17,543 employees in Louisville. Some
work at the division's headquarters at 1600 N. Hurstbourne Parkway.
Others work at the Global Operations Center, the nerve center
of the entire flight network, located in the Edgewood neighborhood
east of Worldport and Interstate 65. But the bulk of the workers
are employed at Worldport, UPS's largest international air-cargo
shipping hub.
The
crown jewel
A $1 billion expansion of the hub was initiated in March 1998
and completed in September 2002. A second, $1 billion expansion
was announced in May. The 4 million-square-foot, 44-dock facility
now can sort 304,000 packages and documents an hour. When the
1.1 million-square-foot, 40 dock-door expansion is complete,
the company expects to have the capacity to sort 487,000 pieces
an hour. About 270 UPS cargo planes fly in and out of Louisville
in a 24-hour period. During the peak period, between midnight
and 3 a.m., one UPS plane lands at Louisville International
about every 90 seconds. Lekites refers to that period as a daily
"Super Bowl." As soon as one of the massive cargo
freighters touches down, it is moved to one of 44 loading dock
doors at Worldport, where teams of workers remove large igloo-shaped
polycarbonate containers holding the plane's cargo. Each plane
is unloaded in about 20 minutes.
The
containers are moved down a ramp, and the contents are unloaded
and placed on a conveyor belt, where they are scanned by some
of the world's most sophisticated optical reading equipment.
The optical readers tell a computer on which conveyor the package
should be placed so it can be directed through a series of conveyors
and sorters toward a collection of packages going to the same
destination. Once unloaded from the plane on a Worldport dock,
it can take as little as eight minutes to remove a package from
a cargo container, put it on the conveyor system and place it
in an outbound cargo container bound for its next destination.
Air-freight packages are placed into a container and loaded
on an aircraft bound for their final destination. Packages marked
for ground delivery are sent to UPS's ground-sorting facilities
on Ashbottom Road or Bluegrass Parkway.
Once
the packages reach those shipping stations, they are sent to
smaller facilities in cities across the region, where they are
placed in the familiar brown package vehicles for delivery to
the consumer. "What we do at the hub is very important
because it touches upon every other operation around the world,"
Straub said. "Over 100,000 drivers a day are waiting on
Louisville packages. They depend on us day in and day out."
Expecting
the unexpected
Communication
is the key to keeping Worldport in lockstep with the rest of
the UPS network, Straub said. Worldport managers meet at the
beginning of each shift to assess challenges that might lie
ahead. On
a recent November day, they received a heads-up about six trailer
loads of Omaha Steaks that were going to be shipped through
Louisville. They also learned of a special shipment of Electronic
Arts Inc. video games. At one time, such unexpected, excess
capacity would sneak up on hub employees, Straub said. "It
used to be you'd have people running around here with walkie-talkies
trying to make adjustments and move people around on the fly,"
Straub said. "Now, we monitor shipments throughout the
day and communicate to other destinations in the network."
Gateway
to the world
Although travelers can't catch a direct international flight
from Louisville International Airport, packages are much more
fortunate. From Worldport, a package can be transported to more
than 200 countries and territories, many within as little as
24 hours.
In addition to Louisville, UPS has international shipping hubs
in Miami; Cologne, Germany; Hamilton, Canada; Taipei, Taiwan;
Pampanga, Philippines; Hong Kong and Singapore. It has smaller
domestic package hubs in Philadelphia; Ontario, Calif.; Dallas;
Rockford, Ill.; Columbia, S.C.; and Hartford, Conn. UPS
also plans to make routes from the United States to Asia more
efficient. Next year, UPS plans to begin domiciling about 250
pilots and crew members in Anchorage, Alaska, if they regularly
fly between the United States and Asia, Lekites said. This will
allow flight crews to begin flying their flight schedules out
of Anchorage, rather than having to fly to Louisville or Ontario,
Calif., and wait two days before they begin their shifts at
those airports.
By
the end of the decade, UPS might supplement flights between
Anchorage and Asia, with direct flights between Louisville and
Asia. Pending the purchase of 10 Airbus A380 and eight Boeing
747-400 super jumbo freighters and airfield work at Louisville
International to accommodate them, UPS has said that it expects
to be able to fly directly between Louisville and China. UPS
has been aggressive in the China market, with flights between
Shanghai, Guangzhou and Qingdao. It is developing plans for
an air hub similar to Worldport to be built in Shanghai. Expansion
into Asia and Europe isn't to satisfy current demand, but to
position the network for growth expected to occur during the
next 15 years, Lekites said. "We're trying to predict where
our customers are going to be," Lekites said. "We
haven't perfected the crystal ball yet, but we have a lot of
tools to work with." |
________________________________________
Heavy
lifting
Heavy freight flying into Louisville, such as pallet loads of
boxes, tractor tires or engine blocks, bypasses Worldport. It
is taken directly to the new heavy-freight facility next to
Worldport, where it is sorted for pickup by commercial trucking
companies for transport to its final destination. The $82.5
million heavy-freight facility opened in Louisville in June.
It came about after UPS bought Dayton, Ohio-based Menlo Worldwide
Forwarding Inc. in December 2004. UPS decided to close Menlo's
Dayton sorting hub and move the work to Louisville. UPS hired
1,000 workers to staff the facility.
On
any given night, about 900 of those employees can be found unloading
planes, scanning bar-code tags and routing freight or driving
one of 200 forklifts that buzz across the floor of the 700,000-square-foot
facility like downtown at rush hour. Despite the fact that many
of the workers at the facility never had prior logistics experience
or forklift training, just five months into operations, the
facility appears to run with the precision of a fine Swiss timepiece.
"The challenge has been getting all the new people up to
speed," said Johnnie T. Edwards III, district manager for
the heavy-freight facility. He moved in May from Menlo's operations
in Dayton to help oversee operations at the new Louisville facility.
"In Dayton, you had a lot of people with 20 years' experience,"
Edwards added. "Here, you have some people who were moved
over from the small-package sort or other air-cargo operations,
and you have a lot of people who just came in off the street.
"We're a lot better off today than we were on June 1, but
we're still not where we need to be," he said. That, Edwards
said, will come as employees get more experience under their
belts.
Although
it might take some time before the heavy-freight facility reaches
its optimum efficiency, the service has been a valuable arrow
in the UPS quiver, said Robert Lekites, UPS Airlines chief operating
officer. "It provides one-stop shopping," Lekites
said. "Dedicated air freight was a shortfall for us, and
we knew we could use our existing network to fill that need."
|
________________________________________
Mission
control
All UPS air routes, domestic and international, are coordinated
each day in the Global Operations Center. "It's really
the heartbeat of UPS Airlines," said Steve Mockus, operations
manager and a 30-year UPS veteran. "At any given time of
day, any day of the year, there is always a UPS flight in the
air." UPS opened the 90,000-square-foot building in 2005,
pulling various decision-making functions together under one
roof.
"The Core," a large, dimly lit planning room in the
center of the two-story building, has dozens of computers and
eight giant projection screens that display weather maps, television
news and real-time information about planes parked on the tarmac
at Worldport.
There
is a sense of urgency and military precision as more than 600
contingency planners, meteorologists, crew schedulers, network
planners, maintenance control specialists and support staff
members work in concert to ensure that the network flows smoothly.
In the center of The Core, a cluster of supervisors are seated
at desks on an elevated stage referred to as "The Bridge."
All information from workers in cubicles throughout the room
flows to the bridge, where it then is relayed to pilots, mechanics
and supervisors throughout the airline. Each day presents a
new challenge in transportation planning, as weather, natural
disasters and even acts of terrorism can throw a wrinkle in
UPS's daily game plan. When
those wrinkles occur, the team tries to isolate the event so
it doesn't interrupt the entire network, Mockus said. One
of the most consistent challenges is weather, Mockus said.
The
on-site meteorology department came about after UPS operations,
like most Louisvillians, were caught off guard when a predicted
January 1994 dusting of snow turned into a 16-inch overnight
snowstorm that shut down much of the city and limited UPS's
operations for nearly a week. Now, five staff meteorologists,
some of whom gained their experience in college or in the military,
meet with contingency planners at the beginning of each shift
to discuss how weather systems around the world might affect
that day's travel plans. "It's very rare that we have many
airplanes sitting on the ground not doing anything," Mockus
said. "We don't cancel flights because we're not flying
passengers. We might swap crews or switch to a plane with more
advanced avionics if we're faced with bad weather."
Like
Worldport, the Global Operations Center also develops contingency
plans for handling unexpected cargo shipments. For example,
Mockus said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. recently contacted UPS for
help in shipping 46 containers of flat-screen televisions from
Ontario, Calif. Wal-Mart needed to get the televisions to its
U.S. stores in preparation for a big sales promotion slated
to begin that weekend. "We frequently get special requests
that we have to accommodate," Mockus said. "We have
to remain nimble and agile and use our technology to meet our
customers' needs.
270:
Number of daily cargo flight arrivals and departures at Louisville
International Airport
304,000:
Number of packages and documents that can be sorted at Worldport
each hour
$1
billion: The amount UPS will spend to add 1.1 million square
feet to Worldport
5:
Number of full-time meteorologists who track weather patterns
used for flight planning
44:
Current number of airplane dock doors at Worldport. Will be
increased to 84 with expansion.
17,000:
Conveyors, stretching a total of 122 miles, that transport parcels
within Worldport
200:
Number of forklifts in operation during peak hours at the heavy-freight
sorting facility
8:
Rank among largest airlines in the world, with 268 planes
777:
Number of airports around the world with UPS gates
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National
City Announces New China Consulting Service
National
City Corp. of Cleveland has created an advisory service division
to help its middle-market and large corporate clients do business
in China. The $138 billion-asset company announced the division
Wednesday. It is part of Nat City's global trade and treasury
group and is led by Alfred Ho as vice president and manager.
Mr. Ho, who was born in Hong Kong, had been the executive vice
president in charge of trade services
"National City has long recognized that business relationships
with its corporate banking clients entail more than transactional
business," Craig Schurr, the manager of the global trade
and treasury group, said in a press release. "Helping our
clients prosper in the new reality of globalization is an important
component of a business relationship."
The
advisory division plans to host seminars next year in Chicago,
St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other Midwest cities where Nat City
has commercial operations. Other banking companies have also
been stepping up efforts to help clients do business in China.
In August the $58.5 billion-asset Comerica Inc. of Detroit opened
an office in Shanghai to help clients work in the country, but
it does not offer banking products.
Business
First
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